Page 64 - The $100 Startup_ Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love

“LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION”
IS OVERRATED.

“A desk is a dangerous place
from which to view the world.”

—JOHN LE CARRÉ

Packing a carry-on bag with running shoes and two changes of clothes, I head

out into the world via a short connection from Portland to Vancouver
International Airport. Later that evening, the twelve-hour Cathay Pacific flight to
Hong Kong gives me two hours to watch a movie, six hours to sleep, and four
hours to write emails.

Arriving in Asia, I clear immigration (no bags to claim), check my wallet to
see if I still have local currency from the last trip here, and settle into a
concourse chair before jumping on the train into the city. I flip open the laptop,
connect to “HKG-Free-WiFi,” and log onto the world. Whoosh … out go all the
emails I wrote on the plane, and in come 150 more that arrived during the night.

I check in with Reese, my designer, about a project we’ve been working on. I
answer customer support requests—a page on our site is down, someone needs a
login, and so on—and write a quick update to customers. I review reader
comments from my latest blog post and quickly check my daily list of email
signups, the only metric I monitor on a frequent basis. (If all’s going well with
new subscribers, everything else should be OK.)

I often stay in guest houses and hostels, but later tonight I have a conference
call scheduled for the bleary hour of 2 a.m.—it’s daytime in North America—so