“It was one-way flights essentially for almost 12 years.”
Claire Marshall didn’t set out to visit 75 countries. She set out to go on safari in South Africa. What followed was over a decade of movement, new cities, new languages, new people, new versions of herself. This would quietly become the most important education of her life. Not in spite of the unconventional path. Because of it.
The First One-Way Ticket
It started simply. A chance to take a few months off work and go on safari in Africa. A single destination. No return flight booked because there was no particular reason to book one.
“Initially it was just I’m going to go to South Africa for safari and to take a few months off. But then it continued going.”
What she found on the other side of that first leap, and then every leap that followed, was something that couldn’t have been found any other way. Each new country demanded that she show up as herself, stripped of the familiar comforts of home, reputation, and routine. Each new city required her to build a life from nothing, with strangers who became friends, in languages she was still learning.
After taking a few months off, she found remote work at a time when remote work wasn’t a thing, working in digital marketing.
“I noticed myself showing up to different people and kind of allowing myself to reinvent myself, but seeing that beliefs I had about myself previously weren’t true.”
That pattern, repeated across 75 countries and two decades, became the foundation of a confidence that has nothing to do with titles or salaries. It is the confidence of someone who has tested herself in conditions she didn’t control and come out the other side — not unscathed, but intact. And increasingly, certain.
What Movement Teaches You
There is a version of the nomadic life that is about escape. Claire is honest that it started partly that way. But somewhere along the way, the running stopped and the arriving began.
What each new country gave her was a laboratory. New relationships formed without the scaffolding of shared history. New environments demanded adaptation without the comfort of routine. And somewhere in that accumulated experience of showing up as a stranger and leaving as someone who belonged, even if it was for a brief time, she built something invisible and unloseable.
“Figuring things out was something that gave me a real sense of I’ve got me.”
That sentence contains years of practice. The knowledge that you have yourself, no matter where you land or what falls away, is not something you can acquire from a book or business school curriculum. It is earned, incrementally, by doing the thing that scares you and discovering you survive it.
“Which has been really important in starting this company. Because a year and a half in is a very vulnerable place for a lot of people.”
The Mexico Decision
In 2022, when Claire left her CEO role and declined the offer that would have made most people’s financial anxieties disappear overnight, she needed to make her runway last. The math in Santa Barbara, where she had been based for the past year, was unforgiving. The math in Mexico was a different conversation entirely.
“Looking at the runway with my savings in Santa Barbara versus Mexico was drastically different when I was starting to map out my expenses.”
It was, on the surface, a practical decision. But it was also something else, a continuation of a pattern she had been living for two decades. The unconventional choice that looks like a compromise and turns out to be a liberation.
In Mexico she found time. Time to think, to build slowly and intentionally, to have the kind of deep uninterrupted focus that a high-pressure city makes almost structurally impossible. It was in that space, between jungle runs, ocean swims, a community of people who had made the same quiet calculation, that Deprogram began to take shape. A program born not in a boardroom or an accelerator, but on a coastline, by a founder who had finally given herself enough room to hear what she actually wanted to build.
“I live right on the beach.”
She says it with a laugh, recognizing the irony. She had spent years white-knuckling toward a future where she could finally relax on the beach. She got there without the millions. And without the millions, she had to actually be present for it.
The Unconventional Advantage
Looking back, Claire doesn’t frame her path as a series of risks taken. She frames it as a series of curiosities followed. That safari that became twelve years of a nomadic life, taking her to 75 countries. The sabbatical nobody planned, that gave her space to see her next move. The offer declined, which freed her from the shackles of making life decisions based on money. The move to Mexico, that brought her closer to her dream life. Each decision looked unconventional from the outside and felt inevitable from the inside.
“It’s also given me a major sense of resilience. Like if I need to stop, drop, and live on a budget, I can.”
What the path gave her was a relationship with uncertainty that most people spend their whole lives avoiding. She is comfortable not knowing how it ends. She is comfortable being in the middle of something without being able to see the other side. She has been in that position enough times to know that the other side exists.
What she discovered in all of that movement about identity, about worth, and about the stories we tell ourselves that keep us small, became the foundation of everything she now teaches. Because it turns out that 75 countries, one-way flights, and two decades of chosen uncertainty wasn’t just a life lived differently. It was the world’s most unconventional personal development program. And she was only just beginning to understand what it had made her.
If this conversation resonated, you’ll find more of it inside the Follow the Founder community.
We share honest conversations about leadership, brand building, AI, influence, and what it really takes to build something meaningful. No noise. No recycled advice. Just lived experience from founders who are in it.
Follow along, subscribe to our newsletter, and join the conversation. The future of founder content will not be automated. It will be intentional.
Want to Keep Reading?
The 4-Hour Work Week: Timothy Ferriss
A blueprint for escaping the traditional 9-to-5 grind by leveraging automation, outsourcing, and lifestyle design to achieve financial freedom and live life on your own terms.
