Editor’s note: Sorry that posts have been few and far between the last week. I’ve been busy at my day job and had some email domain issues. If you’ve ever tried to fix a sender reputation problem, you would know it’s worth trying to figure out before sending again. Anyway, I have a backlog of posts + a couple of really fun guest posts ready, so you’ll hear from me more. Whether that’s good news or not is up to you.

I wanted to share a couple more philosophical thoughts on how I approach MS, churning, and travel, which, much like last week’s post about finding purpose in travel, is also inspired by something random and surprisingly deep I found on the internet in 2013. 

The video’s title is misleading – “You’ve Got To Say ‘Fuck It’ – David Choe” makes little sense because the spoken word in the video is actually a voiceover of an Ice-T interview set over scenes from the David Choe Dirty Hands documentary, also layered in with a M83 song. 

Somehow, it all works perfectly together. It feels strange to take much life advice from the guy who went from O.G. Original Gangster and Body Count to playing a cop on a NBC police procedural, but I’ve found it even more true the longer I apply it.

There’s a lot of “rules” and “limits” that have been written about ad nauseam in churning and MS. It’s almost comical how few of them are actually hard stop rules and limits, but this requires you saying “fuck it, I’ll try anyway” to discover. And as always, there’s a spectrum of YMMV of how hard these rules are to circumvent.

• The most fun ones are the easy ones. Sure, it says there is a limit. But it’s not true. The tale of the mighty deposit limit that was defeated by the bare minimum effort at multiple deposits is pretty common.
• Medium difficulty limit busting requires a bit more thought – for example, you may have a target that doesn’t take business cards. If you say fuck it and try, it doesn’t work. But this target also has other payment methods that may just help you circumvent the rule.
• Difficult ones could look like card limits – those are generally hard coded into the system. While they’re generally an actual rule, loopholes will always exist – especially if you happen to be wearing a green or black shirt. 

Ultimately, it’s just not that serious – we’re playing a game that gets harder and harder by the day, so why not take a chance and try a second deposit or application? Worst case scenario, you are barred from the (lovely I’m sure) financial products at Chocolate Bayou Federal Credit Union, and I doubt you valued that relationship much anyway. 

And next time you wander into your favorite drugstore and see a shiny new money center machine by the counter, try pressing a couple buttons, will ya? 

While it’s a great mantra for MS, it’s even more helpful when traveling. It can be hard to say fuck it while traveling, especially if you are already introverted, don’t speak the language, understand the culture, or some combination thereof. 

Deciding to just go with the flow and wander into some place not meant for tourists or trusting in someone I had just met has led to some of my all time favorite travel memories – the kind you’ll never find in Lonely Planet (or TikTok, for that matter). Things like:

• Spending the night in a TGV train car in Geneva drinking wine and commiserating with some complete strangers because the tracks warped from heat and there was nowhere in town to stay last minute
• Hearing insane stories about working on the volunteer Table Mountain rescue force from a new South African friend while trying not to die myself hiking up the India Venster chains together
• Using my terrible Spanish to chat with an Ecuadorian abuela who ended up giving me some otherworldly homemade pan de yuca in the Galapagos
• Spending half an hour taking never ending selfies with curious young Egyptians on a public holiday in Cairo

I promise this isn’t turning into a self-help blog, it was just a continuation of last week’s post. I hope this gives you an extra ounce of motivation to scale harder (or have more fun traveling) sometime in the near future. 

À la prochaine mes amis!