How to Work from Anywhere and Become Multi-Country
The First Step to a Borderless Life
Are you part of the majority of people who are born in a country, study and graduate in that country, make their career in that country, marry in that country, raise their children in that country, retire in that country and die in that country, and who probably is also only fluent in the language of that country ?
If yes, you are a mono-country person.
Nothing to be ashamed of, but there are many blind spots that you have, and this situation prevents you from taking advantage of all the opportunities available to you.
Read the first article of this series first to discover them, if you didn’t do it yet.
Rest assured, I'm not going to ask you to put all your furniture on eBay tomorrow and buy a plane ticket at random to throw yourself into the unknown: you'll be able to become multi-country quietly, step by step.
The 1st step
To become multi-country, it's best to work completely remotely.
Here are the different degrees of geographical freedom - and therefore of your multi-country potential - depending on your situation :
Level 0: classic work or business, which absolutely requires your presence in a given geographical location. Your travels are necessarily limited to your vacation periods.
Level 1: work that you can do partially remotely, from 1 to 4 days a week. If you negotiate well, you can try to group several days of remote work over several weeks, increasing your opportunities to travel. However, this status severely limits your possibilities.
Level 2: work you can do completely remotely, but which requires you to be present at specific times, to attend meetings or answer the phone for example. This stage allows you to live life to the full as a multi-countryer, even if you have less flexibility to choose your preferred jurisdiction because of the need to avoid too great a time difference.
Examples: administrative assistant , telemarketer, manager, live teacher (e.g. of languages)...
Level 3: work that you can complete asynchronously, without having to be in front of your computer at specific times: all that matters is that you finish your tasks on time. This is the ultimate freedom, allowing you to choose any country in the world without restriction.
Examples: developer, copywriter, illustrator/graphic designer, etc.
And the holy grail is obviously to have an entirely web-based business that is asynchronous, because that's what gives you maximum flexibility.
Types of companies that accept remote working
GitLab, leader in this field, defines companies according to their willingness and ability to allow remote working1 :
Everything at a distance: there's no office or time zone to worry about. Asynchronous communication emphasizes documented processes2, discourages real-time meetings and offers greater flexibility.
Remote working is allowed: Everyone in the company can work remotely part of the time, with some rare exceptions for location-dependent roles.
Remote working only: There's no working in a shared office. However, work is always time-zone oriented. Some companies maintain "core team working hours".
Remote working first: The company is optimized for remote working thanks to documentation, policies and workflows that assume everyone is distributed, even if some occasionally visit the office.
Hybrid remote: There are various sub-models, but in general, some employees - but not all - are allowed to work remotely 100% of the time. Others work on-site, in at least one physical office.
Remote days: The whole company (including management) works remotely on the same days.
Exceptions to remote working: Some employees can work remotely indefinitely, while most are required to work from the company office.
Remote work time: Also known as "remote tolerance", this step allows employees to work certain days away from the office. This is a common practice in companies where "remote days" are offered as a hiring benefit.
No remote working: Remote working is not allowed, often due to a management mandate or the nature of the business.
Finding a company that accepts full remote working for your position should therefore be a priority for allow you to take advantage of the jurisdictional market. Just search for "remote companies" to find fairly exhaustive lists... including companies that are hiring.
Internetize yourself
So you see: whatever your profession today, it's vital that you “internetize” it as much as possible, because there's already a real difference in freedom between people geographically tied to one place because of their job and the others - the same as people who were stuck in a communist country vs. the others during the Cold War.
Because the more the activity you do for a living is natively on the Internet, the more you can reduce the surface area of exchanges with the Leviathan- State, and the more the Leviathan-Internet can lend you some of its power.
Here are the considerable powers that Leviathan-Internet can give you:
The power to be free to choose among dozens of jurisdictions fighting to offer you the best conditions to attract you, and to entice you to stay.
The power to run a business that exists in the cloud first and foremost, and can choose to be physically embodied wherever makes the most sense.
The power to take advantage of a low-tax environment that gives you an unfair advantage over your competitors in high-tax jurisdictions.
The power to make the Labor Law obsolete by having teams all over the world.
The power to make the world your playground, rather than having to be close to your customers.
The power to make certain heavy and stupid regulations less restrictive, and even , in certain situations, to legally not have to follow them.
The power to reduce the state's influence over you, at a time when new technologies are giving it an inordinate power over mono-countries, and it is sliding towards overwhelming permanent surveillance.
So how do you digitize yourself and harness the power of the Internet Leviathan?
I won't go into too much detail to stay within the scope of this blog and the book, not to mention the fact that I wrote about it in depth in The Way of the Intelligent Rebel.
But here are a few pointers.
First of all, we can establish a hierarchy of possible work situations, according to how easy they are to turn into a fully-fledged digital activity. We start with the activities that are the most difficult to digitize.
You have a physical job that absolutely cannot be done remotely.
As a waiter, bricklayer, cab driver, etc.
In that case, you'll probably have to change jobs to take advantage of Leviathan-Internet. Any other attempt would at best be like putting some nice curtains on the bars of a prison cell.
You can either move into a completely different sector (why not start your own business?), or digitize your knowledge and turn it into products, as I explain below.
You have a job that can be done, at least in part, remotely.
The good news is that this applies to all computer-based jobs.
Because as long as it takes place on a computer... it doesn't matter where on the planet that computer is, all it needs is an Internet connection.
This represents a significant percentage of today's professions.
Of course, this is technically true, but in practice it can be more complicated, especially as :
Your company or team is not yet accustomed to working remotely ( or this habit, adopted during the confinements linked to the covid epidemic, may have been partially lost).
Management is opposed to remote working
You work with a team that considers itself more efficient when it's in the same room, or at least the same office/building.
If you are in a situation where remote working is technically possible, but not yet common practice, try the following tactic3 :
Ask to be able to work remotely one day a week, giving a set of convincing arguments, for example: it will save you time on your commute, which you promise to use to work ; it will bring the company into line with the practices of its competitors ; it's better for the environment, etc. NB: only put forward arguments that are true. This is important not only from an ethical point of view, but also because you'll be much more persuasive than lying.
Once you've got that day, work hard: get impressive results showing that you're more productive working remotely than in the office.
Then negotiate a second day, offering to continue the experiment to see if you can further increase your productivity.
Then continue the cycle until you are working completely remotely.
If your boss resists, you have two choices: find an employer who is natively willing to let you work remotely, or make yourself indispensable to the point that he will be forced to grant you this favor.
And if you can't do either, the only solution is to set up your own business, , or find an employer who supports full remote working.
You have a manual services business
For example, you're a plumber, roofer, bricklayer, etc.
You have three main options:
Sell your company and launch a new, more natively digital business.
Stop working in your company (doing the technical job), and instead work on your company, i.e. become an orchestra conductor rather than a one-man band4 , and make your company run without you, or at least without you in a technical position. You'll then be able to manage it more easily from a distance, possibly with the help of an on-site manager or CEO. This is what Olivier Jacquemont did, for example, when he ran his French bilingual recruitment business while living in a small village in the Philippines, as I explained in this article.
Turn your skills into products (see below).
You have an intellectual services company
For example, you are a psychologist, doctor, lawyer, teacher, service provider, consultant, etc.
You have two royal roads:
Carry out your services remotely, as Philippe the psychologist did, who continues to offer his services to clients in Australia, while living half the year in Bali, as I explained in this series.
Many intellectual services can be provided remotely, even if this may seem difficult at first sight.
For example, one of my students, Maïlys Dorn, is an interior designer. She wanted to get her business off to a good start, digitizing it from the outset around a website, Optimise Mon Espace, and its ecosystem (YouTube channel, Facebook page, etc.).
At first, she used her website to build up a clientele for her interior design services, part of which she carried out remotely : one of her first customers lived in French Guiana, while she was based in the south of France.
Turning your skills into products
Basically, it's about automating the way you deliver value.
Because when you perform services, what exactly do you do?
You bring value by solving a customer's problem.
And you do it by giving your time.
Now, what if you could help your customers without having to spend the time?
For example: instead of giving individual guitar lessons, you film yourself giving a guitar lesson. You can then potentially sell these lessons to millions of people, without having to be there.
To take Maïlys' example, she then completely digitized her business by transforming her skills into products, notably by creating training courses to enable interested amateurs to design their own home decor and layout.
This enabled her to make a world tour of eco-friendly housing, visiting 17 countries in 333 days, then moving to the place that most appealed to her.
You are a student
Try to go into a profession that is as natively digital as possible ; try to set up a digital business alongside your studies ; become aware of the limitations of the school system and take responsibility for your own learning.
The Way of the Intelligent Rebel is your friend: it was designed with your profile in mind.
You are unemployed
In this case, it's perfect! You've got plenty of time to work on your business start-up project, and many countries allow you to continue receiving unemployment benefits while you work on your business start-up, or even receive grants to set it up.
In France, for example, a third of business start-ups are started by the unemployed, even though they represent only 10% of the population5.
In all cases
I've will create in the future a free training course to complement this book and blog, to help you with your internalization process. If you are interested, just leave me a comment below to tell me it is a good idea ! :)
Coming soon
In the next article, we’ll take a deeper look into all of this by analyzing how you can become a digital nomad.
Stay tuned ! In the meantime, feel free to follow Disruptive Horizons on Twitter and Linkedin, and join the tribe of Intelligent Rebels by subscribing to the newsletter :
And here is the first article of this series :
In "The Remote Playbook", GitLab, 2023.
See chapter 15 of “The Way of the Intelligent Rebel”
Inspired by the one presented in The Four-Hour Week, by Timothy Ferriss, second edition, 2009.
See Chapter 7 of “The Way of the Intelligent Rebel” 2019, by yours truly.
Source ACPE.
The problem here is that there have to be a significant number of level 0 businesses and people working in them because otherwise all of the infrastructure that the level 2 & 3 people need to be able to work would not exist.
If doctors would film themselves performing operations and then publish it for others to follow, we'd have a lot of dead people...
If everybody would turn to digitized work, there would be no hotels, bars and restaurants, means of transport etc.
I know we are very far from that, but advocating a change of paradigm in this direction has to take into account the chance that your advice could be followed by many.
Plus - education is better with at least some direct contact. Home educated children also have groups they join to practice some of the skills they learn independently or they take part in businesses as apprentices to learn the tasks and solutions. Children benefit from growing up in a fairly consistent environment as they learn relationships - disrupt that and there will be a lot of clients for your psychologist friend to deal with later in their life.
You are talking about a type of existence which will ever only apply to a very small minority of people - and which is essentially about tax evasion when you are not one of the ultra rich who can do it with money.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I'm a sociologist and I know that one way to test social solutions (including public policies) is to assume they will fully work and to see what the possible consequences might be in that case.
Not everyone will want to be a firefighter after a passionate presentation about their work and life, but if the list includes a few hundred professions alongside firefighter, you're talking about a completely perspective. That's the thing I've referred to when mentioning sociology: individual examples don't explain societal changes.
If you can't thing of large categories of people from various backgrounds being involved and of social consequences broadly speaking when you are attempting to describe social realities, you're not conceptualising your topic correctly.
Technology has definitely and always been a significant factor in processes of change in the fabric of society, but the fact that (young) people spend more time on electronic devices and this affects their mental and physical health may be arguably more relevant than the fact that 6% of the population in SOME developed countries chooses to develop digital businesses and travel the world in the process.