Why Living in a Van Made Me a Better Businessman: How Solitude Unlocks Original Thinking

Not a lot of people in my new circle know this about me.

Back when I was younger I quit everything, built a van and spent a year travelling around Australia with almost nothing. No passive income. No systems. No plan worth speaking of. My entire process management at the time consisted of tracking how much fuel I had and how many mandarins were left in the back.

I was living off savings, almost completely alone, with nothing but time.

That probably does not sound like your typical guru gamechanger moment. But that year turned out to be one of the biggest catalysts for everything I have built since.

The secret ingredient was time spent truly alone.

We live in an era of constant connection. Community, social media, AI assisted thinking, group chats, podcasts, YouTube rabbit holes. All of it is genuinely useful. But all of it is also noise. And when your thinking is constantly shaped by what everyone else is saying, doing and building, original thought becomes harder and harder to produce.

When I was in that van with nowhere to be and no one telling me what to think, something shifted. The noise stopped. I got curious about who I actually was and what I actually thought without anyone else's opinion in the room. Ideas started coming from somewhere real. Conviction stopped feeling borrowed and started feeling like mine.

When the noise disappears, originality becomes effortless.

There are 8 billion people on this planet and not one of them is exactly like you. Nobody has your specific combination of experience, upbringing, network, ideas, beliefs and perspective. That is not a small thing. That is your entire competitive advantage sitting right there waiting to be used.

I am not telling you to go live in a van or retreat to a monastery. What I am saying is that in 2026 the best thing you can possibly be in business is genuinely different. Not performatively different. Not different for the sake of a brand. Actually, authentically, unapologetically yourself.

Do not be afraid to bring the real you into your business. Even if it worked so well that everyone wanted to copy you, it would take them a lifetime just to catch up. You cannot replicate someone else's lived experience and neither can they replicate yours.

Lesson 2: You do not have to compete in a market you own 100% of.

Get quiet enough to hear what makes you different. Then go all in on it.

We talk about this kind of thing every episode on the TSP Podcast. The unconventional paths, the real lessons and the stuff nobody puts in a business course. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and come find us in The Sequoia Project community on Facebook.