From A Laptop In Thailand…

Many Internet Marketers dream of leaving the concrete jungle to go about their work with laptops on sandy beaches. It’s the stuff those work from home jpegs are made of, right? Having stomached the first half of a bitter London winter, I would be lying if I said I haven’t been itching at the balls to fly out here to Thailand and kickstart my new life of luxury.

Even though I’ve only been in Bangkok for a week, it’s already clear to me that the quality of life is worlds apart from what I’ve known in the past. The people are friendly. They call Thailand the Land of Smiles, while my old neighbourhood was more like the Ensemble of Chavs. The food gets better seemingly every day, and my taste buds are on fire. Literally. Somebody should have warned me how the Thais love to douse meals in chilies. Of course, the weather here is bliss too.

I’ve waited a long time to live like a nomad. The biggest challenge now is to remain focused on my work while the sun is beating through my window. And if the last six days have been anything to go by, that’s something easier said than done.

I’ve always believed that your environment plays a big hand in your ability to achieve your targets. If you can’t turn your head away from the television, you’re going to miss tomorrow’s moneymaking niche. If your wife is trampling around your office telling you to do the dishes, you probably don’t want to be scouring through female dating pics.

To put it simply, your working environment dictates what you’re able to accomplish. Nothing affects an attention span quite as harmfully as a poor working environment.

I consider myself lucky to have found initial success as a young guy in my 20s, without any kids, without any mortgage and with relatively few responsibilities. It gave me the freedom of locking myself away in my bedroom and sitting at a desk throwing shit at the wall until some of it stuck. Many of you do not have that luxury.

Whether you’re working in Thailand or England, in a home office or at the kitchen table – you need to be able to cancel out the distractions of everyday life fucking with you. I’ve only just noticed since flying out to Asia how badly television can affect my productivity. How eating out can zap monumental hours out of my day. I’m still searching for a balance between work and play. And no, the equation doesn’t involve ladyboys.

Once you find a situation that allows you to focus properly, it’s easy to find a rhythm where to-do lists become yesterday’s waste in the litter basket. It’s what we call the grind. But it’s damn near impossible to slip in to that grind at the snap of your fingertips. We can become ruled all too easily by the environment around us.

So much of the success we enjoy as marketers is carved through momentum. I believe in the theory of 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration being the blueprint to success. Momentum is everything. If you don’t have an online/offline switch helping you to gravitate between work times and social times, it’s your work that will suffer the most. And probably your friends too when you explode with anger through the stress of knowing you’re not working efficiently and haven’t earnt your ticket out of the office.

There’s nothing I find more frustrating than being frustrated with myself.

I’ve become so tuned in to my former working environment that it’s truly a bitch to get my head down and work in a different climate. When I looked out of my window in London, I would see a stretch of grassy nowhereland and maybe – on a busy day – some dude being dragged along by his dog. When I look out of my apartment in Bangkok, I see a city waiting to be explored. The low hanging fruits of my work over the last few years, ready to be plucked and enjoyed.

How do you stay motivated when everything you’ve worked for is sitting on your doorstep?

I’m treating this first week as a holiday that I’ve earnt. Nobody can travel halfway round the world and expect to snap in to a working routine. So much of my success as an affiliate marketer has come from an almost robotic tendency to stay rooted to one spot and churn out profitable campaigns. It was the by-product of a mundane working environment, but a very effective one.

To get the best out of myself, I need to be in an situation where I have complete focus and concentration. As much as I enjoy working on laptops in the sun, a quiet office where I can shut myself away from the world is just the tonic I need to get by. Maybe it’s the snobbery of a guy who swears by his dual screen, but I’m finding it pretty difficult to function without seventeen windows at my disposal.

Laptops are suitable, I guess, if your entire job involves sending emails. Anything more and I need my Mac. Unfortunately it’s still in transit and my productivity has gone down the shitter ever since. I don’t like having to use my finger as a mouse and I’m acting quite grouchy at the idea of having to work out of my established comfort zone. It all comes down to that environment.

If you’re working from home, you need to become a master of your own work space. Maybe the ultimate goal is to one day pack up your bags and migrate to warmer shores. But even when you’re there, there’s no such thing as retirement for an entrepreneur. Understanding how to get the most out of your working day, and how to control your environment effectively, is a prerequisite to success.

So while I’m sitting here pissing around with a shoddy baby laptop and a failing Internet connection, take a look around the room and see how you can channel some extra focus towards your work. Maybe it’s a television that needs to be switched off, or a little white noise to cancel out the cars from the street below. Maybe you should throw your kids over the balcony. Anything to focus your energies where they need to be. Actually please don’t throw your kids over the balcony. Or at least close this window before you act on impulse.

There’s always a way to control your environment. But you can be certain that most of your competition are chained to their own. Working harder and smarter than the rest, with more discipline and more drive, will nearly always get you results. The problem I’m finding, is how I can maintain that level of focus with the allure of Thailand shining through my window…

Recommended This Week:

  • If you haven’t read it from front to back already, snap up a copy of the brilliant 4-hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. Inspiring stuff for any affiliate marketer.

  • If you’re looking to explore some very different but potentially very profitable micro-niches, take a look at ShareASale. It’s like a CJ that isn’t run by a bag of dicks.

  • Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter

About the author

Finch
Finch

A 29 year old high school dropout (slash academic failure) who sold his soul to make money from the Internet. This blog follows the successes, fuck-ups and ball gags of my career in affiliate marketing.

24 Comments

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  • Don’t be so hard on yourself. Bangkok is a fascinating city…give yourself the opportunity to get to know it a little.

    I know how hard it is to work there though. I often vacation there for up to 3 weeks at a time. I usually take a laptop and have every intention of doing a little work while I’m there… but never ever get around to it….. Probably because I’m usually hung over 🙂

  • Great post. You are 22 years old and I hate you already. Only kidding…good luck with your new adventure.

  • All I can say is screw you and your dream city and your money and … yeah well, I’m stuck with a wife, a kid, a fat mortgage, a cubible and many ideas in my head I can’t put to use because “I’m just over broke” and can’t get enough time.

    Kudos to you, enjoy it, don’t blow it (the business, you do what you wanna do with the ladyboys) like so many successful marketers.

  • Hi Finch! Thanks so much for this post and the link to the Simply Noise site. I’ve been working a day job over the last several months and have realized my productivity has sunk to about 1/1000th of what it was when I was working as an affiliate and consultant from home because of the constant noise that surrounds me everyday in the office.

    I have a pair of Bose cs3 quiet comfort noise canceling headphones I wear religiously, but they just don’t cut it. People talk sooo loud and so often. This white noise generator gives me hope!

    Also, take some time and let yourself really experience Thailand. You never know how much time you have left. I’m so jealous btw. I’m currently enjoying the ambiance of a drab grey cube…

  • Yes, environment dictates what you’re able to accomplish. You probably wouldn’t be where you are if you were brought up in the land of Thai. It’s good to have the winter when you are trying to concentrate on your work.

    Watch out for the laptop thieves while wandering out.

  • Nice one.
    I abandoned England and moved to the exotic Costa Del Sol about 4 years ago and it was the best thing i ever did.

    Location changing is very life changing.

  • Awesome post, would love to see pictures of your new setup. Turning off the tv and getting it out of my office was one of the best moves I made this past year. That and investing in noise cancelling headphones. I’m a fan of simply noise, as well as rainy mood and iserenity for different sounds.

  • Welcome to Thailand! My wife is from here and my family and I are spending a year here. Thankfully I set up my business to be run from anywhere, with that anywhere being Thailand.

    If you’re planning on travel I’d recommend Phuket and Chiang Mai – two of our destinations.

    Enjoy Bangkok. It’s crazy.

  • what did you expect to do? fly to thailand and lock yourself in a room? I don’t get it, what’s the point of that?

  • dude, cliffnotes plz. no headers, no pretty pictures, no images, no lists, no stylized text, c’mon.

    tl;dr

  • What’s with this!? All the AMs are coming to Thailand now. Shawn, Nick, You, Ngo and a whole bunch of others are coming soon!

    This is my country and their my ladyboys, dammit!

    Nah.. I kid I kid. It’ll be great to actually have some of you successful guys around. I was getting lonely!

    I’m in Laos doing Thai visa shit right now, missing Thailand like an SOB. I don’t think I could ever move away anymore.

  • Welcome to Thailand.

    I made the move from London to Bangkok about a year ago and am still enjoying it out here.

    Good luck!

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