A Nomad’s Tribe

Nomad’s tend to be a very soli­tary group of peo­ple. There is no offi­cial Nomad’s Club where nomads can meet and exchange ideas, brain­storm solu­tions to busi­ness issues or lifestyle issues, and talk about life on the road.

Oh, there are pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions where you can dis­cuss pro­fes­sional issues, and meet other pro­fes­sion­als either for monthly meet­ings, or dur­ing an annual professional’s con­fer­ence. But nomads and loca­tion inde­pen­dent pro­fes­sion­als tend to live either in remote areas or are rel­a­tively tran­sient, so monthly meet­ings and annual con­fer­ences tend not to become part of their “To Do List”. How­ever, hav­ing a group that shares a com­mon mind­set and can offer you sup­port is not a bad idea. Today’s mod­ern nomads can eas­ily become mem­bers of today’s mod­ern tribes.

A Sec­ond Life gath­er­ing of a Tribes party. source: reti­na­funk, Flickr, Cre­ative Commons

Accord­ing to Seth Godin, author of the book Tribes, “A tribe is a group of peo­ple con­nected to one another, con­nected to a leader, and con­nected to an idea.” (p.1) So mem­bers of a tribe share a com­mon inter­est or a com­mon lifestyle ideal (like being a nomad or loca­tion inde­pen­dent pro­fes­sional), and share a way to com­mu­ni­cate or be con­nected (like a forum, or a space in Sec­ond Life), and have col­lected around a leader (typ­i­cally a change agent). There is much more to Tribes than this, issues like lead­er­ship and social change are impor­tant parts of Tribes, but more on those will be writ­ten in a future post.

For now, the impor­tant aspect of becom­ing a part of a Tribe is that they can play an impor­tant role in the suc­cess of any new vir­tual enter­prise, or uncon­ven­tional lifestyle — if you can find and con­nect to an appro­pri­ate tribe. Not a ‘good enough’ tribe, but a full-on appro­pri­ate tribe.

Find­ing a ‘full-on appro­pri­ate’ tribe takes a bit of look­ing. For exam­ple, I could look for a tribe that has devel­oped around the idea of the impact that baby boomers are hav­ing on soci­ety, but that tribe wouldn’t be appro­pri­ate because a major issue that is impor­tant to me is the loca­tion inde­pen­dent lifestyle design inte­gra­tion of work and life. Or I could look for a tribe that has devel­oped around the idea of the loca­tion inde­pen­dence lifestyle design inte­gra­tion of work and life, but doesn’t pro­vide any focus on issues related to 50+ age groups. I could either make do with one or other of these tribes and try to inte­grate the issues that are miss­ing, or I could begin to develop a tribe that inte­grates all aspects of what I am look­ing for and see what devel­ops around me.

From a ‘full-on’ appro­pri­ate tribe, I should be able to obtain:

• sup­port for the lifestyle, ideal, issue, that is impor­tant to me;
• feed­back on how to do what I want to do;
• edu­ca­tional infor­ma­tion on the com­mon inter­est that con­nects the tribe; and
• a feel­ing of belong­ing to a community.

For any­one inter­ested in con­nect­ing with a tribe of mod­ern nomads/location inde­pen­dent pro­fes­sion­als, check out:

• the Loca­tion Inde­pen­dent Web­site located at http://www.locationindependentcom

TTFN

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