Hi! I’m Tiaan.
This blog, in a large way is about following your fears. Somebody once asked me “isn’t that just the same thing as the saying ‘conquer your fears’ “? When you take a second to think about it, no, it isn’t. The latter points to a destination, whereas the former is all about the journey.
This blog is about that journey, and more importantly, to have the courage to take it. Yes, a large part of the blog posts are about traveling, but traveling solo to a new destination in a new country with a foreign language can be a bit daunting for a number of reasons. But more than that, the central idea around this blog is to encourage you to make bold moves whenever you feel a little stuck or frustrated in life, to follow your fears, to embrace the unknown.
A short recap:
The year is 2017 and I’ve just about had enough. I’m 28 years old, I’ve been working as a second-in-command trader at South Africa’s largest stockbroking firm for the last 5 years, trading everything from stocks to derivatives to currencies, handling a couple of hundred million rands worth of transactions on a busy day. Waking up at 5am to sit in 2 hours of traffic, followed by a 9-hour work day and spending another hour in traffic on my way home was simply no life. So I called it. I sold EVERYTHING, and what I couldn’t sell, I gave away, down to the last teaspoon. Let me tell you, that, was bloody liberating! So I packed my clothes into my last remaining suitcases and headed for an island in Thailand!
Koh Samui – What a place to recover! I headed over with my girlfriend at the time (somehow I had convinced her this would be a good idea) with no real plan, just that I wasn’t going to live the corporate grind any longer. We had about R200,000 (a little under $20,000 at the time) saved up between the two of us, so I decided that I will take R100,000 and trade the stock markets, while she wanted to go and teach. During that year, I got a little bored, and after reading about 10 books and touring the islands flat, I decided to start fiddling with websites again. I never had any real touch for programming, but in my early 20’s I had a WiX site and felt confident enough to start playing with it. I had a project in mind and that would require a lot of custom development work which I had to figure out. Now, at this point I was mostly programming by copy/pasting code snippets and figuring out what goes where, but in the end I got it there. I should mention that I got a little bit lucky here, because at the time WiX had just launched what was then called ‘WiX Code’, a beta version of their own programming language. Being brand new, this market was ripe for development, and I had somehow come across freelancing platforms, so I created a profile on a few of them and almost immediately had people looking for someone who could handle the custom development on their WiX sites. Long story short – I’ve now been a freelance WiX developer since late 2017, having handled over 1,000 projects and having earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process, all from freelancing in a direction I didn’t think I would take in a million years!
As of writing this, the year is 2023, we’ve all just been through the worst pandemic most of us will ever probably see, and my life has taken a lot of new directions. My freelancing business has afforded me the opportunity to live anywhere and set my own schedule, so I’ve moved to a small coastal town in South Africa called Munster where I have since bought 9 hectares of land and started farming. I’ve also made quite a few other property investments, some of which have returned great profits so far and others which are doing well. I’ve also become a dad to a beautiful young boy, have two great dane’s and get to travel a lot more frequently.
I hope my story encourages you in some way to live your life on your own terms, to make bold decisions, to travel more and to believe in yourself. 6 years ago I would never have imagined this future for myself, it far surpasses anything that was on the cards for me if I would’ve stayed part of the machine. Get out there, and Embrace The Unknown!