Author: Clayton B. Cornell

[Photo: Bunch of stuff I just received on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean]

When living anywhere is no longer an obstacle to getting exactly what you need…

Live outside of the US long enough and you’ll find something you can’t live without, something unavailable in local stores.

Occasionally (though not at the moment) I really miss home. This often comes in waves, or at certain times of year (most common in the fall). I often find I’m not missing a particular person or place, but something more mundane.

What I’m really trying to admit is that I miss Amazon Prime and Peanut Butter.

Or more generally, the US does a great job of getting you what you (think) you want when you want it.

Now I’m the first to point out that most Americans are astounded to learn you can find almost anything within walking distance, most places on

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Why you should be taking 12 weeks off per year…

“In life, we must have flexibility. Our spirits must be able to move freely. To be too stiff and rigid is to be brittle and lacking in responsiveness.”
–Musashi

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that I’ve obsessed about work/life balance for a long time.

If you own 100% of your time you decide when to work, when to stop, and when to take a few days off. It’s a lot easier to just work endlessly while stressing out about how you’re not really ‘living the dream’.

At the beginning of this experiment I didn’t work enough, and now I work way too much. Most people who do this long enough realize the importance of staying in one place and developing routine, but excessive routine can become a self-imposed prison.

A few things I’ve learned about myself:

I love to work. I need

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One of my favorite books on productivity is The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results.

If you haven’t read it, the premise is simple: to accomplish any goal, do the next thing makes all other tasks else easier or irrelevant.

That ‘one thing’ is the lead domino in a sequence that will take you where you want to go. All you have to do is stay focused on the next piece.

These ‘one things’ can be individual tasks or projects, or they can be routines, habits, major life upheavals, and so on. The hardest part is being clear-headed enough and doing the work to find the key next step.

And sometimes I just stumble into them. They’re usually incredibly simple and have been right in front of me the whole time.

Here are the things I’ve done in 2016 that changed the game:

#1 – Reading a book every 2 weeks

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Why building an authority site is one of the best investments I’ve made.

How does one go about making money online? Or alternatively, what are the best investments one can make in online businesses?

I was recently surprised by my own answers to these questions. As one of the most basic ways to make money online, it didn’t occur to me until I saw the numbers that I was getting a 237% return on money invested (ROI) in building an authority site.

In other words, for ever $1 we spent on content in 2015 we made $3.37 back.You can get an idea of what this growth looks like from our internal dashboard above.

The rest of this post is about how this is possible, and how you can learn how to do the same.

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One of the most common questions I get is: ‘how do you make money online’ and ‘how

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A shortlist of key Mobility Work for Surfing

What’s the best way to optimize overall fitness for surfing?

It’s a question I’ve been pondering since I took a crash course in human athletic performance at San Francisco CrossFit back in 2013. In about 17 collective months of surfing since–from being obliterated in Hawaii to washing up on various reefs as far away as Chile and Indonesia–I’ve had a lot more time to test the ideas. And more recently, last winter I spent 3 months surfing in the Canary Islands while trying to balance normal life and a somewhat demanding (if amateur) participation in the CrossFit Open.

If you read How I Broke my Body and Fixed it you know I’m a big fan of do-it-yourself physical therapy, but I’ve found very little information specific to surfing. Here are some tips on staying healthy during periods of intense activity in the water, something I originally wrote a few years ago during a month-long

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A breakdown of my cost of living over the last few years.

I’m a strong believer that budgeting and tracking are among the most important skills you can develop. Simply because to be in charge of your destiny you have to know what’s going on and what the plan is. Having access to good numbers is often the hardest part (running a business, fitness, health), but fortunately tracking personal expenses couldn’t be easier.

Since childhood I’ve been a a bit OCD about tracking money. I still remember the investing pamphlet my dad gave me around age 12 about saving money and compound interest. You know the one: clean little graphs illustrating how $1 saved a day will miraculously become $1,000,000 by age 50.

Skill in tracking and saving is what ultimately allowed me to save $15,000 for travel during my first job out of college.

Being a business owner takes the budgeting OCD up a notch. It’s

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Traveling used to be a lot harder.

I remember trying to write a blog post in Buenos Aires in 2008. Wifi as we know it was not widely available, but internet cafes were everywhere, and they worked pretty well if you could get around the non-US keyboards and the impossibility of finding the ‘@’ symbol.

The ease of modern travel with a local SIM card powered smart-phone with broadband internet access is borderline ridiculous. Nothing is impossible when you can get on the internet, and wandering around looking for accommodation has been replaced by some quick tactical research. 

After 3 weeks of traveling through part of the Canary Islands, Southern Spain, and Portugal, this list of tools naturally rose to the surface through daily use. There is still a lot of room for improvement (used Skype recently?), but it’s a lot of fun when a new tool comes along and solves a major first

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What happens to your gear when you never go home?

More specifically–after nearly 5 years on the road–what time-tested equipment am I still willing to lug around in a backpack?

In late 2013 I left the US for a second trip around the world. That trip never really ended, and my original SE Asia Pack List had to survive a number countries, seasons, and activities that I’d never anticipated.

It’s now May 2016 and the core of my kit remains largely unchanged.  Here are the two biggest discoveries/upgrades to the list:

The biggest challenges to the original pack list were:

Cold weather, including my first winter in 3 years (spent in Budapest!). More demanding health and fitness requirements (meaning little or no sacrifices of health or fitness routines while traveling or working). Scaled-up work efforts (meaning the need for a more powerful laptop and some higher-end office gear). The ongoing fantasy of a Jason-Bourne meets Ueli Steck gear kit

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Note: This post is by popular request. I’ve received more messages requesting details on my dietary experiments than almost anything else I’ve written. For those who know the backstory you can skip to the breakdown. Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. Consider this functional entertainment. Also keep in mind everyone is different, and this is an n=1 experiment. With that said…

September 2015 – Throwing weights around in Budapest

“OH, WHAT’S UP NOW MOTHER——!”

The words were out before the weight hit the ground. Thankfully there were only a few observers in the gym that day, but it seemed like a reasonable response to my 4th or 5th personal best (PR) that week.

This time in the snatch, which at 67.5kg (89% bodyweight) was not going to make anyone with weightlifting experience bat an eyelash, but it was the trajectory that impressed me. My PR

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Or, what happened to SpartanTraveler last year.

Editor’s Note: Many thanks to all those who encouraged me to get back to writing. 2015 was a bit of a grind, but the good news is I’ve got plenty to share from the experience.

Fear not, trusty readers, SpartanTraveler is alive and well.

But getting somewhere in life is about making hard choices, and the reality in 2015 was simple: focus or die.

Because when you do everything you do nothing.

‘Like the sculptor, who does not add clay, but strips away the inessentials until the truth is revealed.’
– Bruce Lee character from Dragon

I’ve always thrived at the breaking point of manageable activity. That place where positive stress forces focus and serious action. Where the goals and the necessity for completing them are immediately clear.

As a result, I always assumed as life went I’d continue to be doing more. More traveling,

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