…I’m sleeping in a hostel dormitory room with 7 strangers when all of the sudden I wake up and reach for my phone only to find out that my power plug fell out of the wall overnight and it’s dead. In a daze, I plug the phone back in, turn it on and take a look at the clock. I slowly realize that it’s 10 am and my 7:30 am flight back to the states was long gone.

A few months earlier I received an email touting an exclusive entrepreneurship camp in Lithuania where the attendees would have the opportunity to receive free mentorship from 5 wildly successful businessmen. I filmed a short application video explaining how I had started a small barbecue accessories company called Cave Tools but was living at home working 80 hour weeks struggling to get it off the ground. With thousands of applications per year it was a long shot, but to my surprise they accepted me and I made arrangements to attend one of my first ever solo business trips abroad.

But now the conference was over and everyone had gone home. I was all alone in a foreign country with nobody but myself to rely on. Instead of panicking and scrambling for the next flight home, I decided that I was going to take a walk to think things through and then figure everything out when I got back.

However, during my walk I realized that I didn’t actually need to go home right away. We had a pretty good team in place and I had already missed the flight, so I decided that I was going to travel for another 2 weeks while working remotely and then go home. During those 2 weeks the company didn’t burn down, in fact, we thrived.

On the flight home, I did some more thinking and realized that if I didn’t get out of my comfort zone and go travel the world now while I was young, I might never get the opportunity again. So for the next 5 months I worked on building all of the processes and systems that would allow me to work remotely for a longer period of time while still building and growing Cave Tools.