Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

New year, old us.

As much as I don’t really buy into the concept of “New Year, new me,” there is something about the new year that really feels monumental—the mark of something ending and something new beginning.

We aren’t really big on resolutions (because let’s be honest, we’re always resolving to eat less French fries). But the one tradition that we always stick to is something our good friend shared with us years ago—The Year Compass.

Last year’s YearCompass in Bangkok, Thailand

It’s a free, downloadable booklet that gives you the space and creativity to reflect on the wins and losses of the last year and dream big for the year ahead. (#notsponsored) We spent several hours on January 1st doing this, talking about it together, and writing out or drawing up our dreams for the near future. While it does take a lot of effort, both in time and energy, it always feels worth it.

We did our Year Compass this January 1st in NYC with 99¢ pizza and our good friend who first shared it with us.

The thing that both of us kept mentioning in our Year Compass (and the whole point of this email?)

We want to go back to a little bit to our “old us.”

To explain, we have to go back to the beginning -

We originally started this channel with a very specific goal in mind. Well, goals.

The thumbnail of our very first video. Just wow. (To be clear, the goals weren’t to be a fitness channel.)

Why we make movies

1. To help people travel, not just generate FOMO

One of the major reasons we started this thing was out of pure frustration of seeing the constant perpetuation of the stereotype of “the travel vlogger.” We watched so many show off a glamorous lifestyle (think: hundreds of slo-mo bikini shots on a beach or in front of a waterfall) without giving real, tangible, useful information about how to do any of it ourselves. For us, watching stuff like that always made us feel a little bit worse about our lives. It didn’t connect us to the location or make us want to go there.

We also felt frustrated about the lack of transparency in how they made that life possible (maybe less French fries? Or more, who knows.)

The answer is always more French fries, amirite?

Nobody shared specific tips like how to invest while saving, how to collect frequent flyer miles to offset flight costs, how to find and book budget hotels, why it’s so important to switch to a budget cell phone carrier / google voice, and of course, how to extend that $5 rotisserie chicken into 5 meals.

The true fuel of saving for a RTW trip.

We felt so wildly lucky to even be able to travel at all, we wanted to give some of that back. Help as many as we could along the way. Show that the lifestyle was possible, and give as much useful information as we could along the way.

2. Give away a trip around the world. Again and again.

As we were deep in the mega-saving portion of our lives, which lasted about 3 years, we kept dreaming about how incredible it would have been to just have $25,000 show up in our bank account so that we could go and take the trip that we had dreamed of, before it was too late - before the window in our lives that we could make something as audacious as a trip around the world work closed forever.

To just have that money problem solved so that we could do the thing we were so, so ready to do - what a dream that would have been.

That’s exactly what we want to give to someone. A trip around the world.

That’s the plan. And then, maybe, just maybe, build a system that we can keep doing that over and over again.

We have no idea how to do it yet, but we’ll figure it out. We could call it The World Scholarship? Something like that. Who knows.

3. Sharing entertaining, useful, meaningful and fun travel stories while (hopefully) making enough to keep going

We never thought we’d ever be YouTubers, let alone get to be travel YouTubers. Neither of us knew how to make movies, work a camera, or edit videos.

Two, almost three years later, we couldn’t imagine doing anything else and we’re actually trying to make a living out of it.

We aren’t quite there yet, but just to have the opportunity to try is incredible.

More than that, we SUPER LOVE that we get to use the platform to help people make their travel dreams come true and highlight the real people along the way that add to that dream.

But then…

As we made more and more videos, we slowly started shifting those priorities.

There are a lot of reasons for this - trying to be different, but not too different; chasing trends, but with a twist; trying to be creative, but lacking creativity; making content that feels meaningful, but not too serious…

…and perhaps most honestly—trying to actually offset our costs and turn this life of video making and travel into a full time sustainable job. (But also, keep it fun. I mean, that’s why we quit our “traditional” jobs in the first place, right?)

Our longstanding joke was even on our hardest days, we couldn’t be mad because Octavius was the best and most demanding boss we’d ever had.

If you look at any of 300+ videos we’ve made, we’ve always kind of made videos about a really wide variety of topics — objectively, they're a bit all over the place. It’s definitely a part of our journey, our origin story, if you will.

But lately, it feels as if we’ve been losing sight of the whole reason we started this channel.

We started making some movies not because we thought it would help someone travel or figure out how to put themselves in a position to make a big life change like going on a big trip. We were making them because we thought they were fun, entertaining, and perhaps most importantly, we thought it was what “YouTube” wanted.

This is where you come in.

Alas, “YouTube” is not the boss of us! (Ok, maybe just a little.)

In reality, you all are the reasons we even get to do this. And we want to get back to making the videos that you’ll love, the videos that you’ll find useful and meaningful.

So, if you have a moment, we’d love your advice. Feel free to share anything, but the main questions we have are - 1. Why do you watch travel YouTube, generally? What do you want to get from it?2. What do you love about the things you’ve been watching recently? And what do you not love?3. What do you like the most about the videos we make? What do you like the least?We made a Google Form thing so if you want to give feedback anonymously, you can. It’s all good. Click that sentence to get there.

We’d love to hear from you! Even if you have a travel question that you’ve always wanted answered, just email us back, or DM us with your thoughts or questions.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in our day to day, and we want to share as much as you’d be interested in. Thanks for sticking with us—we appreciate you more than you know.

Today

After spending a couple of months traveling across the states, spending QT with friends and family, we are back out in the (international) world again. Currently we’re in La Paz, Mexico, finishing up the final edits of the last videos of our Japan series and planning out our next life and travel adventures.

The (Near) Future

Maybe back to Hawaii and hopefully hearing from many of you.

Our Latest Videos

Up until this point, we’d only tried $1 budget sushi. But we had to know whether the expensive stuff was worth it.

A month around Japan, with the most bizarre and fun vending machines as our guides

Deer, nature, and water that's been brewing for over 1000 years.

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

Unsubscribe