How to Earning a Living From Anywhere

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If you’d like to earn some or all of your income independently from specific locations and schedules, I have some experiences you might find useful. For more than 30 years I’ve supported my family (we maxxed out at 7 people in the house a few years back) on a single income I earn from the keyboard of my laptop, producing stories, photos and videos for magazines and websites, including my own.

I have no boss, but work entirely freelance, teaching people how to build everything from houses to furniture, how to fix things, and how to grow food and thrive in ways the world seems to have forgotten.  These are the hands-on, practical activities that make up my life. I love doing them and I spend half my time at the keyboard – sometimes sitting under a tree or on the porch. The rest of the time I’m getting dirty building things, growing things, taking care of cattle, and making our modern homestead life happen.

On the rare occasions when I travel, my work goes with me. All I need is wifi. My wife and I were able to adopt our youngest daughter, Ellie, in 2008 only because I could take my work with me to South Africa when we travelled to get her. As I write this article, I’m on the Portuguese island of Madeira with my wife after she recovered from her cancer surgeries earlier this year. In fact, travelling with work is becoming so common that one of the towns near where we’re staying has set themselves up to welcome and encourage what they call “digital nomads” – people who travel the world and work as they do.

Why would I tell you about this in a newsletter that’s about practical, hands-on living? Precisely because the ability to earn from anywhere, on your own terms, is the best way I know of to make a hands-on practical life possible, in the country or anywhere else you might want to live.

Life as a Digital Peasant

I call myself a “digital peasant”, and there are three main things you need to know if you’d like to become one, too. First, you must begin with (or develop) knowledge and hands-on skills that other people would like to learn from and be entertained by. Both skills and entertainment are what you’re selling. Second, you need to develop good digital and communication skills: writing, photography and videography are the stock in trade of the digital peasant, but so is sales. You need to convince people to buy what you make. Third, you need to invest in good computers, a good camera (I use an iPhone 15) and other digital tools. The world has more than enough blogs and videos done with mediocre equipment. Using good gear properly is one way to make your work stand out.

Success Takes Time (But Less Now)

Expect success to take time, too. With help and good advice you can get up and running much more quickly than I did, but don’t forget I was inventing all this stuff from scratch before anyone else was trying it, and before remote work via the internet was the big thing it is now. Blazing trails is always much slower than walking on them. It won’t take you as long as it took me.

I was three years into modern homestead living before I realized something. Working at the computer might be worth a try. After that it took 7 more years before my digital income level rose enough to let my wife quit her job as a registered nurse and to stay on the homestead full time. Today my oldest son, Robert, is financing a life for himself and his wife and daughter on our family homestead doing the same kind of digital work I do. So is my daughter Katherine and husband Paul. It’s also much easier to succeed in this way today, as the world becomes more digital.

Is being a digital peasant for everyone? No, but what venture is? If you like the variety of combining computer work with hands-on living, and you’d like the freedom to earn money from anywhere on planet earth, then maybe another digital peasant is about to be born.

Fleeing the Fishbowl

Robert is someone you’ll hear about from time to time as I offer insights on working remotely on your own terms. Robert is 34 now, and back when he was 18 he took my advice and did what I call “flee the fishbowl”. Rather than go to university or college, after high school he headed out on his own to develop skills he cared about – writing, photography, videographer and design.

More than a dozen years later he’s doing well with lots of great work that he does from home, enjoying plenty of time with his wife and young daughter. People come to him with enough work that he can barely keep up sometimes. Back when Robert made the leap in 2008, and was the only one in his high school class to not go on to college, he wrote a song around the ideas I’d been talking about around the dinner table for years. Naturally, it’s called Flee the Fishbowl. Click below to hear it.

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– Steve Maxwell