Finding the Open Road: A Guide to Self-Construction Rather Than Mass Production

by Mike Marriner and Nathan Gebhard

A compilation of the wisdom gleaned from Roadtrip Nation's informational interviews and experiences on the road, including a how-to-roadtrip guide--Provided by publisher. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1580087213
• ISBN13: 9781580087216
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Ten Speed Press
• Length: 267 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.6" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

Inspiring read filled w/ youthful idealism and great quotes!

On the first page of the book is the pencil-scrawled mantra: "So, what do you want to do with your life? You should be a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, a consultant," Blah Blah Blah... Everywhere you turn, people try to tell you who to be and what to do with your life. We call that "noise." Block it. Shed it. Leave it for the conformists. As a generation, we need to get back to focusing on individuality. Self-construction rather than mass production. Define your own road in life instead of traveling down somebody else's. Listen to yourself. Your road is the open road. Find it. FIND THE OPEN ROAD." Rather than the three boys having "absolutely no idea what to do with their lives" as the reviewer stated, it was rather the boys realization that they had been following other's expectations and definition of success, to do A, B, and C so that "one day you can retire and THEN start to live your life." They thought `how can one think their path is "right" if they haven't been exposed to anything else?' They brainstormed and decided to take a roadtrip across the country and "talk to people about how they found their roads in life". It was a daunting task, but surprisingly, they obtained a number of interviews through cold-calling and perseverance. The book is graphically minimal, mostly black and white with some RV-green sprinkled throughout. It is organized into five parts, beginning with "The Roadtrip Nation Story," an explanation of the start and inspiration of the project. It continues with "Themes From The Road," an inspiring section filled with great questions, thoughts, and selected interview quotes. A couple of my favorite quotes: "If everything in your life is characterized as `risk versus safety,' the human instinct is to choose safety. But what if you use a whole different standard for reevaluating your life, such as `necessary versus unnecessary.' Things like happiness, passion, and love are all necessary." From that perspective, the real risk would be not having happiness in our lives." "Your life is now. Your life is not going to start when you graduate college. Your life is not going to start when you get married. Your life is now. You have to enjoy your life today...otherwise you're going to be miserable." The third section discusses deciding if you personally need to "hit to road" or not and how to do so. 21 interviews follow, with such diverse people as Larry King, Hugh Hefner, the greenpeace USA director, a NASA astrophysicist, a cartoonist, the "Survivor"/"Apprentice" creator, editor of seventeen magazine, a radio DJ, a poet, and more. The book closes with a journal of their roadtrip. I like this book because it is simple, straightforward, idealistic, and the interviews give it a `legitimateness' more than simply proposing theories and ideas would. The authors suggest that life is not predictable, that living is about the journey and not the destination, and that one needs a personal definition of success free from th