Project Hitchhiker | travels, stories and adventures in lifestyle design
welcome to my blog
Project Hitchhiker is the online creative outlet of Mike H.
Mike’s adventures have taken him across 3 continents, including driving a motorcycle for 6 months across Southeast Asia, hitchhiking across Canada and Japan, and walking 1000 miles along the coastline of Nova Scotia.
Mike’s passions are music, travel and motorcycles (in that order).
Mike’s dislikes include writing about himself in the third person.
This site is a collection of his travels, stories and adventures in lifestyle design.
So I started reading the Four Hour Workweek a second time (if you haven’t read it, go to amazon.com right now and order it! Warning, however — you should only buy it if you want to quit your job.), and I’m starting to put some of the principles into action in my life:
The 80-20 rule:
This rule says that 20% of all your actions produce 80% of your results. Or 20% of all input equals 80% of all output. This isn’t set in stone, and the output number is often higher. Tim cites an example in his own business where 90% of his customers were causing him most of his headaches, yet were only bringing in 5% of his profits. He subsequently “fired” his headache customers, concentrated on his big customers (10%) who were making him over 90% of his profits!
I’m moving in two weeks to Osaka, Japan — a city I’ve spent a grand total of two nights in my whole life. I have no apartment lined up and my previous connections in Osaka have all relocated. Am I worried? Nope. How am I going to make friends? No problem. I have confidence that I’ll be more than fine. This is my fourth time relocating, and I’ve created great social circles in less than a month that revolve around me and people I enjoy being around. Having done this a few times, I’ve noticed there are certain patterns that I follow to successfully create a large, high quality social circle in just two weeks. Here are my 10 steps to creating and being the center of a fantastic new social circle:
This one is of Kim and I on our $300 motorbike in Southern Vietnam, off-roading, crossing a river and checking out some waterfalls… just before we got arrested and detained for the better part of three days (story coming soon).
The dirt roads that we drove on for the first week of our trip were a little hairy at times. We crashed twice — once while trying to dodge a rogue cow and another time trying to slowly cross a wooden bridge. The funny part was that Kim actually got the crashes on video (she used to take a lot of videos while we drove — something about being bored because she couldn’t see around my big helmet).
I’m going to post the crash videos (they’re pretty hilarious) as soon as Kim emails them to me.
(UPDATE: The videos were on Kim’s laptop, which got stolen…)
Oh yeah, and that picture of Kim driving: She’s faking it. I didn’t let her actually drive the bike until much later on in the trip…
(I should note about the photographs near the end of the video that look professional: it’s because they are. Josh took them, and he’s an amazing pro photographer. Check out his site: www.jwebb.ca)
Since I’m moving to Japan in precisely two weeks, I thought it would be appropriate to look at what I wrote about the wonderful and mysterious land of the rising prices, on my first trip way back in 2002 (reading my old writing, I get annoyed with my too-liberal use of brackets… aw crap.)
-To Japan-
Early morning on April 25th I drove to the airport with my Mom, Dad, and friend Skye, a student from China (originally on exchange to St. Mary’s) who would be participating in the same exchange program as me. After a bad taste of 80`s rock, typical of an unnamed Halifax radio station, the news came on: seems that scientists have discovered evidence to back up the phenomenon of “Spring Fever” — the theory that says males are more aggressive in pursuing females in the Spring season — typically thought of as an old wives tale. They said something to the effect that male hormones actually increase involuntarily in the spring season. “Good,” I thought to myself, as we pulled into the airport parking lot, “not even on the plane yet, and already I’ve got an excuse ready.”
I usually write about my myself, I know. Yes, I’m self-centered and no, I don’t care. I write about what I know best. That said, I refuse to contribute another “I got up, brushed my teeth, went to the store…” blog to the online world. Something’s gotta be at least interesting to me to write it out, and I have a short attention span.
Writing about my experiences and opinions accomplishes two things: One, it gives me an outlet to record my life; and two, it pushes me to take my life in a direction that is worth recording and sharing with other people.
In the past few years of personal growth, I feel that more anything, the one thing that changed my limiting beliefs and helped me break out of my boring lifestyle has been reading and watching the examples of other successful eccentrics and adventurers. People who are living life and not letting life “live” them. I love to read about how Neil Strauss went from being a college virgin to the worlds most famous pickup artist; how Tynan became the head of an online gambling ring in two years and made hundreds of thousands; and how Timothy Ferris trained for four weeks to become the Chinese Kickboxing National Champion (which is, by the way, a great example of turning the system on its head for one’s own benefit). The people that I read about inspire me to live outside everyday social norms and expectations and consequently have much more fun.
On that note, here’s a video of fun times with Kim and “Georgia” (my motorbike) in Thailand and Laos:
