How to Become a Digital Nomad with What You Have

There was a period in my life where I convinced myself that certificates were the answer. I was unemployed, living on savings in Thailand, and desperate enough to believe that the right combination of credentials would unlock a remote job and let me keep living the way I wanted to live.

My previous employer had let me go out of nowhere. Some issue with me being based in Thailand, two weeks notice, and that was it. I won't get into the details here because that's a separate story, but the short version is that I suddenly had no income and no clear path forward. My Thai girlfriend had my back during that period and helped me stay afloat. Without her I would have been in a much worse position.

So what did I do? I became a full time student of things I had no real interest in. I took expensive Python and Data Science classes through Stanford online. I collected every Zendesk and Freshdesk certificate I could find, all the Hubspot ones, the SEMrush and Google Ads ones, the Bing Ads ones. I even enrolled in a Harvard Business School pre-MBA program and sat the proctored exam at a building in Sukhumvit, Bangkok. Failed it the first time because my quantitative skills were weak. Passed it a month later after grinding through the material again. I was moving, or at least it felt that way. The resume was getting longer and more impressive looking. The problem was that nothing was actually happening.

Months went by. I sent that resume out over and over. Nothing. No interviews, no responses worth mentioning, no traction. I had built something that looked credible on paper and meant almost nothing to the people I was trying to reach. The money was getting low and the illusion of progress was starting to crack.

The shift came when I stopped studying and started building. I picked the things I actually wanted to be known for and started creating small projects around them. Then I rewrote my resume to reflect those projects rather than a list of certificates nobody cared about. From there I started cold emailing companies, cold calling, doing the uncomfortable work that you skip when you just click submit on a job board and wait. The projects gave me something real to point to. They became my selling points, and that is what started getting me into actual conversations with people who could hire me.

That approach is even more relevant now than it was when I went through this. The tools available today are genuinely different. Learning to work with AI, specifically learning how to use Claude well, is one of the more practical skills you can develop right now. Not collecting a certificate that says you completed an AI course, but actually sitting down and figuring out how to use it to produce real work. Writing, research, content, code, analysis. People who know how to get useful output from these tools are moving faster than people who don't, and that gap is only going to widen. It is the kind of skill that shows up immediately in the quality of your work and is easy to demonstrate to anyone considering hiring you.

The best way I can describe this shift in mindset is through a scene in The Martian. Matt Damon's character is stranded on Mars with limited resources and no rescue coming anytime soon. He does not sit around waiting or studying survival theory. He figures out how to grow potatoes in a place where nothing is supposed to grow and he keeps himself alive one practical solution at a time. That is the mindset. If you have not watched that film, watch it. It captures something about problem solving under pressure that is hard to explain any other way.

Once you have even one small project to show, the whole process of getting in the door somewhere becomes easier. It gives you something concrete to talk about and selling yourself, which is really all job searching is, becomes a conversation rather than a guessing game. The specific role or industry does not matter as much as people think. If you want to work as a Python developer, build a basic app using free resources and then go find companies to approach. You do not need to walk in as a Python developer on day one. You just need to get in. Take the support calls if that is what is available. Get inside and move from there. The same logic applies whether you want to write copy, do design work, or anything else.

The certificates are not going to do it. The projects will. And right now, one of the most useful projects you can start is simply learning to work with the AI tools that are already changing how work gets done. Start growing your potatoes.