eat pray love Around the World Travel: Meet, Plan, Go!Coming this summer, to a theater near you, is the film, Eat, Pray, Love, based on the best selling book by Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s about a woman in her thirties who chucks it all to travel around the world (hmmm…not a bad idea, huh??  I am working on my book, I promise).  This book, others like it, and hopefully the movie will inspire people to do what myself and many others have done recently – jump off the beaten path, take a break, do something different—because if it’s really want you WANT to do you CAN do it. Life is way too short to even hesitate or worry. I’ve never met someone who regretted going after what they wanted, no matter how scary.

For me, it was the best thing I have ever done and my life is forever changed.

These are sayings and clichés for a reason:

  • Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
    - John Lennon
  • Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
    -Helen Keller
  • Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.
    -Charles R. Swindoll
  • And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
    -Abraham Lincoln
  • Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
    – Mark Twain
  • Life is measured by the risks you take.

No one is dying and thinks, as they look back on their short life on our beautiful planet, that they are happy they took no risks and stayed in their mundane 9-5 job and saved their money and never did anything they really wanted to do.  There’s nothing wrong with taking a new direction, veering off the well-worn path, taking a career break, a sabbatical of sorts, or a semi-permanent early retirement as I like to call it!

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So, to segue off of the buzz of the movie and all this ‘inspiration,’ I am helping host a nationwide initiative B2B passport logo Around the World Travel: Meet, Plan, Go!on September 14th called “Meet, Plan, Go!” It is headed up by my friends at a wonderful and inspiring site called Briefcase to Backpack. Simultaneous events will be taking place all over the United States to bring travelers and others together for a night of not only inspirational talks, but the real nitty gritty of how someone like me (and you) can do this. How did I quit life as I knew it? How did I PAY for it? How did I really plan for 3+ years away and living out of a bag (as I still am…just for one more week! Eeek!) Stay tuned for more details and hopefully you will join me in Chicago and all of us in cities like New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Dallas in September.