A few years ago I lived in a remote jungle for 6 weeks.
Check out this video I filmed from the hut where we spent time:
Costa Rica. 3 miles away from civilization. Intense. Beautiful. Brutal. Fun. Enlightening.
My wife Kelli and I saw toucans, Mealy Amazon parrots, sloths, monkeys, bullet ants, army ants and poison dart frogs. 7 scorpions and 8 bats lived inside the hut with us.
This was a fun, challenging and flat out amazing experience that taught me – and teaches you – 3 distinct blogging lessons.
1: Be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
I have never been as uncomfortable in my life than during this 6 week stretch.
No electricity, meaning no internet and save candlelight, everything became pitch dark after 6 PM.
No refrigeration, so all food was dry, and then, prepped on a propane-powered stove.
Water flowed from a hose via a jungle stream, and since it did run 24-7, it was running water, technically.
No plumbing. Meaning we used an outhouse.
I slept under a mosquito net with holes in it, so skeeters and other little bugs got in and bit me every night. The mattress was plastic with straw inside of it. I slept 3-5 hours every night, if that.
I became comfortable with being uncomfortable. This is jungle life.
Successful bloggers become comfortable with being uncomfortable, whether writing their first guest post or writing their 10th in-depth comment of the day. Or perhaps they are writing and self-publishing their first eBook.
All growth occurs outside of your comfort zone. If you can be comfy with being uncomfortable you will be wildly successful.
2: Express Gratitude for the Seemingly Little Things
I loved taking a cold shower after a day spent using the machete to clear away jungle foliage in the brutal heat and humidity. Of course, the shower consisted of a tube that fed water in from a jungle stream located a few hundred meters from the hut.
In any other situation the process of moving the hose/tube from the kitchen sink to the shower area would be a laborious, painstaking, annoying situation but I felt so grateful for this convenience of cool, refreshing, clean water that I was on cloud 9 at shower time.
I also felt grateful for the sweet, little, simple chocolate chip cookies we enjoyed after dinner each night. Nothing else to do in the jungle save read, eat, yoga, sleep, and maybe some gardening.
Night time reading by candlelight? Pretty neat. Here’s Kelli reading one night in the wilderness:
When you have no electricity, lighting or running water, you tend to be highly grateful for any comfort or convenience. I even felt grateful for the vile outhouse; it beat going to the bathroom in the jungle, where a fer de lanz could bite your bottom and kill you with its savage venom.
Successful bloggers are grateful for a $2.78 Amazon royalty payment for a $3.99 eBook sold. Rocking bloggers appreciate each person who comments on their site or signs up for their email list. Being grateful for seemingly little things allows greater success to flow to you, for where your attention and energy goes, grows.
3: When Ya Gotta Go Ya Gotta Go
After 6 weeks of eating a few hundred calories a day, sleeping horribly due to bugs in the bed (skeeter net with holes in it), and over exercising (walking dog miles through harsh jungle terrain) my body began to severely break down.
Physical exhaustion set it. I knew it was time to go. I walked into town, called the homeowner and told him we had to cut our house sit short by 2 weeks. It was time to go. Despite his protests I basically told him we were leaving, and since he had to take care of his dog after we left, he better come back quickly.
That got his rear end in motion.
This experience was not unlike me trashing my old blog. It was time to let go the old brand, blog and cash flow streams. I had outgrown the situation, lost my passion for the blog and mentally, I began to break down, getting depressed and also seeing some financial strain too.
Sometimes you gotta let go, either a blog, a brand, or some income stream you had outgrown. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.
Your Turn
What blogging lessons did you learn from my experience in the jungle?