Check out the video!
Check out my interview with Abe. Abe is a philosophy and arts professor at the Art Institute in Chicago. He is also a father to an adorable young child, and a husband to another digital nomad as well. He recently started a brand Woolf N Gang, where he and a group of other fathers interview experts, share tips, and converse as they re-discover themselves and the world through the journey of being a father. He admits that he was actually forced into the digital nomad life during COVID, but now he travels around the world with his family, and he’s based out of Berlin Germany!
This interview is part of my 4 Question Series – a series of digital nomad interviews where I ask successful digital nomads from all over the world and all walks of life to answer the 4 questions we all want to know the answer to.
- Who are you? Tell us about what you do and how you got where you are.
- Where is your favorite place to work remote?
- What are 2 tips you would give someone who wants to work at your favorite place?
- What are (or were) your biggest fears around working abroad? And how did you address these?
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Transcripts Of The Video
hey this is lauren with digital nomad lifestyle i’m coming in from san jose costa rica with abe yes right we’re coming in with a four question series as a reminder the four question series is the four questions that you and i all want to know the answer to for existing digital nomads so the first question abbey is could you tell us a little bit about yourself what you do how you kind of got into digital nomading um yeah so um my name is abe as mentioned and i am a professor of philosophy and art history damn that’s cool yeah yeah i teach um at the art institute in chicago and um i yeah i guess you know the whole idea of digital nomad is more foreign to me but it’s something that i found my way into based on the pandemic um because all of classes went online and um i guess for the past year and a half i’ve been teaching all interesting killer man so what do you think is your favorite place that you worked at uh worked remote at um so around the same time of the pandemic we um my partner and i actually moved to berlin germany oh dad yeah so you’ve been living in germany for um yeah the past two years and um i mean i have my art studio there and um i guess that would be the favorite place to do it yeah i enjoy teaching there hell yeah man you have an art studio there too yeah so i didn’t actually ask abe too many questions before this so this is all new to me as well that’s pretty badass what do you think are the two tips you would give to someone interested in being at dijon nomad in berlin germany um in berlin germany specifically specifically and two tips that i would give wow interesting i don’t know about tips that i would give i guess i could think of how my partner benefits from it is that one tip would be kind of have a place where you do regularly work um she’s been working out of any work um okay so there are we works there yeah yeah okay and um i mean as i mentioned i work out of my arts field so kind of having a dedicated place that you work um and i think the second would be having um sort of a schedule you know um me i’m forced to have a schedule because of class starts at a specific time but i guess if you are freelancing or you’re on your own business kind of having a dedicated schedule because otherwise i think you really kind of um start to see your work bleed into your social and normal life and there’s no sort of compartmentalization of it absolutely so i think it’s important to have that yeah yeah and then you you both suffer yeah that’s the ironic part you know if you don’t schedule like compartmentalize that that’s exactly it how much if you don’t mind me asking how much would the we work would that cost a month as of december 2021 yeah i think it’s around 300 for a hard desk so like a dedicated room and stuff like that no not even a dedicated the dedicated rooms are a bit more expensive for like one of these um i mean just kind of a section desk section yeah okay so not crazy affordable but i imagine you could probably find the co-working spots good call yeah i’m sure there’s probably a couple other ones i mean yeah i mean i think wework is kind of more the popular um you know sexy one but you know they’re plenty and then that’s the thing about berlin where it’s um it’s a sort of it’s a diy culture i would say um where you could definitely find a lot of different co-working spaces coffee shops that are way more affordable than that there was one that i was in
after i was changing studios and wanted to be closer to home because we have a child and just wanted to be closer to help and um the one hour zone was 100 bucks a month yeah okay yeah yeah oh man i got another shot there um oh sweet so what were the two things you were concerned about when you started working online and how did you kind of address those um the concerned um because you know academic work is only partially just teaching there’s a lot of it that’s conferences you know applying for grants fellowships to do research do projects the big concern was a lot of that kind of shifted and dried up because a lot of the conferences moved online everything went on zoom a lot of um institutions started cutting back on funding um so those were kind of the big concerns yeah so just kind of around like funding being cut which is obviously a big part for you huh yeah so yeah so i mean you dealt with you were mentioning earlier that you were forced to i started digital yeah forced into it but i’m not complaining yeah it’s not like you like went for it yeah it’s not like oh man yes yeah but um yeah i mean i think i’m definitely one of the very lucky people that you know has the pandemic hit my work can easily be transferred online um and i’m able to continue in that way rather than you know be furloughed or completely lose my job yeah i’d be a bummer man yeah yeah so um yeah but that’s i think that’s a good one for some people out there who maybe are were first into like a more remote position they’re interested in traveling they weren’t really considering maybe working and traveling at the same time but you’re kind of a good inspiration that it can be done even if you didn’t necessarily think it was so it can be done i mean and i think you just kind of have to be more disciplined because especially you know for example being in costa rica where um you’re there’s so many distractions yeah you know so you have to be a bit more disciplined to get the work done yeah that’s true sweet all right well thank you abe i appreciate it yeah no bro so uh digital nomad lifestyle we follow us on instagram we also have a tick tock now to youtube and then digitalnomadlifestyle.com we also have a facebook group too tell