When I first left work, I was surprised by how few steps there were to start traveling. At their most basic, they were:
1. Quit
2. Buy a one way ticket
3. Pack and board the plane
Obviously there are many more steps to doing this responsibly, mostly around planning and preparing for the journey (e.g., buying health and travel insurance, picking must-do experiences, moving items into storage, etc.) but to get started, all I really needed to do was the first one and I knew the rest would fall into place.
However, I realized there were two key steps (steps -1 and 0, if you will) that I needed to take before I left Redstone. To explain these steps, I first need to explain how I currently understand change. Change happens when resources, capacity, and motivation band together to overcome default state.
The default state is the expected status quo. My default state, at this point in my life as a young and inexperienced recent-college alumnus, is to work hard to start advancing in my career. This is the default state because, in all likelihood, I'll return to it when I come back from my travels. I view the default state similar to the bottom of a hill when rolling a rock up it. It takes energy to move the rock up and, eventually, the rock will have to come back down to its resting place. In this metaphor, pushing the rock requires the resources to push (e.g., food), capacity to push, and motivation to push. To define each in more detail:
Resources are material possessions, and usually the most important among them is money. One of the key reasons I can travel is that I have no debt and I saved up enough to not have to work for an extended period of time.
Capacity, at its most basic, is time. I needed the time to travel, which I obtained when I left Redstone.
Motivation is trickier to explain. Right now, I define it as the desire and drive to overcome the challenges that entrench the default state. For me, most of these were internal barriers I made for myself, such as, "you can't quit because you need more experience to do what you want to do later in life", "you can't quit because you need to start saving to buy a house and support your family", or "you can't leave your friends because you'll be lonely and they'll find new ones." It was important to realize that all of these barriers are solvable but are not easy to solve, thus the drive to overcome these challenges is vital. Motivation has two components - internal and external. While internal motivation can be influenced by others and the world around you (the most classic example being peer pressure), I believe that internal motivation is more sustainable than external motivation because, at the end of the day, it is you who has to overcome the challenges. I think external motivators are most useful in getting started - there is nothing like peer accountability to make you take your first few steps.
Back to the point, I am privileged to have graduated without debt and to have found a fulfilling job right out of college that paid well enough for me to save enough to travel, completing step -1. However, finding the motivation to travel, step 0, was the hardest for me. I kept worrying about the opportunity costs of not working and leaving the familiar.
One of the key moments that solidified my decision to travel was when I developed a narrative hypothesis (or draft story) for why I wanted to travel that moved beyond “seeing the world.” Through exercises like odyssey planning, I explored different careers I thought I could be interested in when I return and identified how travel would benefit those careers. That reasoning in turn helped me define areas of interest and personal goals for the trip (which I described in my first blog post). It was only when I articulated these interests and goals that traveling felt less like an escape from professional life and more like a productive step forward in all facets of my life from personal to professional.
I'm very curious to see how defining and refining my personal narratives can help me make decisions moving forward and how my narrative hypothesis for my travels will evolve in the months to come.