Reading list for aspiring digital nomads

I’m primarily known online for my photography, but being a digital nomad is a big part of why I became a photographer in the first place.

I was an entrepreneur first, a nomad second, and an artist third - once I had location independency, and a degree of financial freedom, photography (and later filmmaking) became my primary… purpose.

Naturally, when people see me traveling all the time, I get a lot of questions about how I got started as a digital nomad.

But the problem is, my actual origin story isn’t helpful for those of you who aspire to start this lifestyle in 2025 or beyond. I started experimenting with online business in 2010. We live in a vastly different world some 15 years later. SEO tips from 2010-2015 era internet aren’t going to exactly help much.

But what I can do is to simply point you towards some resources that really helped me personally.

The best books on making money that I’ve ever read

These are affiliate links cus at this point, marketing is in my blood.

The Millionaire Fastlane

When I illegally downloaded the pdf scan of this book as a broke high school student, I wasn’t expecting it to be anything more than a cheesy “get rich quick” scheme, but I was curious anyway. It turned out to become the most important book I’ve ever read in my life.

The book simply explains the principles of making money efficiently in a way that scales. It’s basically the bible for “work smart not hard”. It makes you understand what kind of a business you should start, and generally makes you see things a lot more clearly. There’s a few things I still don’t agree with the book about, such as the author’s negative stance on affiliate marketing, but regardless it’s the first book that I’d recommend to anyone that’s interested in starting any kind of a business online (or even offline). I’ve since bought many copies for my friends as gifts.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

This is a book I wish I’d read a lot earlier. It’s much shorter than the Millionaire Fastlane, but the first half of the book again explains the principles of making money in SUCH a clear and easy to understand way that it should be required reading for any aspiring entrepreneur (or even any aspiring nomad). It’s perhaps a better book than the first one, because of its short length. Because it takes a certain type of genius to explain such complicated topics in such a short and clear book.

The second half of the book is about living a happy life, which again is a good read but definitely a lot more subjective.

I could list a lot more books here, but the reality is, it’s easy to get lost in the “learning phase” for too long. These 2, or just one of the two even, is enough to get you in the right mindset. After, you should focus on the more technical skills and execution of your plans.

What if you don’t want to start your own business?

All I’ve ever known was doing my own thing. I like the direct relationship between risk and reward. I liked the self-reliance. You can’t get fired, you have more control. But of course, not everyone needs to start their own thing. Especially for those of you who can get paid a lot, for example people working as developers, it makes sense to simply find an employer who lets you work remotely.

Building your own thing generally takes a lot longer to get started, and the rewards, if they come, are delayed - but also often larger. If you want to be retired in your 30s or earlier, entrepreneurship is pretty much the only way. But if you want to get on the road TOMORROW - you basically can’t do that unless someone else gives you a remote job in a field you already know.

Online Resources

The best thing about this is you’re never the first one who’s on this path anymore. There are entire discussion boards and subreddits dedicated to entreprenuership, remote work, and digital nomadism.

The biggest resources for my era were the blackhatworld and wickedfire discussion boards. One of them is dead and the other one, merely a shell of it’s former self at this point. Even back then, navigating these resources required a large degree of skeptisicm and the ability to “sense” who was legit and who wasn’t. If you took advice from the wrong person, at best you’d waste a tremendous amount of time. At worst, you’d lose a bunch of money. But the same still applies today, and in fact, knowing which advice to take is probably the major differentiator between those who eventually make it, and those who don’t.

So you should always have the mindset of “trust but verify” when it comes to taking advice from people on various discussion boards. Always look for tells such as, do they have a product to sell? Is their advice generic or specific? What is their actual goal?

reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/

The generic board for digital nomad discussions. All of the basic questions constantly get posted here. How much money do you need to live in thailand? Where do you pay tax? Sort by top questions and you’ll get a lot of info on everything and anything. But remember it’s reddit so it comes with some of the usual bias.

buildersociety

This is where some of the old veterans went when the original forums died. It’s not terribly active, but some gems can be found.

x.com

I recommend following people like levelsio if you’re on X.

Youtube

Honestly, I don’t watch youtube that much for this type of content. But it’s undeniably a top resource these days for all types of niches. Just be careful of who you listen to.

Keys to success as a nomad entrepreneur

This lifestyle is not for everyone, and I’ll expand on that in the next article. But the keys to success are:

  • Taking action - constantly testing ideas

  • Efficiency - the ability to quickly and cheaply run through business ideas until something shows potential, and then focusing hard on what works. If you get distracted, you lose.

  • A certain level of discipline - if you have an addictive personality, don’t move to bangkok and expect to get work done. The nomad life requires an ability to work while you think you’re on “vacation.”

More in the next article.

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The Dark Side of being a Nomad