I’m Alex, originally born in Colombia, recently living in Mexico City. There was a time that I barely knew like 5 restaurants in my hometown, I didn’t get to know new ones because I was scared of having a bad moment, I always went for sure bets. After traveling to +150 cities in the last 4 years, my life has changed a lot from that.
Traveling a lot means that sometimes you get what you want, but sometimes you have to adapt to the situations, conditions and offers that you have. There are business trips, family trips, friend gatherings and very rarely, vacations (when you travel a lot for work, people tend to think that all of them are vacations lol). Each one of them is a completely different situation.
After this realization, I came to the conclusion that if I were more adventurous, I could have had a better experience in my hometown. Right now, what I do is to apply the tips and insights from different trips to know more about my city and my country when I visit my family. Of course, since I go there just a few weeks per year, I have less time to do it. But wait! that’s the key, let me explain it to you:
The best way to challenge you to have new experiences is by tricking yourself to think that there will be no opportunity like this one to have that. For example, Saturday morning, you have nothing to do but Netflix. If you convince your brain to think that next weekend you won’t be in your house, or with your family or something like that (maybe I’m being too extremist hahaha, but you get the point), you open yourself to challenge the current situation and say: “hmm, maybe is a good moment to go to that ice cream shop that I saw last week” and BOOM, then you start doing that often.
Forget about the money issue. Of course you need to know your limits, how much you want to spend and how often you’ll do it. But start creating goals for it, you’ll see that this will help you to become more intelligent, financially speaking.
Is not that easy, but start challenging yourself once per month, then per week and so on. At the end, you will get a new habit: looking for new places to visit!
Have Fun!