The great American roadtrip…I think every young guy needs to do one. It's our rite of passage.
When I was 24 I was celebrating my first sober year and previous year’s business success.
So I decided to spend 6 weeks riding my motorcycle across the country by myself.
I started in San Francisco, went all over Colorado, then Tennessee, onto North Carolina.
On the way home Texas, Arizona, New Mexico.
I stayed in motels, couch surfed, and camped. And met so many people. The entire trip cost maybe $2000 (or less).
The entire trip took 45 days and was 9000 miles.
Some highlights:
- I got pulled over by a cop when I was unknowingly going 90 MPH for miles. He saw my grandfather's photograph in my saddlebag (he was a cop, we had just met in Oklahoma and he gave me his photo, so I kept it so I could see it while driving) the officer let me go with a warning and said "it pays to have a pig in the family."
- Stayed at the famous “clown motel” in Las Vegas.
- Tons of random convos with people at gas stations
- Using a couch surfing app and meeting people from all walks of life
The trip changed my life.
It sounds corny, but wandering around the country has a cool way of showing that your life defaults - like how you live, where you live, how you respond to things – those are choices you make. And being on the road, by yourself, meeting different types of people…makes you realize that.
Plus, I met my wife a week after I got back and was able to impress her with cool stories.
So if you’re reading this and you’re in your early 20s, do it.
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Some of the best pics below
My friend Henrik spent 25 years studying why smart, successful people make terrible decisions with their money.
His research has been cited over 7,000 times and covered by the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Time Magazine, and more. He’s one of the most decorated behavioral finance researchers alive.
He ran studies on 38,000 Swedish twins and found that the tendency to panic sell, chase performance, and hold losing positions too long is genetic.
And education doesn’t fix it.
Reading the investing books doesn’t fix it.
Knowing about your biases doesn’t fix it.
Every founder I know thinks they’ll be the exception. Henrik has the data that says otherwise.
He also found something that matters even more for founders specifically. Whatever you do with your money in the first 90 days after a big exit is probably what you’ll still be doing 20 years later. Financial inertia is permanent.
I just talked to him on Moneywise. This episode hits different.
Comes out next week.
@chrishume_@ANC_CA Whites is known for craftsmanship. The price is pretty aligned with the product, in my opinion. Many of their products are $600-$900 and great MiUSA boots are $1000-$2000.
i worked for sam for just over a year.
in that timeframe i became a 10x better copywriter.
example
I'd write something, send it to him, and i'd get a text at like 11pm saying, "this sentence is written in a passive voice. it makes you sound soft. you bench 400 pounds. write in an active voice."
h/t @thesamparr
45 days after I started and it was AWESOME to see San Francisco again.
One thing I learned was that no matter what state you're in, people in general are all the same.
Country folks are country folks no matter where they are. City folks are city folks regardless of the region.
There are friendly, mean, helpful, and racist people everywhere...but 95% of folks are genuinely nice and trustworthy.