Month / February 2022

digital_nomad_life
by admin

Find your business idea and work from wherever you want!

If you are interested in the Digital Nomad lifestyle and you want to work from an exotic beach doing what you truly enjoy, please read this article. Sharing my story I would like to assure you that whatever you wish is possible…

All you need is a good plan! 

When I finished my degree, I had a big dream… I wanted to be a world citizen, feel free, do what I really love, and explore our beautiful earth.

But at that point, I worked in a small Polish company with 24 days of vacation per year and waited for big changes that never came.

I heard about some successful people who are traveling the world and making money online. They are living their best life, unlike some of us who are just stuck in jobs that we hate – following the rules we don’t like and don’t believe in.

These successful people have a name – Digital Nomads!

Digital Nomads have the freedom to live and work wherever they are as they can work online. The most popular destinations that Digital Nomads work from are Thailand (Chiang Mai), Mexico (Playa del Carmen or Mexico City), and Bali.

If you join the Digital Nomad community you can appreciate excellent weather, try the best cuisine, and hang out with like-minded people. You can earn in dollars, euros, or francs but spend in the local currency of the country you are living in, and if you compare for example USA and Thailand this is an enormous monetary difference.

During the pandemic I finally decided – This is my time! It’s now or never!

No… I neither quit my job immediately nor started my life as a Digital Nomad on one of the beaches in the Caribbean Sea. 

At that time I thought that I started carefully, but today I can say that I started wisely.

I decided to follow my work in the corporate world until I had saved enough money to be financially independent for a couple of months of joblessness. What was even more important was that I settled to start my own online business in the country that I was living in and was thinking about moving to appropriate digital nomad destinations in a few months.

Here are some points which helped me find my online business ideas! I hope they can assist you too:

  1. Take a sheet of paper and draw three columns. 
  1. In the first one write all the skills that you have. 
  1. In the second column rate your skills from 1 to 10 based on your experience and knowledge. Say for example that you are a beginner and you just started learning how to design in Figma – put 1 or 2. If you are advanced in Google advertising, value your knowledge at 6 or if you are average, put 4. If you are a sales expert, value this space to 9 or 10.
  1. Finally, in the third column add the emotional part to each skill – I don’t like / I don’t mind / I like it / I love it!

How to read the results:

If you are a beginner and you don’t like something don’t follow it… But if you are a beginner and you like it, does it mean that you should explore and earn based on it? There is no clear-cut answer.  

Once you know what skills you can offer on the market and what you actually want to do, this is time to confront it with the real world. But how to do it, I will show you in the next article of this series!

Please let me know what kind of online business you are thinking about or what are you actually developing in the comments below. 

Martyna

social media security
by admin

Secure your Social Media accounts before it is too late!

Throughout my entire IT career, I was always amazed at how quickly people adapt to do things digitally, just like the internet was the real world. Just think about sending letters, buying goods, or meeting new people. It was very easy to switch to this faster, more convenient way of living without much nostalgia about the past.

Furthermore, I am always amazed that those new solutions are always consumed slightly differently than their analog equivalents.

Unfortunately, we tend not to do things by the book nor the most logical way possible. A good example of this is cybersecurity. Let me show you a simple analogy. Ask yourself, when was the last time, when you heard about a friend or a family member, who had to contact the local Mercedes or BMW garage because they lost keys to the car and were not able to drive around? Or when was the last time you realized that you left keys to your apartment on the desk in the cafeteria and anyone could simply take them? Not that often, right? You would definitely think that something went horribly wrong when you imagine that keys to your castle can be exploited by others.

How to regain access to Facebook or Instagram accounts when one has forgotten or lost a password?

Moreover, I am sure that you have heard multiple times, about people who lost access to their digital identities, social media accounts, or e-mails. I have been asked hundreds of times by customers, friends, and family members, how to regain access to Facebook or Instagram accounts when one has forgotten or lost a password. I was always wondering how many times the same person lost their car keys or ID somewhere in town?

Finally, it is not hard to secure your personal information to the level that this is basically too time-consuming for potential attackers to expose you, so they need to move to another target. In this series of articles, I will do my best to show you, in simple words, how to secure yourself online.

So without further ado, let me turn to my first advice to you, that is – use a password manager!

Yes! A password manager is something that not only frees your memory from storing multiple passwords but also increases your productivity online. Essentially, Password Manager is safe when you store all your passwords and sensitive information. So this is a very important place that requires special security measures to be deployed – very strong, ideally more than 10 characters long passphrase (sentence, not a word!) and multi-factor authentication, so you can get into your safe only when you provide what you know (your password), but also use what you have (for instance a smartphone).

So I need to remember yet another password?

Yes, kind of, but thanks to that all other passwords will be safe and will auto-populate every time you want to login to your account online, saving you lots of time.

You may ask me what Password Manager is the best, but frankly speaking, the answer is – any that you like and you use! There are several solutions out there, you can simply Google it and find a solution that suits the best platforms that you are using. I can assure you that any popular solution will be more secure and reliable than your memory.

Prevention is better than cure! I hope I see you soon!

Mateusz