I'm James and I'm currently in Myanmar on an uncomfortable, bone-shaking bus journey from Inle Lake to Yangon. I am on a route that takes me through treacherous jungle mountain roads, sheer drops on both sides and if you're lucky - as I seem to be - you also have to contend with driving through monsoon cloud cover in what is essentially a 30 year old lightning conductor.
Hot coffee and bumpy buses are not a good combination.
As I have nine hours to kill, I thought I'd introduce myself to the Steemit community and explain exactly how I ended up at this point.
I'm James I've been heavily involved in Blockchain technology since 2013. Some people on here might know me as 'Coinerz' and indeed that is the name of the crypto-exchange company that I setup in April 2014. Coinerz was designed to help newbies purchase Bitcoin and other altcoins. The concept was basically the same as an exchange booth - you purchase your required digital currency and then pay for it in normal everyday Pounds, Dollars or Euros.
Talking to over 200 Google employees about the blockchain.
Everything was going incredibly well and my company received a good deal of interest from many different outlets. Google invited me to speak to their employees and investors, I contributed to the UK governments white paper on the future of blockchain technology, I became part of the Horizon development team, I was a moderator of one of Facebook's most trusted and popular cryptocurrency groups and had many things going on at once. Everything was skyrocketing and my company was a huge success.
And then I fell ill. Very ill.
During 2014, I started to suffer from terrible cluster headaches. To those of you who have been fortunate enough to not know what these are, I shall put it in perspective for you. Imagine a migraine headache, the kind that puts you in a bad mood. If a migraine headache is like the BMW of the headache world. A cluster headache is like a Ferrari Testa Rossa. Cluster headaches are also known as 'suicide headaches' because they literally feel like you are being repeatedly struck on the side of the head with a sharpened ice pick. Not pleasant.
The doctors were at a complete loss as to the cause of the headaches and their solution was simply to prescribe me lots and lots of meds that I didn't actually need and which resulted in liver failure several months later. After several days in hospital attached to a drip, with jaundiced skin, I was finally allowed out of hospital and told that I needed to take a break from my entrepreneurial activities.
So I took a trip to Thailand and booked myself into a yoga detox retreat
You know where you can stick your trophy?!
A strict regime of fasting, clean living and twice daily self-administered colonics resulted in me losing over four stone in weight and feeling incredible. The headaches had more or less stopped and I was feeling better and better with each passing day.
Life's a beach!
A couple of weeks after leaving 'colonic camp'. I suddenly started to feel bad again, but this time it felt worse. I couldn't eat anything without being sick and I simply didn't have the energy to get out of bed. In fact, it was the staff at the hotel I was staying at who were so concerned at my rapid downturn, that they practically forced me into an ambulance.
And I'm forever grateful that they did!
I was driven to the nearest hospital in Bangkok where I found myself in an emergency ward where they performed a battery of tests and informed me that part of my lower intestine was massively swollen due to undiagnosed Crohns Disease that I had apparently had since childhood. They then told me that this section would need to be 'removed immediately' or else there was an incredibly high likelihood that I would not last another month.
Whilst I was figuratively 'shitting it' before my operation, I was unable to be literally 'shitting it' on account of my intestine being a figurative arsehole!
If you have ever been in a situation where you are forced to stare death in the face and your family and friends are on the other side of the world, you might understand how I felt and the range of emotions that I went through. I'll skip the details of my nine hour operation - mainly due to the fact that I was unconscious at the time and hence don't know much about what happened. However, I eventually woke up and found that I now had a scar that stretched pretty much the length of my waist. It might have been the delicious morphine, but I remember thinking that my mum would probably be jealous that I now had the biggest 'Caesarean' in the family.
After realising that I was alive, I was able to victoriously raise my thumb as it was the only part of me that didn't hurt!
A week later I was released from hospital and immediately made the trip up to mountainous Pai in the northwest of Thailand to think about my future. All of a sudden, the whole 'rat race' thing seemed unimportant to me. I was lucky enough at being given another chance at life and I didn't want to become one of those people who woke up one day and found that they were 70 years old and their short time on earth was nearly at an end.
Putting my life in perspective...
I remember sitting by the river in Pai, watching a bamboo waterwheel lazily turn around and then looking at my backpack which contained nothing but a laptop, clothes and toiletries and having a total revelation.
I suddenly realised that I was happier and more content than I had ever been at any point in my life. Suddenly the whole concept of working every waking hour and spending my days doing the same thing over and over and over and over again seemed absurd to me. After spending all of my life thinking that happiness was intrinsically linked to how much money you had in the bank or whether you're the owner of the latest vacuous boy toy, I realised that what makes me truly happy is experiencing and learning new things and cultures and, more importantly, helping others. In the Western World, people have much more than they need and yet they are never satisfied. In Thailand and SE Asia, people have comparatively little, but they are so much happier.
For me, the choice was a no-brainer.
It's now just over four months after my operation and I've had the pleasure of meeting amazing new people on a daily basis. I've put the world to rights with Saudis in bars. I've danced with Kenyans in night clubs. I've conversed with monks on airplanes and I've even arm-wrestled with ladyboys in cafes. The one commonality between all of these experiences is that I've been able to take people at face value and learn something new from each of them.
Learning something new each day...
I'm now in the process of changing the mission statement for Coinerz. I'm less interested in how the blockchain can benefit me personally, and instead, I want to use the skills and contacts I have built up over the years to create something good. Developing countries like Thailand and Myanmar are crying out for solutions that can easily be solved via the blockchain and I'm going to work as hard as I can in order to make sure that they come to fruition. There is a lot of exciting stuff in the pipeline which I will announce in due course, but assuming that this post doesn't get buried, I think that Steemit is the ideal way for me to tell the world about my adventures as a blockchain digital nomad.
March 2016 I was hours from death. Four months later, I'm high on life!
If you have any questions, please put them in the comments below and I'll try to answer them whenever my sporadic internet connection feels like working. Thanks for listening to my story.