Chris Guillebeau has achieved what few others have — just one of hundreds of travel bloggers when he set out to become a writer less than three years ago, his first book made Amazon.com’s Top 100 list as soon as it was published last week. Now he is on an “unconventional book tour” that will take him to all 50 states.
If you’ve read my profile of Guillebeau in the Washington Times, you won’t be surprised by the “unconventional” designation. His blog on “life, work and travel” is called “The Art of Non-Conformity,” and that’s also the book’s title.
“I help people live unconventional lives — to think differently, question assumptions and authority, find out what they are passionate about and overcome gatekeepers,” he told me during a visit to Washington last year. “For me, a large part of challenging authority involves looking for alternatives to the way most people do things.”
The way Guillebeau became a writer was certainly alternative to the standard path, which I took by working as a journalist in the so-called mainstream media for 18 years and writing for established publications like the Financial Times. At 32 — four years my junior — he has succeeded without the help of a reputable newspaper or another gatekeeper. Since early 2008, when he created his blog, he has attracted thousands of readers, and many of them have become dedicated followers — he calls them a small army.
Although he didn’t need anyone else to publish his writings in order to reach his audience directly, his ambition was to write a book, and there are certainly gatekeepers to overcome in that endeavor. But the number of his existing readers and his idea were enough to land him a book agent, who was able to negotiate a publishing contract with the Penguin Group. Incidentally, Penguin is owned by Pearson PLC, the British company that also owns the Financial Times.
In Guillebeau’s words, the central message of the book is: “You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to. You can do good things for yourself and make the world a better place at the same time. Here’s how to do it.” This is where you get the book and find out.
The other unconventional aspect of Guillebeau’s book tour is that Penguin didn’t have money to organize a tour, which is a rare luxury these days, so he decided to self-finance it.
You will no doubt notice the graphic similarities between the book’s cover and Guillebeau’s website. They were both created by Reese Spykerman, a very talented American designer currently living in Asia, where I met her last year — of course, Guillebeau had something to do with that encounter.
I had corresponded with Guillebeau by e-mail and written about him in my column as early as 2008, but he didn’t mention his book project until our first phone conversation in early 2009. I called him from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska, during a refueling stop on my way back from Asia with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
When he came to Washington last fall, I invited him to the State Department and showed him the briefing room and my office — more precisely, my cubicle in the correspondents’ room. Over lunch in the cafeteria, we did the interview on which the Times profile was based.
As you can see from my website, I’ve interviewed many famous people — Sharon Stone, Denzel Washington, Kevin Costner, John Malkovich, Conan O’Brien, Walter Cronkite, Larry King, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, to name a few — but sometimes it’s talking to and writing about real people that gives a journalist more professional satisfaction.
Ironically, now I’m in the position Guillebeau was in two years ago, trying to build a small business — and I find myself learning from his experience. His project was to help people lead unconventional lives, mine is to educate people how to be better travelers. We are both passionate about democratizing travel — making it more affordable, comfortable and enjoyable for more people — so don’t be surprised if we work together in the future.
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Continue reading about ‘Unconventional book tour’ in 50 states
By Nicholas Kralev
The Washington Times
December 21, 2009
Chris Guillebeau has never had a “real” job. At 31, he makes a living by advising others how to make a living without having a “real” job.
Mr. Guillebeau started out as a blogger less than two years ago, but he is already on track to earning six figures annually by selling self-published manuals on “life, work and travel.” That’s his projection for 2010. This year, he estimates he has earned up to $80,000.
“I help people live unconventional lives — to think differently, question assumptions and authority, find out what they are passionate about and overcome gatekeepers,” he said. “For me, a large part of challenging authority involves looking for alternatives to the way most people do things.”
His blog, “The Art of Non-Conformity,” is still free, but his manuals have attracted enough interest so he doesn’t need another income to live on.
“About 95 percent of the people who read me will never buy anything, and that’s totally fine. But the model is able to sustain itself because 5 percent do invest in the products,” he said. “Next year, it should be a six-figure business. I don’t need to grow it beyond that — I’m not trying to get rich.”
Mr. Guillebeau, who lives in Portland, Ore., said he has “personally connected” with about half of his 20,000 readers — mostly by e-mail, but also meeting many of them during his travels across the country and around the world. Travel is one of his passions, and he has visited more than 100 countries so far.
Ben Lopatin, business director of Wellfire Interactive, a Web-design firm, said he was initially familiar with Mr. Guillebeau’s travel blog posts but “kept reading because of his writing about entrepreneurship and unconventional perspectives on work life.”
“He’s not preaching a ‘Get rich quick’ message,” Mr. Lopatin said during one of Mr. Guillebeau’s “meet-ups” on a recent trip to Washington, where about three dozen of his fans showed up. “He’s offering tips and perspectives on rethinking how to work for the things that really matter to you.”
Elliot Susel, another reader who works for the consulting firm Accenture, said it was “abundantly clear” from his conversation with Mr. Guillebeau that “he practices what he preaches.”
“Although he’s able to provide highly individualized guidance, he instead focuses on empowering each individual with the tools that they need to make tough decisions,” Mr. Susel said.
From Mr. Guillebeau’s writing, one wouldn’t know he is a high-school dropout — after a year, he decided that, while he liked learning, he disliked everything else about high school. He began taking classes at a community college in Alabama at 16.
“They never asked for a high school diploma, and by the time they realized I didn’t have one, I’d finished one quarter and had good grades, so they let me keep going,” he recalled. When he transferred to a four-year college, he was attending classes at three schools at the same time, then pulled all his credits together and graduated in two years with a degree in sociology.
Around that time, Mr. Guillebeau got the closest thing to a “real” job — working the night shift at Federal Express in Memphis for a couple of months. Next, he started importing coffee from Jamaica and reselling it to U.S. distributors. He also sold things on eBay.
“In 1998, you could put anything on eBay and sell it. You could go to the store, buy things and people would pay more for them, just because of the novelty of it,” he said. “I went from making $20,000 to $200,000 a year.”
Having made some money, in 2002 he moved to West Africa with his wife, Jolie, whom he married at 18. He became a volunteer for a medical charity, but he “didn’t have any skills,” so his “job for the first year was to carry boxes around,” he said. Later, he moved up and was in charge of 120 people. He was also “a liaison between the organization and host governments, meeting presidents and hanging out with warlords.”
After four years in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Mr. Guillebeau returned to the United States and earned a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Washington in Seattle.
He started his website in early 2008, writing mostly about his travels, but soon “realized there would be a limited audience for that.”
“I had a message to share and wanted to establish a career as a writer; how do I do that? I wrote to every person I knew about the site and to fellow bloggers and other writers. This was going to be the most important thing I do, so I wanted to focus all of my creative energy on making it happen,” he said.
He also wrote his “flagship manifesto” with the deliberately provocative title “A Brief Guide to World Domination.”
In the past 15 months, Mr. Guillebeau has self-published five manuals, ranging from $39 to $129, on self-employment, on how to build a small business, on how to succeed as an artist without relying on established norms, on using social media and on how to play the frequent-flier game.
“The most important thing [in starting a small business] is creating a product or service with an active group of people who are already interested in the topic. This is much easier than trying to convince someone they need something they haven’t heard of before,” he said when asked for an example of the kind of advice he offers.
The best sort of entrepreneurship “focuses not on trading time for money,” as is the case in consulting, “but on developing systems that earn money while you sleep,” he added.
“The typical paths in life — school to college to entry level to mid-level to professional — don’t work for everyone,” he said. “I want to help people avoid some of the unnecessary steps to get closer to what they really want.”
This story was first published by The Washington Times
U.S. carriers have made major progress in listening to direct customer feedback in recent years, while foreign airlines have been less aggressive in pursuing new creative approaches. Finnair, however, is trying to change that. It’s looking for “quality hunters” — fliers who will spend two months on flights around the world and report their findings.
Product-testing and sampling is certainly not a new concept, but the scale on which Finland’s largest carrier plans to implement the program is rare — as is the public way it has chosen to recruit the four travelers it needs.
Finnair, which is a member of the Oneworld alliance, calls them “independent advisers, whose task is to travel to various destinations in Europe, Asia and the U.S. to investigate the elements that determine quality in travel.” They “are expected to communicate their impartial views and recommendations to the company on a regular basis throughout the two-month period” in October and November, the airline said in a press release this week.
In an attempt to improve its products and services in a very competitive environment, Finnair has launched a new project and created a website called Rethink Quality. This is where you can apply for one of the four slots by Sept. 26, if you can make yourself available for the duration of the exercise. That same site will feature blogs by the “quality hunters” once they begin their travels.
“The recruitment of the quality hunters is one means for Finnair to focus more
closely on issues that are important to today’s travelers,” Antti Nieminen, global marketing communications manager at Finnair, was quoted as saying in the press release.
As often happens, the release didn’t answer some of the obvious questions about this experiment: How and by whom will the winners be selected? Will they be compensated? Will they earn frequent-flier miles for the flights they take? Will they fly in economy or business class?
So I asked Nieminen and quickly received the answers. A 10-member panel of judges from Finnair and its PR agency will choose the “hunters” based on “creativity, excellent writing skills, ability to use modern technology, no-fear attitude and open mind to explore quality and provoke conversation.”
“The hunters will be paid compensation,” he said. “The exact amount is confidential contract information but can be compared with an average salary. No miles are granted to the hunters as they are flying on duty. They will be flying in both business class and economy class, since we want them to blog in a versatile manner from all angles related to flying.”
Nieminen also said that “Finnair staff will not be warned about them in advance,” so they shouldn’t receive special treatment.
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Continue reading about Finnair tries creative customer feedback
These are some of the participants in the first official “On the Fly” Seminars in Washington last week. Everyone who came was extremely satisfied — in fact, none of my students had expected to learn nearly as much as they did.
As you can see from the comments on the seminars’ website, they were called “a traveler’s dream,” “incredibly revealing and extraordinarily valuable,” and “a mandatory tool to save money for frequent fliers and corporations.”
“These are perfectly practical methods to make the system work to your advantage — just a few steps to get inexpensive flights, ideal itineraries, upgrades, no fees, and free flights,” said David Aidekman, founder of Adventurati, a group travel company.
Charles Zhang, who came all the way from Princeton, N.J., to attend one of the DC seminars, said he has had top elite status with a couple of airlines for a while, and flies more than 150,000 miles a year. “But I still learned lots of new things from your seminar, which I had never heard before,” he said. “I will use my skills from you seminar toward my future flights, and enjoy my travel more.”
Of course, I couldn’t be happier with the feedback, but it seems I have a serious challenge to overcome: It’s clear the seminars are extremely valuable for those who attend, but the problem is that they don’t know that until they come. Despite the detailed curriculum and syllabuses I’ve posted, last week’s participants said they had no idea that much of what I taught was possible and available to all travelers.
So it seems I need to come up with a catchier way to compress material that takes hours to teach into a few soundbites and paragraphs. Wish me luck!
In the meantime, I’m pleased to announce that the next seminars in Washington will take place on July 23 and 24. Before that, I’ll be offering a seminar in Anchorage, Alaska, on July 6. I’m also looking into doing the same in New York, either in July or August.
Continue reading about Lessons from ‘On the Fly’ Seminars, and July dates announced
Just as many loyal United Airlines customers hoped that its expected merger with Continental Airlines would put an end to United’s massive blocking of “award” seats made available for mileage redemption by its partners in the global Star Alliance, the carrier made a government filing that raised new questions about its filtering policy.
With all the complex issues United and Continental have to resolve before completing their merger, which would create the world’s largest airline, the “award” blocking is hardly a top agenda item. In fact, I’d be surprised if it has come up at all in their negotiations so far.
However, it’s an important matter for many elite members of United’s Mileage Plus program, as shown by the overwhelming response to my original column exposing the previously secret practice in September 2008. A thread on FlyerTalk.com, the largest online travel community, that was started at the time has had more than 100,000 views and over 2,000 responses to date…
Continue reading about United’s award blocking an issue in Continental merger
