Roadmap

The Get-It-Together Guide for Figuring Out What to Do with Your Life

Nathan Gebhard, Brian McAllister, Mike Marriner

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781452128450
• eBook ISBN: 9781452146317
• Subtopic: Personal Success

This welcome antidote to the conventional career guide answers the old question—"So, what are you going to do with your life?"—in a groundbreaking way. From the team behind the campus and online resource and the inspirational TV series in its eleventh season, ROADMAP helps emerging careerists think deeply about how they can enter the workforce and thrive, using Roadtrip Nation's interest-based approach. Full-color charts and graphs offer a unique visually engaging reading experience and prompts for reflection are interspersed, making the reading process interactive and the discoveries personally impactful. With actionable, real-world wisdom on every page, it's an essential tool for today's young professionals and the parents, educators, and advisors seeking to inspire them.

CHAPTER 1

THE INVISIBLE ASSEMBLY LINE

Here’s a big, goofy cliché: you can be whomever you want to be. We just cringed as we wrote that, but nevertheless it happens to be true.

So how did this corny afterschool-special cliché become a tired trope rather than an empowering truism? Maybe because the world we navigate forces us to ignore its underlying truth. In the name of security, we put aside what we might truly want. We pay our dues. We put our heads down and work hard, chugging along on a preplotted path that promises stability, security, and comfort. But in the quiet moments, we have a nagging feeling. Is this the path we’re supposed to be on? Are we fulfilled? Satisfied? Are we living our lives or are our lives living us? Are there choices we could be making that better speak to who we are? Are we on the right road?

For some people, finding the “right” road is easy (or at least it seems like it to those of us standing off on the side). They seem to be living the life they want to live, they appear to be successful, thriving, and happy in the roles they’ve chosen. For most of us, however, finding that road feels like an exercise in impossibility. We get stuck. And lost. We feel afraid of the unknown or incapable of bold action. We become bogged down by the responsibilities we face and the choices in front of us.

If the road belongs to us, why is it so difficult to get on it? Why can’t we force that cliché back into truth? The answer lies in a particularly sneaky aspect of human nature. Just as a deluge of rain pounding a dry hillside will form into rivulets that trickle downhill—beating tracks of least resistance into the earth—as individuals, we tend to fall into the paths that society has already created for us. This process starts early in our lives and is devilishly hard to shake. And while there can be value in the tried-and-true (there’s nothing wrong with everybody wearing pants, for instance), following by rote restricts individual experience and inhibits potential.

Think about it this way: If you live on the North American continent, outside your door is a road that will get you to New York City. You can pull out a map and take any route you want, winding through purple mountain majesties and amber waves of whatnot and stopping at as many roadside tourist traps as you’d like. You can explore sleepy towns off the beaten path, you can stop off for a few cheesesteaks in Philly or roll up to the Grand Tetons, and no matter where you happen to be, you will still be on the road to New York City. But if you punch your destination into your phone’s GPS, it will lead you directly to the closest highway. It will tell you exactly how far it is to New York and estimate exactly how long it will take you to get there. And it will be a nonstop march that’s as straight as possible. You’ll have certainty but no cheesesteaks, no time for exploring, just you in your car on the very same highway that everybody else takes. This is exactly what society’s formula for “success” is like: a one-size-fits-all, bumper-to-bumper haul that ignores the nuances of who you really are.

This is the Invisible Assembly Line, and chances are you’re on it.

Our personal Assembly Lines are built cog by cog from all the expectations, education, societal gimmicks, well-meaning advice, and preprogrammed choices that we’ve absorbed from the day we crawled out of the sandbox and wondered what we would be when we grew up. Whether we’re pushed to become doctors or lawyers or to work in the family business, or whether we’re informed (“for our own good”) that our aspirations are beyond us, all those fears and all that conditioning define our decisions and our expectations without our being aware that it’s happening. But it is happening.

That’s where we began—on the Assembly Line. The first Roadtrip was forged by a numbing fear that we were locked into preplotted “career” destinations: a doctor, a business consultant, or the next in line to run the family business. None of these options had anything to do with who we really were, but they had everything to do with the expectations we had absorbed. And it filled all of us with a jittery sense of panic. We were afraid we’d wake up one day in high-thread-count, Egyptian cotton sheets in cookie-cutter homes with the devastating realization that we’d been living someone else’s dream.

Of course, signing up for the Assembly Line template provides the seductive perceived comfort of safety in numbers. After all, if everyone is making the same few choices, those choices must be the right ones. That’s the trickiest part: When you’re on the Assembly Line, you often don’t even know what your options are. The Assembly Line does the heavy lifting of defining happiness for you; it provides a script to follow, but it’s not written for you as an individual. The folks we’ve met on the road, the Leaders—each with their own constellation of interests, experiences, talents, and ambitions—have all discovered ways to change the scripts they were handed.

Rewriting that script can be one of the most difficult acts in your life. It might upset people close to you, it might shake the foundations of your worldview, and it might be scary. The political activist and BET host Jeff Johnson* remembers rejecting the Assembly Line while he was in college on a track scholarship.

As Jeff became more involved in student politics at his school’s Black Student Union, his track coach confronted him: “I didn’t bring you here for that. I brought you here to go to class and to run track.” Jeff’s Assembly Line was starkly clear: “star athlete,” not “rabble-rousing activist.”

Much to his coach’s surprise (and his father’s anger), Jeff made the tough choice to reject the scholarship so that he could pursue his interests in school with a clear conscience. In rejecting the preprogrammed route, no matter how scary doing so was, Jeff found an important lesson that he continues to share with others.

www.roadtripnation.com/leader/jeff-johnson

“Most people who are successful . . . didn’t do what everybody else did. They didn’t go the same routes everybody else went. It is the people who think outside the box in whatever discipline they are in who shake the world. No one’s looking around at the people who followed a manual saying, ‘My God, they followed that manual in a way that was just inspiring.’ It is the people who throw the manual away and say there is something beyond this that I can share, or that I can give, or that I can invest, who become successful.”

—JEFF JOHNSON, BET host and political activist

Being stuck on the Assembly Line often manifests itself as a nagging feeling in your gut that things should be better than they are. That gut feeling is what launches the first phase of your journey. It’s time to get to the root of what’s causing that anxiety.

Start by asking yourself questions—not just about the road you’re already on, but deeply personal questions about who you are and what you want. In short, at this moment, it’s time to be selfish. It’s time to focus inward to uncover your individuality and to spend some time asking the questions th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About Roadtrip Nation
• The Roadtrip Nation Interview Archive
• Introduction
• Part One: Let Go
• Part Two: Define
• Part Three: Become
• Projects
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Chronicle Ebooks