Why Now is the Time to Unlearn Everything Weve Been Taught About Work
a few years ago
i left pretty much everything behind to
explore the unknown so with my laptop in
one hand
and my backpack in the other i’ve been
working
all the way from the mountaintops in
georgia
the night train through kazakhstan and
the jungle in sri lanka which wasn’t my
best idea
but to understand why i went on this
digital nomad journey in the first place
let me just back the tape to 2017.
so first just to give you some context
so
i was a high school dropout who
ended up breaking the idea of who can
become successful
so in 2017 i was running an
award-nominated company within the music
industry
supported by angel hayes and wu-tang
clan
i was living in the city of my dreams
barcelona with a partner in
a beautiful apartment so objectively
i had it all pretty much figured out
but in a matter of a few months i
lost it all
so one morning during an extremely hot
summer in barcelona
i woke up with severe
stomach cramps at first
i thought oh it’s going to go away it’s
going to pass after a day or two
but they never did a few months later
i was diagnosed with a chronic disease
called gerd i
pretty much lost my ability to swallow
my own food
and as a result i became
so deeply mall nurtured that i could
hardly
use my legs and the consequence of being
seriously ill were that my company
started to fall apart
their relationship ended and
i moved out of our apartment and into
a hospital in the midst of this
chaos during new year’s eve
i got a call saying that my grandpa had
passed away in a massive stroke
this was a pivotal moment
i would say in my life where everything
i thought i knew
just shifted i was
navigating through a rough breakup and
losing one of the most important people
in my life
so me my grandpa had a very special bond
and very much shared that desire to
explore the unknown
when he was young and didn’t have any
money to travel
he took matter in his own hands and
crossed the atlantic ocean
on a cargo ship to get to south america
but he had to put aside his passion for
traveling
for over 40 years because
obviously he had bills to pay and kids
to
feed and a job to maintain
so when he finally reached his pension
and thought that he could finally
continue the adventure he hoped for he
passed away
and this was a game-changing moment in
my journey where
everything i thought was important
completely
melted yes i was
fighting a horrible disease
but it enabled me to look at my life
with clearer eyes
losing my grandpa and going through a
lot of grief
at that time made me realize that
i want to build my life around something
that he could be proud of
something beyond prestige and
accomplishments
something that truly fueled my soul
and for me the answer was simple
i wanted to become a traveling digital
nomad so let me fast forward seven
months
so seven months later i had just landed
a job
as a digital marketer at this tech
startup and the first thing i did was
walk up to rs the ceo of this company
and i asked him so would you mind if i
worked from a coffee shop somewhere else
and he was like cool that’s totally fine
and i replied with okay but what if i do
it from
say kazakhstan and he looked at me
and said well maybe not
that far so this startup
has a thing called a happiness
philosophy
which basically means that there’s no
business
if people aren’t happy which was one of
the reasons for why i
jumped on board in the first place after
persistently trying to convince him
arif eventually got back to me and he
said
okay i had some thinking and if this
really
makes you happy then let’s give it a go
let’s try it out
so guess what i did
i got home that day i
packed my bags bought the cheapest
one-way ticket i could find
and never looked back
so you might wonder how did you get
there
getting to that point i would say when
my mindset shifted
things started to shift in the external
as well
i met the doctor in gastroenterology
was the first one who refused to give up
until my symptoms were minimized
i started visualizing a life
working from the road and even through
my worst
days i made small
but profound choices that would lead me
to that dream
and at first those choices were simply
having the strength to get out of bed in
the morning
having the strength to walk to the
mailbox and back
and eight months later i landed
a new dream job and worked with the
world
as my office
so now after years of
working out in the world without a home
i realized
first of all how incredibly privileged i
am to
possess a powerful passport and be able
to travel this seamlessly
but that’s that’s another ted talk the
one memory that really
stuck was working from kazakhstan for a
month
so i’ve just spent a weekend in a remote
village
with 20 strangers the remote village was
called saty
i have a photo of that here
so in the evening me and six kazakh
women
were sharing a meal together and this
was like randomly at
someone’s house in the middle of nowhere
with no phone signal
and at that point my russian was pretty
much non-existent
so one of the women at the dinner table
started to paint in her notebook to
clarify questions she was trying to ask
me
and later into the dinner we were all
communicating
by painting in our notebooks exchanging
stories about life and love
the day after i got in a taxi back home
to alamati where i was living
but just to clarify so a taxi in
kazakhstan
basically means that you just jump into
a stranger’s car
and you negotiate a price so i was
sitting in the strangest car
driving through the mountains at sunrise
and this immense feeling of freedom
just hit me
it hit me that freedom didn’t have to
mean
breaking free from everything i could
still maintain a job and a career
but do it in a way that allowed me to be
the full spectrum of myself
so i would lie if i said that working
remotely
hasn’t been challenging i would say that
two of the most
important skills to attain when working
remotely
are self-leadership and self-care
to be disciplined enough to make sure
that everything gets done
and loving enough to listen to your
body’s needs
just want to underline though that not
all jobs are possible to do remotely
nor are all people a fit for it
so after advising some of sweden’s
biggest companies
on how to shift from the office to
working from home during corona
this is the three fundamental challenges
for us to overcome the fear of
shaking up the how it used to be
our world is immensely different from a
hundred years ago
when the nine to five was born the
generations that are
settling into the workspace today have a
different mindset and different values
it’s not like we don’t have the tools
for remote work
it’s more about daring to shake up the
old infrastructure
and redefine work to align it
with the century that we live in
two autonomy
physical presence is no longer an
indicator of
productivity at work why because
just like me people want to move through
life
and feel a bigger sense of ownership
over their days
and essentially across a lifetime
so allowing flexibility to an extend
doesn’t mean
letting go of control because management
isn’t about
walking around making sure people do
their work
it’s about giving your employees the
best conditions to do so
so how do we do that anchor into a new
type of leadership
that is based on trust and not
visibility so what is a trust-based
leadership
me compare to dating
so say that you’re going on a first date
and
things are going great you’re not all of
a sudden
going to ask for proof proof that
assures you that
this person is trustworthy that this
person
will be a good loyal partner to you
we trust until there’s a reason
not to trust and we need to adapt to
that approach
in the work life as well
so in order to work differently we need
a new toolbox
now as we all know the majority of the
workforce
has been forced into this new way of
working
without the tools needed to do it
mindfully
so when we change the way we work we
need to change the way we move through
our days
and one major key here is as i mentioned
earlier is to cultivate self-leadership
it’s to care for your health and knowing
when to turn off the computer
it’s implementing routines
in your life that fulfills your being
it’s setting up boundaries for yourself
and knowing that
just because you’re able to work
whenever does not mean
you should it’s time to create a
workspace
where people can live in their full
truth and not be tied up to an outdated
idea of how work is supposed to look
like
many companies today have adapted to the
technological aspect of working from
home
so now the challenge is to implement a
human-centric approach
in order to actually create a workspace
with longevity
because a massive revolution is
unfolding as we speak
and we’re not going back to normal we
are creating
a new one thank you