A few months ago I returned to Auckland from a five week stint in Bangkok. I decided to head to my beloved Thai capital after a few months in the European winter, which was driving me nuts. I finally understand why Southeast Asia is full of Europeans in December and why they’re all so happy.

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Books! This has been a big part of my life the last couple of years, especially because I suck at reading and used to take so much pride in never reading the book in school and still passing the exam. But this is no longer school, this is life, and reading is starting to feel

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I got another email today about an American buried in college debt with no job and hating their life and wondering where in the world they could go to run away from all their problems. I wasn’t surprised. I get this email a lot. Should I go to college? I have so much student debt.

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Four weeks ago I decided to end my summer with a challenge. Since I’m generally a “do it when I feel like it” kind of guy, I tried to build some discipline into my life by setting myself small tasks to work on every day. The tasks revolved around different areas of my life I’ve

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One of my goals this year was to try and read more. I never read. Before this year I’d read maybe five books since high school. I read a couple last year, but this year the challenge was to make reading a habit. Why? Because it’s the advice that keeps coming up again and again.

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“We get a little better or a we get a little worse every day. Let’s get a little better today.” – Jason Street I push self-improvement a lot on this site, and travel is often a vehicle to reach those goals, rather than the goal itself. Last year I wrote about the joy of learning

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Learning Mandarin seems to be the global craze these days. People from every corner of the world are flocking to China and many universities have entire campuses dedicated solely to the teaching of Chinese to foreigners. International students are spending thousands of dollars to live and study Mandarin in China’s top institutions, some even coming

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As the end of 2014 approaches, I thought it would be nice to share with you the blogs that I’ve been reading this year. As many of you know, 2014 was the first year of blogging for me, and there were many blogs I looked to for inspiration as I waywardly tried to find my

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