7 Recommended Books for Digital Nomads — Travel, Productivity, & Inspiration
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I lived as a digital nomad for two years. I traveled to dozens of cities and countries and worked from my laptop the entire time.
Often I get asked how I took the leap. I never had an easy answer. It came through a variety of factors. I wrote about the 3 key steps I took in this article.
Books were one of those factors. Many of these I read in high school in my childhood home, dreaming of the travels I would take and the adventures that awaited me.
These books encouraged me to question the “normal” path that society pushes onto us and to dream of the life I wanted.
This list is me retroactively going through the books I read that had the biggest impact on choosing to live as a digital nomad and how to thrive once I did.
You won’t find any books with “digital nomad” in the title here. Those are too on the nose. Dozens of travel creators have published their own books. A lot of them were probably written with the help of AI. That’s not what this list is.
Digital nomading, ultimately, is long-term travel, and that category has more books whose ideas have stood the test of time — fiction and nonfiction included.
Let’s get into the list.
1) The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
I’ve been a Tim Ferriss fan for over a decade. I don’t revisit The 4-Hour Workweek much, but I have a clear memory of the impact it had on me in high school, (so much so, that I quoted The 4-Hour Workweek in my college essay.)
While often in the “business” category of the bookstore, what stuck with me most about The 4-Hour Workweek was the core idea that we could choose our own path.
In it, Ferriss shares how we created a “mini-retirement” for himself by questioning whether we needed to wait until we turned 65 to be happy.
This framework helped me decide to take two gap years after high school, choose an unconventional career path, and ditch my lease once I graduated college.
Before my first long-term trip to Barcelona when I was 18, I re-read the chapter on “Fear-Setting.”
The 4-Hour Workweek helped give myself permission to take the path less traveled.
2) Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
I was introduced to Vagabonding by Rolf Potts through Tim Ferriss, as he mentions it in The 4-Hour Workweek.
I wonder if I had read Vagabonding first if it would have had an even bigger impact, because the themes are similar.
When I read Vagabonding, I only got even more excited about the prospect of the travels ahead of me. Yet a few key lessons stuck with me:
First, the glory of minimalism.
The backpack life is romanticized in travel circles, and I think it lives up to the hype. The idea of being free of possessions, of traveling light, appealed to the hiker/nature lover in me already. During my entire time as a nomad, I never checked a bag.
Second, like Ferriss, Potts affirmed that money should be to help your life; your life should not be for money. Living in this world, it’s not easy to come down from the high altar of capitalism. Potts helped me reframe what I valued.
Between these two books, I think you have essential reading on the modern subculture of digital nomading.
3) How to Travel The World on $75 a Day by Matt Kepnes
In college, as I plotted and pondered ditching my lease when I graduated, I read “Nomadic Matt’s” book How to Travel the World on $50 a Day. I always felt that traveling didn’t need to be expensive.
I was 23 when I graduated college. I didn’t mind sleeping on couches, in hostels, or taking red-eyes in economy. I had nowhere to be ever, so I could always get the cheapest flight. I could go to less expensive places to begin with.
Kepnes strikes down the myth that traveling needs to be luxurious and expensive.
I didn’t want to sit in a resort sipping overpriced drinks; I wanted to see the world and explore. Considering I had no lease, I was able to save a lot of money even with meager, fluctuating freelance writing income.
Like a lot of his writing, it strikes a balance of philosophical, while staying practical in the core essence. This is the best book for pure digital nomad tactics and strategies.
Matt has walked the walk. He’s been a travel blogger since (at least) I was in middle school, because I’ve read his blog since about then. His updated book is How to Travel the World on $75 a Day
4) Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
Okay, let’s shift gears. Ever since high school, I have been a disciplined person. I always got my homework done. I woke up and went to bed early even if I didn’t need to. I developed an ability to create my own structure.
These skills served me as a digital nomad. When you’re traveling, it’s easy to give in to the temptations. But I also had to work. I wanted to work too. I was in an era of simultaneous exploration and building my career as a writer.
You have to stay disciplined with your work and find that balance.
As I wrote about back in 2022 after my first nomad stint, I gave myself a quota to work 4 hours a day. For me, always in the mornings.
That’s where Cal Newport’s Deep Work comes in. I read this book in high school, and I resonated with the message that it wasn’t about how many hours you put in, it was about whether you could find the “creative flow.”
I think Newport’s writing is clear, simple, and actionable. If I had to pick one productivity philosophy compatible with the spirit of digital nomading, it’s Newport’s. More recently, I enjoyed his book Slow Productivity, and I debated putting that here instead, but Deep Work is his biggest hit.
5) The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo
This short novel made me ask the question, “Am I living my life’s purpose?”
I first read it in high school, and it didn’t land at all. I thought it was slow and I didn’t see the appeal of the characters.
Years later, I reread it when I saw a copy at a bookstore in El Salvador and needed a quick book to read.
This time, it hit.
“It’s precisely the possibility of realizing a dream that makes life interesting,” Coehlo writes. One of life’s great joys is to uncover your “Personal Story,” the main character’s mentor-figure offers.
It’s a beautiful book that helped me ponder what it is, exactly, that I was chasing with my travels.
6) On The Road by Jack Kerouac
I started devouring all of the classics when I was a student at NYU, living in New York City, the center of the Beat movement.
Yet, I didn’t read the seminal work of the Beat Generation until after. I had an old used copy I bought at Mercer St. Books, a used-only bookstore in Greenwich Village. I decided to bring it with me last year to Europe. I started it in London, finished it in Paris, and left my marked-up copy in one of those book exchanges in Barcelona.
It’s a joy to read about the sheer joy of traveling while doing it yourself. It added a spring to my step and a glint of looking for magic with every step I took in London and Paris. I think it gave the subconscious edge to seek out some adventure.
If you need a reminder of the incredible power of the present moment, bring Kerouac with yu on your travels.
After all, if you’re going to travel the world with a few belongings, you are one of the “mad ones,” that Kerouac wrote about. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.”
7) How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by P.E. Moskowitz
Traveling from city to city, I developed an obsession with city planning and urbanism.
What made a city walkable, liveable, a pure joy (or the opposite) filled my curiosity. I started reading about cities: how and why we built them, their problems, and their evolutions.
There are a lot of books on this topic I could put on this list, but I want to focus on a topic that I found related directly to my digital nomad experiences.
I remember just before a trip to Colombia (read my digital nomad guide on Medellín here), I read the book: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood.
I knew about gentrification and how cities in the U.S. had changed. In the Lower East Side, high rises popped up all the time while I lived there in college. Now I wanted to understand it, and in Medellín, I saw a much more drastic example of “gentrification.”
Cities that have attracted digital nomads have undergone some of the most rapid changes. The changes can happen on the scale of months because the income discrepancy between a nomad and a local Colombian, where the minimum wage is around $300 USD per month. This means all the changes happening throughout global cities happen faster in digital nomad hotspots. Prices jump higher. Local restaurants get replaced with chains sooner. A new influx of expats changes the very soul of a place as locals get outpriced.
I believe that as nomads, we owe it to the places we visit to understand our impact. This isn’t to scare you off. As it is, “gentrification” is a loaded term. I address
I think reading books like this can help us understand the context in which visitors like us enter different countries and cities. It will help you understand why locals in cities like Barcelona have anti-tourist protests.
Our actions, whether visible or not, impact others. If you’re going somewhere locals aren’t happy with nomads, maybe that’s a sign to investigate why and be conscious about your choice of where to stay, what restaurants to eat at, what tourist attractions to go to or avoid.
While digital nomading is often about the sexy stuff, the go travel and chase your dreams stuff, this side of it is more important. If you’re not ready for a book, check out my article with my 5 key tips to ethically digital nomad.
[Bonus:] How to Travel — Some Contrarian Advice by Ryan Holiday
This is not a book. It’s an article, which is why it doesn’t make my official list. As a kid, I sat and reread these tips over and over, gearing up for any trip I had coming up.
Holiday has some gems in here. Here are a few that I pondered before my travels:
“Don’t check luggage. If you’re bringing that much stuff with you, you’re doing something wrong.”
“What are you taking all these pictures for? Oh for the memories? So just look at it and remember it. Experience the present moment.”
“Take long walks.”
Check out the article here: How to Travel: Some Contrarian Advice.
Now Go See The World
There’s a joke that over-educated people like me spend too much time reading books and not enough time seeing the world. Our experience of the world provides one perspective, and one very important one, but so do books.
To me, the two go together like peanut butter and jelly.
As time goes on, I see how everything I read connects to varying interests. Don’t be afraid to go down rabbit holes and stray away from the typical “travel” books. Any novel or obscure topic can reveal a perspective that shapes your life and makes you see your travel experiences differently.
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