Chris Guillebeau, creator of the The Art of Nonconformity, joins us to discuss his career and his new book Born for This.

Creating a deliberate life without grand vision

Lessons learned from failures and dead ends

Balancing persistence with knowing when to quit

How sunk costs impact our decisions

The psychology and mindset required for significant goals

Why an inciting incident doesn’t have to be something massive

4 elements that create emotional resonance in your work

The power of asking if there’s another way to do things

The intersection of joy, money, and flow

Using a combination of intuition and logic (feelings and research)

What happens to your identity at the end of a quest

Most people fail to back out of a dead end not when they’re terrible at it, but when they’re just ok at it.

I’ve had lot of projects because I’m not good at doing just one thing.

Mastery comes when you find something you truly do love.

Having a fixed goal is valuable for both the destination and the journey

Deeper message doesn’t necessarily imply some philosophical truth that has never been shared before

The intersection of joy, money, and flow is essentially the goal

If you look back at the best moments in your life, you don’t necessarily know at the time

Born for This

The Happiness of Pursuit

The 100 Dollar Startup

The Art of Nonconformity

Chris Guillebeau is a New York Times best selling author and a modern day explorer. During a lifetime of self-employment that included a four-year commitment as a volunteer executive in West Africa, he visited every country in the world (193 in total) before his 35th birthday. Since then he has modeled the proven definition of an entrepreneur: “Someone who will work 24 hours a day for themselves to avoid working one hour a day for someone else.”