Leave Your Hometown

Why and how changing your environment changes your life

Author

Brandon Bedford
June 30, 2025

In partnership with

When I meet people in Korea, it inevitably comes up that I’m from Canada. Born and raised, lived there for 30 years, and then left.

Today, I’m sharing my personal story of why I left my hometown, and why you should too.

This will not focus so much on the reasons I left Canada as a country. If there’s interest, I’ll cover this in a future article.

Throughout this story, I touch on:

  • How to “plant the seed early”

  • How to recognize when you’re on the “default path”

  • The cost of inaction and the benefits of a new adventure

  • 4 Action Items for cultivating a more adventurous life

If you are considering, or have even just imagined a life different from your current one… where you live in a different country, work a different job, have a different daily routine…

This one’s for you.

And if you’d rather watch and listen to this story, you can do so on YouTube:

Let’s dive in:

For new subscribers: I spent 10 years working in B2B tech startups in Canada before moving to South Korea in 2023 to start Wealth Potion. This is the first time I’m sharing the full story, and what it taught me about success, career, and wealth.

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Travelling Abroad: Plant The Seed Early

11 years ago, before graduating business school, I took part in the Cansbridge Fellowship which gave me the opportunity to work in Asia for a summer.

I worked for 3 months in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at a small venture incubator. The work itself wasn’t memorable. But this relatively brief stint changed my life in a few ways:

  • I experienced a culture entirely different from my own

  • I made friends with people from different religions, native languages, and worldviews

  • I saw how businesses and startups could succeed in other regions of the world

And most importantly, I saw that there are an infinite number of career paths outside of the typical options laid out for me in college.

Me in Business School in 2014, thinking I’d go into Management Consulting.

I went to business school, and so 99% of my classmates were pursuing careers in one of 4 areas:

  • Finance

  • Management consulting

  • Marketing

  • Accounting.

But this experience in Malaysia shook my worldview to its core.

It simultaneously showed me that the world is so much bigger (number of interesting opportunities) but also so much smaller (how accessible those opportunities are) than we think.

This experience planted the seed for my move to Korea almost 10 years later.

Action Item: Travel and work abroad, if you can. And do it early. It’s one thing to experience a new culture through tourism, but it’s another thing entirely when you experience the work culture, the economy, and learn how business and commerce is done in another country.

Settling Down Isn’t a Decision, It’s the Default

If you had asked me in Summer of 2014 (when I was in Malaysia) where I’d be in 10 years, there’s a lot of things I might have told you:

  • Travelling the world!

  • Starting my own startup!

  • Working on something deeply important to the world!

Naive answers? Maybe. But they would have been honest, enthusiastic answers.

Me at a TED event in Kuala Lumpur, also in 2014. Completely different mindset.

But there’s one thing I definitely would NOT have said I’d be doing in 10 years... And that is:

“Living and working a comfy job in my hometown and never having left!”

Fast forward 10 years, and that’s exactly where I was…

In a way, I have to thank the Covid lockdowns for this sobering reminder. For those that are unaware, Ontario Canada had some of the longest lockdowns outside of China.

During this period of isolation, I started to ask myself some difficult questions:

  • Is this where I wanted to be 10 years ago?

  • Despite my career success, why does it feel like I failed?

  • What if there’s another pandemic? Will I be stuck here for even longer?

  • If I “settle down”, get married and have kids, isn’t it going to be even harder to move?

  • Am I… already settling down?

I reached the inevitable conclusion that, yes, I was indeed settling down.

The expression “settling down” makes it sound like an action we take, or a decision we make.

In reality, settling down is a much slower, much more gradual process.

We settle down by doing nothing.

So, I decided to do something.

Action Item: Ask yourself the questions In listed above. How do those questions make you feel? If you feel ok with your answers, that’s wonderful! If your answers make you feel uncomfortable, keep reading.

The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd

Around the time I moved to Korea, I read a book called the Pathless Path.

In it, the author Paul Millerd retells his own story of working in a well-paying, prestigious corporate job devoid of meaning. He called this The Default Path.

If my story is resonating with you so far, I highly recommend The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd.

He quit his job with no real plan. He found it much more fulfilling, and has since mentored many young professionals who are in the process of doing the same. He called this The Pathless Path.

In the book, he writes:

❝

“On the pathless path, the goal is not to find a job, make money, build a business, or achieve any other metric. It’s to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing. This is one of the most important secrets of the pathless path. With this approach, it doesn’t make sense to chase any financial opportunity if you can’t be sure that you will like the work. What does make sense is experimenting with different kinds of work, and once you find something worth doing, working backward to build a life around being able to keep doing it.”

Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path

Before I say this… I want to make clear that I mean no offense to any of my former coworkers, or the wonderful businesses I worked for… but here goes:

In my heart of hearts, I didn’t really care about the technologies that I was building, selling, or marketing.

Money aside, I didn’t want to keep doing it. I was on the default path.

Did those technologies help our clients’ businesses make more money? Sure did! I didn’t doubt that they were effective technologies.

But effective at what? What impact were they making on the world? On actual people?

Would I be putting any of these work experiences on my tombstone?

Action Item: Are you on the default path? How long have you been on the default path? What’s holding you back from taking the Pathless Path?

I knew that something needed to change.

I am willing to bet that a decent number of you reading this newsletter already set ambitious goals for yourself. How much money you want to make, what your career path will look like, and so on.

How many of you think about what would happen if your life were to stay the same?

This is an exercise mentioned by Jordan Peterson in his Self Authoring Program, an essay-based writing program for ambitious adults.

If you feel like you’re settling down, and that makes you uncomfortable, try this:

Action Item: Write for 15-20 minutes uninterrupted about what your life will look like in 10 years if nothing were to change.

The point of the exercise is not to scare you into inaction, but to do the opposite. To show you the cost of inaction and jolt you into making change.

At this point in my story, I hadn’t decided on where I wanted to move. Why I chose South Korea is a story for another time.

The moral of the story is this:

If you’re feeling stuck, the best thing you can do is change your environment.

Because at the end of the day, wealth is more than just digits in your bank account. True wealth is achieved by building the life you actually want. What are you waiting for?

To your prosperity,

Brandon @ Wealth Potion