Sole Trader or Solopreneur? How Travel Can Be The Best Business Decision You’ve Made Yet

“You’ve got your whole life to work – go out there and see the world while you’re young, you’ll only get this chance once”.

The amount of times I was told this as a 21 year old graduating university astounds me – almost as much as the idea that the two options insist on being mutually exclusive.

Understand: The person who spread the rumour that we had to do one or the other was a liar, and probably suffered from some sort of inferiority complex.

The previous year has been one of significant travel and exploration for this young business owner and it has been crucial in the success of Tonal Persuasion Method.

In fact, the Tonal Persuasion Method would never have been conceptualised if not for a highly interesting bus ride on one particular Summer day in Montreal, Canada.

Travel is the ultimate experience in putting your brain into an unfamiliar – and often times uncomfortable – situation where it needs to develop new thinking strategies to cope with its environment.

With these new neural pathways comes unchartered territories of creativity, inspiration and drive that never would have been realised from the comfort of a familiar office desk and a home cooked meal.

The economic and business world operates on a different landscape now.

The ability to do work we love (which hardly qualifies as ‘work’), all the while living the travelling lifestyle are more possible today than in any other time in history – and that possibility grows in strength and viability on a daily basis.

With the continuous upgrade of technology and online services that allow us to generate an income from practically anywhere in the world we are saturated with choices in the way we can develop an income.

If you have just completed high school or a college degree and the next step is deciding whether to enter the workforce or see the Eiffel Tower with your own eyes, this young business owner encourages you to realise that the two can easily – and sustainably – coexist.

We are heading for a different future in what it means to have a job and run a business.

We are moving in a direction where sole-trading and entrepreneurship will be on many levels regarded as a safe option in career stability by like-minded goal achievers who come together to complete projects together.

We are moving towards more opportunistic flexibility and away from the rigid office-space lifestyle of working generations gone past.

We are experiencing a shift in values from employers who like to see worldly exploration on a resume as much as the standard university degree.

Whether we are aiming to travel the world and run a business from a laptop, or put the career on pause and substitute in the backpacking lifestyle, we need to realise one thing: The two practices of travel and work are merging whether we like it or not – its simply up to us whether we’d like to capitalise on the opportunities it brings.