Yesterday, encouraged by a friend and a couple of late-night margaritas, I bought tickets for a random hiking trip. It was a bit of an impulse purchase, having only heard about it a couple hours earlier.

“Just buy the ticket, we’ll figure out the rest later,” she said.

I started nomading full-time about 7 years ago. I’d been thinking about it for a while. I knew this would require moving out of my condo, selling my car and most of my things, figuring out how to run a consulting business from the other side of the world, and dealing with dozens of other details and logistics that I hadn’t even considered yet.

But once I bought the ticket, the decision was made. I was committed. A deadline had been created. I had a timebox to figure out the rest. No more excuses.

The beauty in this is the priorities immediately become more clear. When your living in hypotheticals, anything can happen. Anything can be a list of all the other things you also want or need to do. Anything can be all the details you have to figure out to move forward. Anything is an infinite list of possibilities — but we only have finite time and resources to work with. The deadline turns anything into something, the hypothetical into reality.

I now spend about half the year in San Diego and the other half nomading, but the strategy remains.

Buy the ticket. Figure out the rest later.