Home Business from Anywhere in the World: 5 Must Have Traits

It’s About More than Freedom…

Unques­tion­ably, one of the biggest draws of work­ing at home is free­dom; the free­dom to traipse around the house in your fuzzy bunny slip­pers, sleep in till noon, and work at cafés while sip­ping on mocha­ci­nos. And as a work-at-home pro­fes­sional, you have an oppor­tu­nity that few cubi­cle dwellers have – namely, the oppor­tu­nity to work from just about any­where on this planet.

Since boot­strap­ping my web copy writ­ing busi­ness at the begin­ning of last year, I’ve worked in my skivvies from Ecuador, Chile, Japan, and Argentina. Basi­cally, I’ve worked any­where there’s been elec­tric­ity and an inter­net connection.

But things haven’t always come eas­ily. From work­ing around the daily power out­ages in rural Ecuador to pulling all-nighters because of the incon­ve­nient time zone dif­fer­ence in Japan, I’ve dealt with my fair share of frus­tra­tions while work­ing from the road.

Home Busi­ness from Any­where in the World Is Not a Rock Star Lifestyle

Since the ‘loca­tion inde­pen­dent’ lifestyle is all the rage these days, peo­ple are quick to glam­or­ize the idea of run­ning a dig­i­tal busi­ness from abroad. They imag­ine them­selves lying beside a pool with a Mai Tai in hand while a hand­ful of vir­tual assis­tants run their busi­ness from cubi­cles in the Philippines.

I’m not say­ing that this per­cep­tion is unre­al­is­tic or false; I just think that each person’s busi­ness and sit­u­a­tion is unique. While it might sound like the life to work for just 4 hours a week while you sling back Red Stripes on a beach in Negril, you may have to toil away a lot more than that to stay afloat and con­tinue to grow your business.

What Does it Take to Have a Home Busi­ness Any­where in the World?

Here are 5 traits that I believe are indis­pens­able if you want to travel the world and take your home busi­ness along for the ride.

Flex­i­bil­ity

Flex­i­bil­ity is THE most impor­tant trait to have if you’re going to run your busi­ness in a dif­fer­ent coun­try, espe­cially in a devel­op­ing one. You might be the type who gets all her work done early in the morn­ing on week­days, but you are unlikely to stick to such a strict sched­ule when you’re on the road.

Some­times, you’ll be forced to take breaks because the inter­net stops work­ing or the elec­tric­ity goes out. If that hap­pens, just breathe, take a walk, and save your work for later. Throw­ing tantrums will only add to your stress. Believe me, I’ve been there.

One of the most eye-opening expe­ri­ences that come with trav­el­ing is the real­iza­tion that you take a whole lot for granted back home. A shower with good water pres­sure and a steady flow of hot water? A freakin’ lux­ury. An inter­net com­pany that comes to fix your modem when your con­nec­tion is down? Worth donat­ing a kid­ney for. Real­ize that you’ve got it made back home and accept that things don’t always go as planned, espe­cially when you’re abroad.

Travel Expe­ri­ence

If you’ve never been to a for­eign coun­try and you’re plan­ning to spend an entire year work­ing your way around the world, you might want to con­sider short­en­ing your trip or tak­ing peri­odic breaks to return to your home coun­try through­out your jour­ney. Cul­ture shock is real.

No mat­ter how often you watch National Geo­graphic and the Travel Chan­nel, you’ll never under­stand what it really feels like to be far away from all things famil­iar and adjust to a new cul­ture unless you actu­ally do it.

Travel is an exhil­a­rat­ing adven­ture, but you have to go easy on your­self, or you just might end up on a plane back home weeks ahead of sched­ule, cry­ing for peanut but­ter and toast (I’m not jok­ing… this hap­pened to a fel­low vol­un­teer when I was in Brazil).

A Sav­ings Cushion

#&$% hap­pens. Make sure you’re pre­pared for what­ever is to come by trav­el­ing with a sav­ings cush­ion. You could end up in the hos­pi­tal with typhoid, out of a func­tion­ing com­puter thanks to some evil hacker, or get­ting pick pock­eted on the metro.

One of the excit­ing aspects of travel is fac­ing chal­lenges, but you’ll be in no shape to run your busi­ness if an emer­gency wipes you out. Make sure you have sav­ings to back you up in case of such unfore­seen events.

Per­son­ally, I use an online sav­ings account with weekly auto­matic with­drawals. It forces me to save part of my income and not spend my all of my extra funds on mocha­ci­nos and infor­ma­tion products.

Desire to Learn a New Lan­guage and Adapt to a New Culture

When you are pas­sion­ate about a cul­ture, lan­guage, or nation, you are more likely to have a pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence abroad. The locals sense your enthu­si­asm and are more gen­er­ous and open with you when they feel that you gen­uinely appre­ci­ate and respect their culture.

You could go abroad armed only with the desire to hang out with your coun­try­men in expat pubs, but you’ll miss out on a grand part of the living/working abroad expe­ri­ence, which is get­ting to know the local cul­ture and see­ing life through a local’s eyes.

Abil­ity to Savor the Differences

One thing that inevitably hap­pens when you spend a lot of time abroad is that you start to play the com­par­i­son game. You com­pare a country’s cus­tomer ser­vice, inter­net speed, qual­ity of food, and other traits with what you have back home. If you notice your­self begin­ning way too many sen­tences with, “In my coun­try…,” pause and cher­ish the high­lights of liv­ing wher­ever you hap­pen to be.

Sure, Ecuador didn’t have the top-notch cus­tomer ser­vice that Japan does, but it did have fresh, deli­cious trop­i­cal fruit that I could buy for dirt cheap. In Japan, the land of $500 water­mel­ons and $200 man­goes, it would cost me at least 10 times more to eat the same type of fruit I had in Ecuador, if I could even find it.

Access to fresh, exotic fruit might seem like an insignif­i­cant mat­ter to some peo­ple, but it dra­mat­i­cally improved my qual­ity of life and my per­cep­tion of liv­ing in Ecuador. So, before I resort to com­par­ing and com­plain­ing, I make an effort to savor the dif­fer­ences. Even at my most home­sick moments, I rec­og­nize that I have pos­i­tive mem­o­ries to take home with me from each and every place, no mat­ter how shoddy the inter­net con­nec­tion may be.

Kath­leen O’Connor, the founder of O’Copy, is a bira­cial, bicul­tural web copy­writer cur­rently based in Chile. Fol­low her doings on Twit­ter and check out her blog for online busi­ness build­ing tips with a cul­tural twist.

Editor’s Note:

Thanks to Kath­leen for tak­ing on the role of guest con­trib­u­tor. She is our first guest writer on 2Chicks and we expect you’ll see lots more of her great advice around the webi­verse. Do you have an idea for an arti­cle that the 2Chicks reader would enjoy or find ben­e­fi­cial? If so, drop us a line and we’ll take a look.

Mean­while, please share your thoughts about Kathleen’s great arti­cle in the com­ments below. I’m sure she would enjoy dis­cussing the global per­spec­tive of home busi­ness with each of you!

Do you find stay­ing on track and focused a chal­lenge? Then Find Your Focus audio sem­i­nar might help. If you would like the 2Chicks to focus our atten­tion on your home busi­ness life, con­tact the 2Chicks and ask us about the Co-sult Coop. We can help!