At 25, he has visited nearly twice as many countries as he is years old. Dreading the idea of having a regular office job, the enterprising young man has taken it upon himself to live a life of adventure.
On a June
evening, globe trotter and blogger Orest Zub, a Lviv native, spoke at Freud
House in Kyiv about his new life on the road and how others can also travel the
world while making a living.
Zub wasn’t
always so hard to pin down. He once was a typical student, studying law at Lviv
National University and working toward a career with a reputable firm. He
imagined wearing a white collar to work, where he’d have a desk stacked with
files of legal cases to work on. Everything would be gracefully predictable and
logical. The money wouldn’t be bad, either.
“My friends
have all dreamt about prosecution offices and courts. For me, personally, it is
a totally rotten business,” Zub said.
It wasn’t
one event in particular that altered his career goals and perspective on life,
but rather the combination of general distaste for boring office jobs and a bit
of wanderlust.
Zub said he
caught the travel bug early on, while attending summer camps abroad as a child.
After finishing university, instead of searching for a job in Ukraine, he chose
to take an internship in Poland. Later, his passion for the open road led him
to Croatia for another. Eventually, he made his way to India, where he stayed
for half a year before returning to Ukraine.
“India was
nothing like I expected,” Zub told an audience of two dozen people, smiling. He enjoyed traveling around the country, but
he knew it wouldn’t last forever – not without a source of income. “It was
there that I became eager to launch a business.”
“Moreover,
I realized that the world is a far smaller a place than I thought,” he added,
telling a story of a run-in with a traveler in India whom he had met in Europe.
He had taken a photograph of the stranger on the Norwegian fjord and shared
some traveling tips with him. Later he saw the same man at the Dalai Lama
Palace in India.
After
coming back to Ukraine, he challenged himself to settle down and work a regular
job. Gigs at a travel agency, a pig farm, a car rental service and the
Ombudsman Office didn’t work out. The last of these jobs was rather
disillusioning for Zub, as he realized that his zeal and inspiration for such
work was a rare trait in the office environment. “My colleagues couldn’t get
why I kept on meeting our clients with a smile,” he revealed.
Eventually,
he decided to create a network of those who shared his passions, launching his
own blog called OpenMind, where he shares his traveling experiences and coaches
people on how to live, work and travel freely. The site now provides him with
advertising revenue that supplements his trips to see far-off places.
His main
source of income is delivering trainings on how to inexpensively yet
comfortably travel the world. But it didn’t start out to his advantage.
“The first
training gathered a bunch of volunteers to be coached, and it wasn’t profitable
at all,” Zub said.
“Now such
projects bring me $1,500-$2,000 monthly. People used to say I’m a psycho, but
in the end I have become the first one to create a Ukrainian-language online
trainings market. It is not that easy to find a job in Ukraine. But it is easy
to create one for you,” he added.
He said
that his online enterprise now fully covers all of his travel expenses.
“I used to
take (whatever money I had) and set off to faraway countries. Now it is totally
different. My blog totally finances all of my whims,” said Zub.
His last
journey to Asia lasted six months and turned out to be quite fruitful, he said.
While there, Zub managed to learn Muay Thai and try his hand at surfing. On a
flight from the United Arab Emirates back home to Ukraine, he proposed to his
girlfriend.
So what is
the next on his list? Zub replied without hesitation: “Learn languages, develop
the best travel blog and get married on a cruise liner.”
Kyiv Post intern Yuliya Hudoshnyk can be
reached at [email protected].
