A Cheap and Easy Way to Enrich Your Life

culled from:lifeoptimizer.org

Do you want to live your life to the fullest? To do so, the one thing you need to do is to enrich your life. You need to broaden your life experiences and taste more of the richness life has to offer.

You might think that you need to spend a lot of money and go overseas for that, but there is actually a cheap and easy alternative. Here it is:

Explore your city.

Yes, explore your city. You don’t need to go overseas. You don’t even need to go out of town.

A while back, there was a Dutch girl who faked a trip to Southeast Asia. She posted pictures on Facebook showing the exciting places she went to. One picture shows her sitting next to a Buddhist monk, as if she was visiting a temple in Southeast Asia. Another picture shows her snorkelling.

But guess what? All those “exciting” places were actually in her own country! In fact, she didn’t even leave her hometown!

My point is: there are interesting experiences waiting for you in your own town. You just need to discover them.

Here is how to do it:

1. Find and list new places to visit.

To find interesting places in your city, a good resource is TripAdvisor. Search for your city and visit its Attractions page (here is an example for my city). The places are already ranked so you can easily see the best ones.

Look at the places listed. Have you visited them all? Chances are that you haven’t. I’ve been in my city for more than 15 years and still haven’t visited some of them. In fact, there are a few that I have never heard of before!

You might also want to broaden your culinary experience by finding new places to eat. Again, TripAdvisor is a good resource for this (here is an example). In my case, there are so many places I haven’t heard of before that it’s like discovering a new world!

2. Visit the places with a tourist mindset.

Now that you have a list of the new places, take time to visit them. You might want to set aside a day (or more) per month for it.

In exploring your city, have a fresh set of eyes. Be like a tourist. Appreciate and absorb the richness of the experience.

3. Find and join a new social club.

Broadening your experience isn’t just about visiting new places – it’s also about meeting new people. You might never get a chance to know the many interesting people in your city if you don’t make the effort to meet them.

A good way to do this is by joining a new social club. In my case, I joined Toastmasters a few months ago. I joined it without knowing anyone there before, so I met entirely new people. And guess what? They are interesting people that I’ve learned a lot from.