I know and dive with someone who did much the same as you are thinking of doing. She was working an office job in Manhattan and was not liking it all that much. She saw a special promotion for a cheap weekend getaway to the Florida Keys and decided to give it a go. When she got there, she asked, "What's there to do here?" The person she asked suggested scuba diving, which she had never done. A couple years later she was working for a dive shop in Mexico and learning the ropes. A couple years later she was working as a cave guide and instructor in Mexico, and she was making a living doing it. (I will get back to her later.)
Put yourself in a situation in which you have to do a lot of diving with a lot of variety, and you will progress rapidly. If you go out and do the same dive over and over again over a period of time, you won't get nearly as far in that same amount of time.
I have never met anyone who went through one of those intensive programs such as you find in a lot of different places, the kind of program people pejoratively call "zero to hero," but I have a friend who has. He told me that when he was a Course Director working for a major shop in Florida, they got an applicant from such a program. He scoffed at it because he had a very negative view of the programs, but they gave the guy a trial anyway. He was shocked at how good the guy was. Apparently not only doing a heck of a lot of dives in a short time but doing them under the direction of someone who was intent on making you good at it paid off in this case. Maybe he was a fluke, but he was apparently pretty good.
Great ideas, thanks for the reply. I have been struggling to find mobile opportunities actually. I am skilled in web development and support of many different platforms but for some reason I have not yet been able to find location independence.
Back to the woman mentioned earlier. She is running a successful cave training and guiding operation now, but she wants more than that, so she is looking for exactly what you are looking for. She does web work, too. In fact, if you are inquisitive about scuba topics and search the web, you will run into her there. She is building the practice. It takes time. Her goal is to spend part of each year working her cave training and guiding business and part of her year traveling to different places around the world, sustaining herself through Internet-based work. The last time I dived with her, she seemed to think it was going well, and she is still working toward that life style.
It does take time to build an Internet-based business, though. That is especially true if your expertise is in web development. More than 20 years ago I learned to make web pages, first using pure HTML coding. People I worked with thought I was an Internet genius. Then they started coming out with crude web page development programs, and when I switched to them, people marveled at my skill. Today, the programs are so sophisticated that any idiot can make a great looking web site in no time at all. The skills people marveled at a decade ago are totally obsolete today. I am thinking of building a new site soon, but nothing I learned to do back then will be of any value to me. I will choose some DIY program that anyone can use, figure it out in an hour or so, and build something far beyond what I could have done back then.
In other words, what you are looking for can be done--just be aggressive in pursuing your dream and wise in the path you take for the Internet part of it.
