About The Zag
The Zag’s mission is to help you resist the suck of complacency and conformity. The goal? For you to have a rewarding time zigzagging down an extraordinary life of your own design.
Everything you’ll read here is written by me (Chris). Consider me like a personal trainer for your comfort zone. I give you creative challenges to make your status quo sexier.
Join me and thousands of others to get a new Consider This challenge every 10-ish days:
About Chris
👋 I’m Chris.
🇨🇦☔️🎓 I was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, then studied Business at The University of Toronto.
🇨🇭🇵🇦📊🍹 I worked in Corporate Finance for 4.5 years in Switzerland then Panama, then “pretired” at 27.
🍇🐛🏨🗺⚡️ I tried exporting frozen fruit, selling bug guts as food, starting a hostel, and travel blogging. Then, in 2023, I decided to Zag.
👨💻📸→ Now here I am sitting on the floor of my apartment, poking away at the keyboard of my 2015 MacBook Pro, sharing ideas about living extraordinarily.
🤰👨👦🔬 I live between Vancouver and Cape Town with my wife and two sons (2.7 and 0.4 years old).
📒🎙 See my personal user manual and Unfollowables interview for more about me.
What Am I Up to Now?
February 2024
- 🎉 Enjoying: Summer in Cape Town—beach volleyballing, Saunders picknicking, wine tasting, and running around Lions Head.
- 🛠 Working On: Exploring new businesses to work on in addition to The Zag because, unfortunately, what I’m doing isn’t good enough.
- 📺 Watching: MTV’s The Challenge. Loving season 39!
- 📚 Reading: The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich.
- 🧗♂️ Current Challenge: How to zigzag The Zag in a direction that’s less dependent on ugly display ads and earns me a respectable income?
Frequently Asked Questions
First and foremost, because the TheZag.com domain was affordable.
Also, I like the word “zag.”
Dictionaries say zag means “to make a sharp change in direction.”
Meh.
I say it means more than that:
Zag: To proactively veer in adventurous directions.
My qualifications:
- A Commerce degree from one of Canada’s top universities.
- I read a lot.
- I enjoy my unconventional life to an unusual degree.
Ok, so I understand why some people reading The Zag would think “why should I trust this guy?”
All I can say is Google trusts me enough to send over 150,000 visitors a month to my site and over 5,000 people have trusted me enough to let me into their inboxes.
Here’s a small sample of the nice things subscribers have written to me:
Most of my income comes from the annoying display ads on this site. So the longer you to scroll around this site, the more ugly ads you see (unless you have a good ad blocker), and the more moolah I make.
I don’t like it, but it’s the least bad way I’ve found so far to be able to share my content while trying to earn a living from it.
Technically, I can’t? yet.
Most months, I don’t make enough money from The Zag and my other blog, The Unconventional Route, to cover my family’s living expenses.
But I have enough well-invested pretirement savings to cover that deficit for many, many years.
Also, my income (and potential income from growing my skills and audience) is growing faster than our expenses. Pretty soon, I’ll be flush enough to splurge on a new laptop.
Send me an email. I always reply, though sometimes it takes a while.
To make it harder for spam bots to scrape my email and degrade my inbox, you’ll have to puzzle this together:
It’s the first letter of my first name at thezag.com.
Let’s Do Extraordinary Things Together
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