Feel like you’re in a rut and you aren’t making any progress?
Sometimes I get to the point where I think: Ugh. Same old same old. I feel like I haven’t learned anything new, seen anything new or am doing anything interesting to improve or change my life.
Here are 3 simple ways to gain a little change in your life.
TRAVEL
This is something I do often. I’ve been posting all the photos from my trips to Asia, Europe and even around North America in recent years here and you can find some more travel pictures on my other blog Fabulously Broke here.
Visiting new places and countries makes me see how others live. You also learn how people live in that country and the tricks they use to get around in their daily lives.
Beijing: Where people generally don’t obey signs or rules unless there’s someone there to enforce it.
READ A BOOK
You don’t need a lot of money to read — just time. Reading biographies can bring you back into another time, or reading interesting books like ones by Malcolm Gladwell can change your perspective on how you see things:
- What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
- Outliers: The Story of Success
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Or maybe you want to change your life and get out of debt — here are some of my personal finance recommendations.
I can say without a doubt, that reading The Millionaire Next Door, literally changed my financial life. I have never been so impacted by a book before, and I wish I had read it sooner!
You can travel within books — something I discovered as a child, and not just within fairytales of faraway lands (Harry Potter!).
I am also not talking about buying a travel book and moaning about how you don’t have money to go to Hawaii (that’s just depressing).
I’m talking about reading and flipping through books with pictures and interesting looks into the lifestyles of those around the world.
My top picks for this would be Peter Menzel’s (a genius photographer) works that include awesome facts and biographies about each family’s life.
Note: I don’t keep many books, but these are the few hardcover, heavy books that I am planning on keeping and re-reading over the years to revisit others’ lives. You simply can’t make these books into small e-books and do them justice.
When I go through these books, I feel like I’ve been there and met these people in-person, even just on paper.
- Hungry Planet: What the World Eats
- Women in the Material World
- Material World: A Global Family Portrait
- What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets
TALK TO PEOPLE
Talking to new people, expanding your circle of friends and connecting across the world can change your mind.
Go to a new class you’d never try, and see who you meet. Instead of going to your usual haunt, try another one.
Smile and look approachable — people will talk to you!!
You don’t even need to be in their city.
You can connect to people on Twitter, by reading their blogs, and meeting some of them offline 
As a blogger, this is true on so many levels. Having come across interesting people in the past years I’ve been blogging has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life.
There you have it. Three fairly easy ways to get out of a rut and change your life.
