Why travelling is a good thing. Travelling on your own is completely different from going on holiday. If you backpack or travel for an extended period of time you get to live like a local in the countries you're travelling in. You're not travelling as quickly, because you don't need to. You don't have to be back at work in 2 weeks. You don't have to rush, you can just live.

I've been on the road for about 1 month now. It started as a 2 week holiday planned as annual leave from my job at Specialmoves. A couple weeks before I left they decided to make redundancies. That risk really made me think about what I wanted to do with my life and when they told me I still had my job, I quit. It's not because I don't like the company or I don't like development, but i realised this is something I have to do in my life. I need more life experience. I've been studying and working my entire childhood and adult life and it's time to see the world and gain some new and crazy experiences.

There are a few things that I've had to learn and am still learning:

How to be alone

'It's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.' - Olivia Wilde Being a lonely traveller forces you to be okay with being alone in a completely new situation. It helps you to define yourself and see who you really are. Growing up just with friends it becomes harder and harder to see what part of you is really you and what was adopted from your friends and family

How to make friends

I always thought I was good at making friends, but being in uncomfortable and new situations all the time sometimes makes you freeze up and not remember who you are. I've had to learn how to make friends again in many more situations as much you need learn how to be alone, as humans we are naturally social beings and it's important to keep meeting new and amazing people!

It forces you to learn

Whether it's culture or learning the language, you will always learn something whilst you're travelling. How much you learn is dependent on how much you want to learn. Since I'm travelling alone, the two above are hard lessons I'm forced to learn as well as lots of other country specific things. When I go to Taiwan and China, I will force myself to learn more Chinese beforehand so I don't have the communication barriers I was having in Thailand. There's always lessons to be learnt in being uncomfortable and unfamiliar places and that's why this journey has already paid dividends and will continue to do so until I get comfortable again.

A commitment

I just made a commitment to write a blog post every week and release it every Sunday (or earlier) until the end of the year. If I don't I'll have to do a forfeit, which you'll find out what it is if I do mess up and get lazy! I've been far too lazy recently, not just with blog writing, so I'm going to start building good habits again even though I'm travelling and it starts with this blog. I guess this is the one bad thing about travelling, you lose old habits. But I'm hoping to build the old ones back and build better new ones too!