Welcome to the October Issue of Chiwi Journal! Your monthly newsletter with the content I filtered, curated and wrote based on 140+ hours of reading and listening time.

Quick update from my side:

It’s been a colourful and exciting past month for me here in Portugal - exploring Lisbon, attending a writing course, remote working with clients from the globe, and hanging out with the digital nomad community in Madeira!

Living in the digital transformation age, I’m super excited to upgrade my knowledge on Metaverse. This month, I’ll continually invest in cryptocurrency, create relevant content, and participate in some web3 projects.

Now, let’s get straight into the content.

📚 Book of the month

Speaking of digital nomads, one of my favourite Twitter friends, Pieter Levels, recently published two reports that featured digital nomad characteristics and remote work categories. As an early adopter of digital nomad life, he predicted that by 2035 there would be 1 billion digital nomads in the world.

Are you ready to join the party and enjoy the life of living and working anywhere?

Here are the books list to help you pave your way:

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson

The digital nomad bible empowered us to know the possibility of living and working with just a laptop and a passport and achieve sovereignty.

The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau and Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Real-life examples of self-employed travel around the world lifestyle to showcase how to turn your dream into a reality.

Atomic Habits by James Clear and The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer by Steven Kotler

Build a good habit system to support your unsettled digital nomad life and achieve flow-state productivity.

Silence by Erling Kagge and Tribe by Sebastian Junger

Sometimes, digital nomad life is a solitary journey. We have to get along with solitude to refocus on prospective decision-making, rather than just reacting to problems as they arise; The other times, digital nomads need to foster a sense of belonging in a community to maintain healthy mental health.

Read the Full curated list here.

My all-time favourite books recommendation.

🎼 Music of the month

"The only thing that matters is to feel the fado. The fado is not meant to be sung; it simply happens. You feel it, you don’t understand it and you don’t explain it." – Amália Rodrigues

When in Lisbon, you can't miss the soul of Portuguese music Fado.

Fado means 'fate' or 'destiny' in Portuguese. However, just like another famous Portuguese word, 'Saudade', 'Fado' cannot be perfectly translated into other languages. The Fado performers lament the impermanence of fate, but there is also love and defiance within it.

While listening to Fado, I remembered a well-known Song Ci (lyric poetry) written 939 years ago by my favourite poet Su Shi: "The music kept streaming out and lingering in the air, so melancholic that it sounded like a continuous sigh of sorrow or like a ceaseless weep with grief, which could entice a scaly dragon perching in a deep pool to rise and dance, or make a widow sitting on a lonely boat cry."

Music is the universal language of humankind that travels through time and space and touches our hearts.

More podcasts and newsletters recommendations

🧐 Article of the Month

Once you see 'Zen', all of a sudden is everywhere!

I interviewed Richard Reis on my podcast about his experience of practising Zen Meditation last month. To my surprise, Tim Ferriss interviewed Richard's teacher Henry Shukman in the following days and deep-dived on the topic of Zen, tools for awakening and meditation.

Richard also wrote a blog post, sharing everything he learned during his 4-month meditation retreat with Henry. I know my Chinese readers would love this topic, so I translated it and got more than 30,000 views across the channels.

What more excited was I met one of my online friends in Madeira who is very into Zen philosophy, so we decided to record a podcast to discuss self-actualisation, Chinese Buddhism and Love.

My grandfather was a lifelong Zen Buddhism practiser. Although he went through numerous ups and downs in his lifetime, he always chose to have a peaceful and generous mind. He left a poem to my family before he died in 2009. Hope one day I can reach the same level as what he called oneness.

(English translation)

Meditation

The light of the day is gone without a trace,

Wealth and fame are like clouds passing by.

I am a simple person living a life outside of the material world,

And I have studied Zen from the journey within.

Yin and Yang harmonise and purify my emotions,

Exercising and meditating cultivated my mind.

The essence of the spirit is my inner guard,

The universe and I unified in one.

👩‍🎓 Course of the month

In September, I joined the Write of Passage Cohort 7 run by David Perrell to accelerate my online writing skills. Halfway through the 5-weeks course, I've already broken through my writing barriers in English and built up my information capture system to help me with consistent writing!

What I enjoyed the most about the course was meeting like-minded people who share the same journey with me. Through brainstorming ideas and writing together, and giving feedback to each other, we formed a comradeship.

I also got a chance to have Robbie Crabtree as a mentor, which I've been following for a long time on Twitter. When students are ready, the teacher will appear!

Highly recommend people who want to build personal branding and establish professional opportunities through online writing to join this course! Cohort 8 will start in February next year!

📝 Recap of my English content

👀 What I am up-to this month

contributing content to a meta-project on Metaverse in Chinese
interviewing digital nomads at Chiwi Journal Podcast
attending David Perell’s Write of Passage course
remote working in Portugal or Spain in October and November

🗣️ AMA

Question from CY Circle reader:

How to make friends and build up your network as a digital nomad?

My answer:

I'm not too fond of the traditional way of making friends, limited by your geographical locations.

I had at least 500 classmates from kindergarten to graduate school, but less than three people I could call friends (I was moderately popular at school). In my opinion, classmates are a product of random assignments. It's normal to be surrounded by people who have very different backgrounds and interests from you, which lead to different paths in the future. The same logic applies to colleagues unless you share the same vision and are willing to work together to achieve the same goal, but often everyone just wants to have a stable job and get paid.

Many people complain that the older they get, the more challenging for them to make friends. I'm the opposite. The more mature I become, the more I know who I am, what I need and who I can be friends with.

I met 90% of my friends online, either through proactively reaching out to them or being approached by my readers who shared similar experiences. I used to feel rootlessness because I couldn't find my tribe in the physical world, but my problem has gone with all the digital platforms where I could connect with people from all over the world.

During travelling, I like to use Airbnb and stay with locals because they are the first point to provide me with all information in the new environment. I also enjoy Nomadlist, Meetup, Workaway and many other community-based networking platforms to meet new people. I interviewed one of my online friends, Chance, on his approaches to make friends as a digital nomad.

Last but not least, I highly recommend one of my favourite podcasters, Jordan Harbinger's free 6 Minute Networking Course. You will master the game of making friends and growing networking, and connect with people you want to know.

Remember, you are the average of five regular friends around you. Choose your friends wisely and review your contacts regularly!

Camellia Yang

🥝 Chiwi Journal October Issue: Digital Nomad 2.0, Fado, Zen Meditation, Making Friends and more