Welcome to the Freaking Nomads Newsletter, your weekly dose of stories, insights, tools, and opportunities for digital nomads and remote workers building a life without borders.
Hey Freaking Nomads,
Someone at a dinner recently told me travel must have taught me so much about myself.
I nodded like a person with depth.
Then I went home and made an honest list of what five years of this has actually made me good at, and it is not wisdom. It's a very specific set of skills that would be worthless in almost any other life.
I can sleep anywhere. Upright. Fluorescent lights on. Someone's elbow in my ribs. A man three seats down watching TikToks at full volume with no headphones. I have become, essentially, a cat.
I can tell you what my bag weighs. Within about half a kilo, by lifting it. A useless superpower I would absolutely list on a CV if I thought anyone would take it seriously.
I can have a full conversation with someone with whom I share no language. Mostly with my hands, some sound effects, and an expression I can only describe as hopeful. It works far more often than it should.
I can decide. Where to eat, where to stay, whether to trust a guy with a van. On bad information, in about ninety seconds, and then live with it. I used to spend two weeks choosing a rug.
Here's the one that I think actually counts, though.
I'm no longer embarrassed to be bad at things in public.
Because you're constantly new. New city, new transport system, new way of queuing that everyone else absorbed at birth. You get it wrong in front of strangers roughly daily, and at some point the fear of looking stupid just quietly stops showing up.
So no, I don't think travel gives you wisdom. I think it gives you an odd pile of skills, and one that's genuinely worth having.
Irene
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🧑💻 The Nomad Resource of the Week
One skill travel never gave me is doing currency conversion in my head at speed.
What made that worse for years was my bank quietly making up its own exchange rate on top…
I switched to Wise a while ago and stopped thinking about it, which is the highest compliment I can give a financial product:
Mid-market exchange rate, the one you get when you google it, with the fee shown separately instead of hidden in a bad rate
Hold and convert multiple currencies in one account, so you stop converting twice by accident
Local bank details in several currencies, useful when clients or employers want to pay you domestically
A debit card that spends from whichever currency you're holding
Send money abroad with the fee visible before you confirm, not after
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