Roadtrip Nation: A Guide to Discovering Your Path In Life by Nathan Gebhard, Mike Marriner, and Joanne Gordon is promoted as a guide for college graduates, but this book is truly an entrepreneurial bible for every age. It follows two young men who graduated from college and didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives. So, they hopped in an RV and drove across the country interviewing people about their jobs.Â
The interviewees range from Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander to a lobsterman. What’s most intriguing, however, is that rather than delivering stale status reports from founders of companies like Barnes & Noble, Starbucks and Dell, you’ll learn what drove these visionaries to buck the system, overcome objections, and follow their passions. In essence Marriner and Gebhard asked these extremely successful entrepreneurs “what the heck were you thinking way back then?â€?
And, that’s what I liked most. Because almost all of the entrepreneurs in the book were repeatedly discouraged by others from pursuing their business plans. So, whenever anyone would tell me things like, you can’t possibly start another women’s network in Boston, I would remember that someone once told Benjamin Zander, that he was so bad at composing, he should never be allowed to do so again. Good thing he listened to the music and not that one critic.
And, after launching Boston, I was then told that I couldn’t break into the NYC market. That’s when I would remind myself that someone once told Howard Schultz that Italian style coffeehouses would never work in the US. Thank goodness he also ignored them or I would be blogging from Dunkin’ Donuts instead of Starbucks!
Looks like the book is out of publication, but you can still get a copy from other resellers through Amazon. However, the guys are still roadtripping. To check out what they’re up to now, visit www.roadtripnation.com.
The Bottom Line: This book is for anyone who has ever woken up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and thought “what the heck am I doing with my life?” Keep this book by your bedside and your dreams at the forefront.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
