I am a digital Pirate, not a digital Nomad
Disclaimer: this article is not about digital piracy.
As a person and as a professional I really like the digital nomad philosophy. The idea to go wherever you want, travel the world and at the same time do your job from wherever you want is really attractive and a lot of people are really enjoying doing it.
It is very normal today for a digital nomad to travel in 10–15 different countries in a year while working and spend time in different environments while visiting the world, participating in the social life of those countries and not just like a tourist.
If you want to have just a feeling of how much the nomad lifestyle is becoming so popular for creatives and product people, you can get an idea by looking at how many products are in the Nomad Lifestyle topic in Product Hunt: check here.
From my point of view, what doesn’t make me want to become a digital nomad is that I have the feeling that for a digital nomad moving becomes the most important thing and all the rest is a consequence of it. A common pattern for digital nomads is to be creative freelancers that get jobs to do for clients while traveling and visiting the world. Or, sometimes, they are passionate travelers that want to make their experiences the source of their incomes, usually they have a blog or they are photographers. I am sure that this is like a dream for a significant amount of folks. To me, anyway it looks like something that is not making me as active and productive as I would like to be.
What makes me happy and gives me a purpose is the process of creating and change, even in a very marginal way, how the world works. In a few words what I have always to feel is to have a purpose and make an impact. But they told me that’s it’s just normal, I am a millennial.
What is a digital pirate
A digital pirate is a person that is always keen to be involved in new projects and to grow as fast as he can as a person and professionally, by not following the rules or waiting for the “deserved reward”. Moving is a requirement just when for any reason it looks like a need, because pirates don’t like the common paths and don’t like to wait for things to come to them. They want to get to the point in a fast and straight way, no matter what it takes.
As a pirate, you don’t only do what you do, for money, career, or different benefits, you do it to feel you have a purpose but also for the excitement and the adrenaline. You want to create, build, take, improve and all of that is to work on a purpose. One of the most important concepts is speed. A digital pirate wants to make things happen and he is not that patient, he needs to overcome obstacles and to go to the next step or the next adventure. In my eyes a pirate will touch things with his hands, work on prototypes, pitch crazy revolutionary ideas anywhere, even at the barber shop, until things start working, because he is impatient and he wants things to be moving his own way.
A pirate typically works in small groups of likeminded, to focus on the actual goals, reducing communication and technical barriers. Amongst them, what is important is respect for the others and what they are able to do. Also, historically pirates have always been having a sort of democratic organization, they shared the risks and shared the rewards.
If you want to know a little bit more about this and other things pirates did and do, check The Misfit Economy by Alexa Clay and Kira Maya Phillips. Amazing read.
But a pirate in an environment that is not allowing him to “be a pirate” risks to not really fulfill what are his goals. But if he is a real pirate, he won’t stay there that much. Another thing that pirates are not really good at is optimizing and fine tuning, instead they prefer to create and craft.
Speed and unconventional
Moving, changing country, traveling are important but only because by moving you access to different resources and by going to the right environment can help you accelerate the speed of reaching what is your goal, for example a Pirate would go to Japan to master sushi faster and with more proficiency.
So one possible goal of a pirate is to create something that he can craft, innovate and distribute to like minded people, in a rebel and sometimes disrespectful way. A pirate will look for disruption and not for incremental improvements. What is he looking for are unconventional approaches.
One of the main reasons I like to call us pirates because we tend to be disrespectful for what people give for granted and we are creative and totally not conventional in finding a way to solve the next problem or invent a new concept.
So, while trying to get several achievements (the famous “treasures”), at a certain point the life of a pirate becomes really linked with moving.
I am sure that you heard of that guy that in the last 5 years was living in Berlin, Paris, New York and San Francisco and that now is starting his own company in Barcelona. Well, he is a pirate.
While nomads are usually digital professionals, pirates are more serial entrepreneurs. They are people with a vision and sometimes, but not always, also a plan.
Let’s start a crew
So, let’s become a pirate crew and let’s change things fast and with unconventional approaches.
If you want to be part of the crew, just do at least one of these two things:
First, you can register here to this list, I’ll contact you after with the plan: https://luduvigo.typeform.com/to/Z433bL
Second, you can register to my own newsletter and be updated with all the new pirate updates: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/luduvigo/
