What to do in Ericeira when it rains cacao, coaches & chakras on you
Spoiler: spend some days in Lisbon until more "business people" get coached on how to open up their hearts and allow true connections right here in Ericeira. Do not move to Lisbon, plzzzzz, don’t make my issue bigger than it already is. I now even created a lil cute graph to manifest which people I want to import to eriparadise cause I admire them.
Don’t get me wrong, I dooo like 20 % of cacao, coaches & chakras in my life. I really do. But only 20 % :) And I think that is exactly what unites us all in Ericeira: we all value the magical, but to different degrees. So which other magical place in Europe, where you can actually start a family, already attracts that many smart (& hot) people who can work remotely? Tell meeeeeai, I'm desperate for the mountain version of Eri.
So either you have plain faith in the universe and just keep breathing through this tough early bird phase of Eribusinessparadise yourself. Or you do your bit and try to open the hearts of some "business people" and connect with them these ways:
- Join the Founders Running Gang in Lisbon
- Join the Founders Padel Gang in Lisbon
- Join the Padel & Business Gang in Lisbon
- Live at the only real coliving in Ericeira
- Become my accountability buddy on Fridays in Eri
- Join the IndieBeers event 1x month in Lisbon
- Go to the open coffee event 1x month in Ericeira
- Help me import admirable people
Let me elaborratte - and add you to the above gangs.
Join the Founders Running Gang in Lisbon
They must be cool, cause they are an offspring from the OG founders running club from San Francisco. Right? They are kinda cool, yes, and I mean everyone can run, so it’s your lowest barrier to get around other brainy-business people. Join for the 9:30 am Saturday runs usually along the river, starting in mega-central Lisbon (Praça do Comércio) or in the park Monsanto.
Join the Founders Padel Gang in Lisbon
If you yourself are even slightly cool, you’ve tried padel at least once by now. Which means you can join the Founders Padel Gang, which is a sprinkle cooler than their running gang, I’d say. Ah, yea founders only plz, that already makes you cool :)
Well, the truly cool part is, that they make basically padel parties happening every Friday evening around 7:30 pm. I simply cannot grasp why there are not more people in Lisbon who want to end their stressymessy week by playing padel under the bridge. But happy days, we manage to get 4 courts booked most of the time.
And while we have in Eri that famoso ocean-view padel court, the Founders Padel Gang has river-view, romantic-ships-passing-by-view *and* adventurous-planes-landing-view padel courts. Thing is, they are located under that bridge. So theoretically it is mega noisy, but in reality your brain does some random magic when you’re in complete flow and dance on the court - that the noise just disappears from your consciousness. So overall, a magical place to end your week in a sweaty ish, healthy way. I like. Optional dinner & party after :)
Join the Padel & Business Gang in Lisbon
For the mega serious optimisers among us, there is a proper Padel & Business Gang in Lisbon, that I’ve been part of for 6 months now. By proper, I mean, rich corporate people, finance people, big entrepreneurs, ex-professional golfers etc. - which also means they are selective in who to let in.
Youssef is the mastermind of the group and will assess you the Moroccan-German way before letting you in. He has also in typical Moroccan-German manner created a padel bot that lets you sign up for games with 0 hustle. Magically all sorted and booked for you, just turn up and you have a crowd to play with.
Here and there, a tiny blogger with a cute directory cheats her way into that gang 😂😂 Be wary of that species, but say hi if you recognise one of them. My name is Svenja. The gang is a big Ericeira fan (we did an Ericeira padel day already) and if you join, they have one more reason to move to Eri. Do a mini application here and get your padel & business fun sorted.
Live at the only real coliving in Ericeira
If there is 1 thing you should know about me, then: I am in love with colivings. Get a remote job to go to colivings first. Then to Eri. These magic places create the best times ever with the nicest remote (business ish) people. I had my years of coliving in Ericeira - that 1 (now closed 🥹) coliving is basically the reason why I am in Eri.
I only know of one new proper coliving in Ericeira called Três Bandeiras. Which is led by 2 cool Dutch guys, who are tech entrepreneurs themselves. I haven’t been there yet - but even if it happens to not provide you with the ultimate "business people", they use the magic trick for real long-lasting connections: they put a bunch of people for 1+ month in a constrained physical space, somewhat outside of downtown, so they can’t escape easily. That usually makes people randomly gossip a lot, which results in properly opening up their hearts <3
Become my accountability buddy on Fridays
I am sadly not living any more at a coliving 🥹 At some point you have to grow up, I guess. But this magic trick of a constrained space …… the issue with not getting forward with your own side project, is also cause there are usually no time constraints. No boss or maths teacher telling you to get your shit together and hand in the paper at 1pm, sharp.
But lucky us Ericeirians, there are people in town, downtown, who model the good ol’ maths teacher: The Library Gang. How dare they to only open from 10 am to 1 pm?? And then take a nap until 2 pm? Who on eriearth wants to take a nap in the middle of the day? But .. kinda good if we anyway don’t have more willpower to hustle for more than 3h 🤔
So here’s the deal: Let’s go together to the library Fridays 10 am - 1 pm and hustle on our side projects (meai on erijoy or rideshareri) - no phones or social media allowed, whatsoever. Deal? Plzzzzzzz :) I mean, you can send all your friendz a pic of that very cute library and tell them you made your first magic €€€ in that pretty place and had an ocean dip afterwards. Deal?
Join the IndieBeers event 1x month in Lisbon
So now that I dropped the hustle-word, lemme explain what you should hustle for and wtf IndieBeers are: beers that are drunk by indie hackers. People who hack together several to0o0o0ls indie(pendently) from a boss. For maximum autonomy they hack together Shopify, Zapier, Mailchimp, Stripe, Excel, well, whatsoever software with a pinch of custom code to create a scrappy new piece of the internet. They hustle to eventually make some magic money - if they listen to customers and open their hearts and pockets (the difficult but joyful part).
Some of these guys meet up in Lisbon 1x month and have some beers. Kinda same people turn up every month and the event is in demand; usually 100+ people sign up :) Come and hang. To then eventually end up together in that very cute library in Eri or in the very very cute free public castle coworking in Lisbon.
Go to the open coffee event 1x month in Ericeira
If you are wayyyyyyy too lazy to move your ass to Lisbon, well then good luck with the business options in Eri. There is the open coffee thing 1x month. Even though every time I think it’s gonna be boring this time, always something nice is happening somehow. Even if you just meet the dude you previously met at volleyball and he introduces you to someone else.
You can go to the front and talk 2 minutes about (1) how you can help others and (2) what you need from others. Sounds networky, but is surprisingly fun most of them time. It did help me to start talking about erijoy with strangers. It did.
Eri is not on the Lisbon map as such
As a proper business person, you also smell some optiii-potential there to have some more Eribusiness gangs? Meai too. Funny thing, the Lisbon-Ericeira conversion rate is high - many Lisbon people are usually sold in seconds to visit Ericeira asap when I give my lil speech. Oftentimes, Ericeira was simply not on their map, e.g. I’ve heard “is that across the river?”
What a beautiful marketing issue and not a product issue to have, aye. And I have seen how quite some Eri people successfully imported Lisbon people and finally provided them with a proper Portugal Insta beach life. As any good hometown friend would expect from someone living in Portugal. Just saying.
But, who should we import to Ericeira .. from the world?
Let’s be honest: you crave to import brainy people to do brainy things with them. You like them, cause you yourself have not yet optimised opening up your heart and feeling into your soul?? Well, that’s a yap for another time. The 2 of us just talk about something else and you open up your heart to a coach for now. Heard there is a massive hidden gem lying on the other side of opening ya heart (but just heard about others feelings, not done my own ROI calc yet).
So you like brainy, ambitious, financy, tooly, boardgamy, podcasty ………… curious people? Meai too. Do I want to talk with them about business? Not really .. most of the time. It’s more that I enjoy feeling their kind of brains in action on anything they say or do.
How do brainy people reveal themselves? By what they do for work, i.e. how they enjoy their brains all day? Maybea. So while we’re at it, which brainy people in the world do I crave exactly? I think, my brain thinks that they play the following “workish games”. Welcome to ma cute admiration graph - I will add step by step who I admire most - yapyapyap incoming :)
Wait, but why on eriearth would you crave people who play workish games
I think because of this thing called admiration, which, you could argue, is almost a feeling. I don’t know why, but craving people also has something to do with admiration. I think my brain predicts that people I admire will magically expand my universe, hehe.
Also, let’s be kind and save your brain from falsely predicting what will magically appear on that graph. As a rule of thumb, I rather do not admire doctors, lawyers, book authors, politicians, travel guys who saw all 196 countries and show them off in their Insta highlights, rich bitches, xtremely good padel barbies, content creators, surf hostel owners, van persons, shepherds, actors, professional sports people, YouTubers, bungee jumpers, charity owners, retired persons who garden and travel 24/7, podcasters, HR business partners and also not heads of marketing whatsoever, sry. Some other spicy ones incoming 🌶️
IT guys - strong ones only plz
You may have come across the official erijoy-term “strong IT guy” on another page. I like these ones, but I am a bit shy to say why. Anyway, they're at the left of the spectrum, cause they’re solid. So, while IT guys are in fact usually just slaves doing whatever IT, they are also fixers of something very fundamental.
Which theoretically means, they can coach me on how to fix any of my fundamental issues I have with these screens I watch 8h+ a day? Nice. And the strong ones also found a way to fix their health? Impressed. Most admirable way of optimised slaving in ma opinion. Way more admirable than doctors by now, cause those usually overwork insanely and therefore get a bit prainfcked.
Read on in part 2 where I elaborratte on 10 more kinds of people that I admire and why :)
