Here is a list of the necessities that I will need for my travels. Let me know what you would recommend for some or all of the items, as this will be all I have, and I want to make sure I have the best I can get! On the items that I pretty much know what I’ll be getting, I’ll show what I’ve decided on in parenthesis and italics, though you should totally feel free to disagree with my decision and tell me why (I love to be proven wrong, if it leads to me having the best equipment for the job!).

This article may seem superfluous at first. You’re mentally admonishing me as such: “Seriously, Colin, I know I should be traveling more and I enjoy traveling and I will when I get the chance so lay off, sucker.”

I get it, I do. You want to be worldly and have a wonderful time, James Bond style, exploring exotic locals (and even more exotic women/men), enjoying the best the world has to offer, seeing the underbelly of the underbelly of a city that doesn’t even really have an overbelly.

I started the Exile Lifestyle project to bring some semblance of order to a series of changes that I am instituting in my life. The most extreme of these changes is that I will be leaving the United States (I currently live in Los Angeles) and running my business from the road, moving to a new country every 4 months (each new destination will be determined by your vote on this very site!). I will also be undergoing some rigorous lifestyle experiments (including but not limited to selling everything I own except what can fit into a carry-on bag) and starting up a series of new businesses. Whew, I’m excited already!

I remember my first day of Ultimate Frisbee practice. There was a lot a catch to be played, running to be done, stretches to be learned, and ideals to be ingrained. On such ideal I still maintain until today, because I’ve found it to be incredibly useful in nearly every situation I’ve thought to use it in.

Take a look at your hobbies. Are they corporate tools (as in a useful device or implement, not a person who is a douchebag)?

They almost certainly are. I, for one, have had MANY hobbies that, in retrospect, seem to have involved little but buying, buying and more buying.

Take, for example, my years of competitive Magic: The Gathering card playing. I loved the social aspect of the game, being able to attend conventions and tournaments, keep up with the storyline and the lore of the game, and I definitely loved the strategy involved (in both playing the game and building up my collection by trading the cards).

The iPhone is the Swiss Army Knife of smart phones, able to tackle a wide variety of tasks that are generally divvied out to many separate devices. Consider investing in an iPhone (or similar gadget), as consolidating these products into one small phone significantly reduces an individual’s carbon footprint and allows for a quick simplification of one’s life.

Like a well-woven tapestry or epic oil painting, it has the power to inspire and amaze. Like a broken window, it can drag a bad neighborhood deeper into disrepair and violence. It can be found in the ruins of Pompeii and on the sides of traincars and is constantly evolving, the same piece taking thousands of shapes before being whitewashed over, creating a clean canvas where there was once a work of art or work of vandalism.

Inspiration is a finicky creature; always there when you don’t need it, but as soon as you do it cannot be found.

As someone who’s livelihood depends on being creative and tapping into my inspirational reservoirs very quickly when I need them, I’d like to share with you a few tricks to jump-starting your own creative engine so that you will be able to make greater use of it in the future.

A good friend of mine and I have frequent debates about the future of ‘green.’ We both believe that humanity’s survival depends a great deal on how we cope with our non-sustainability today, and that we need to change certain aspects of our lives in order to make those changes (though we also both think that we needn’t make sacrifices to our standards of living; just adjust our standards so that they are equally high, but consuming different resources).