Roadtrip Nation: Find Your Path in Life was written (with help) after two college students decided to take a road trip and interview various people to find out how they got to where they were in life. As college seniors (this is in 2000, I believe), they found the paths that seemed to be laid out for them unappealing (one was a business major; the other pre-med; both were just following the family roads). As they put it, “We needed more information. We needed more experience. We needed to meet more people.” They wanted to go beyond the boundaries of the college campus, so they rented an RV, got some money from Monster.com to keep a blog, and hit the road, hitting places like New York, Boston, Maine, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, as well as their home town of LA.
The book itself seems to be a compilation of interviews with people they met with on their second trip, which was also made into a documentary. Their interviewees range from Gary Erickson, the founder/owner of Clif Bar and Denis Muren, the special effects whiz behind Star Wars to “buzz marketing queen” at Yahoo Luanne Calvert and Manny the Lobsterman, who I personally found the most inspiring, precisely I suppose because he eschewed the corporate world, opting for a life of diving and fishing over working in computers.
The overall message of the book is to find your own path, more or less. Many of the folks in the book either didn’t finish college, or went into careers totally different from where they started. Some of them are just examples of living your passion, like Benjamin Zander, an international conductor and composer. I think what’s useful about this book for college students is that it shows that “what you major in” is not necessarily the make or break decision of your life. There is also a lot in here about having to take risks and believing in yourself, no matter what you want to do, and taking opportunities when they come before you.
The one frustrating thing I found was that several of the interviewees in their reflections noted that they could take the risks they could (usually in their 20s) because they were young and didn’t have families who were counting on them. Not so great if you’re a parent! Nobody addressed the work/life balance question, which is increasingly a concern for young families–I often read that this is more of a concern for Gen X’ers and especially Gen Y’ers than the Boomers (and most of the people interviewed were Baby Boomers). It seems these people got where they were by making some significant sacrifices and probably losing a hell of a lot of sleep. Still, I found a lot of inspiration in this book, and I think it’s a great read for college students, even if the economical outlook is grimmer than it was at the time the book came out. There’s a lot of wisdom in these pages.
At the end, the authors give recommendations for taking your own road trip. Even doing something like this on a small scale is a good idea, especially if you’re in the last year or so of college. They give specific instructions for finding and contacting people, and getting them to talk to you. In HR speak, this is called requesting an “informational interview”–but these guys have some tricks up their sleeves to make them really work!
Since the book came out, Roadtrip Nation has become a movement; they’ve been on PBS and apparently, at least this past summer, you could apply to take your own road trip. There is more information, videos, links, etc, at their website, www.roadtripnation.com.
Good luck on your road trip!
The Book: Roadtrip Nation: Find Your Path in Life by Mike Marriner and Nathan Gebhard with Joanne Gordon (New York: Ballantine, 2003).
