Thoughts on travel, life ... and that baseline 20%

In travel, as in life, willingness to invest a little anticipatory time and effort pays big dividends. It may sound like a lot of work to learn, think, read, wrestle, plan for a trip in advance. Even just a bit. And in some ways it is. Isn’t half the fun just “showing up”?

But the painful reality, as people wiser than I have observed, is that failure to plan is a plan to fail.

Even a small amount of energy invested in advance profoundly enriches the actual experience once you are there, enabling you to travel (and live!) proactively instead of reactively. Explore and experience a city, a region — or a life-transition — on your own terms, rather than simply have it "happen to you." Discover things others will likely miss. Make the most of your time once you reach your destination. Maybe even have more fun along the way!

Some of us love to really go at it, explore all the options, push out the possibilities before we even get wherever we may be going. We are wired to live that way, and find it life-giving to do so — while others who are wired differently may look on with dismay, and feel exhausted just observing such a process. They innately expend their life-energy in other ways, equally valuable but different, which is a topic for another day.

The good news — even for "those people" (you know who you are!) is that the 80/20 rule obtains here, in spades. 20% effort expended in advance — before you are in the thick of things … even if the process is somewhat unnatural for you — will produce a bountiful 80% return.

Some may be innately inclined to press in, push things out, invest 60%, 90% - or even "110%" effort, whatever that really means. If that's you, you know what it means, and you're "all in". Probably because that's your default mode in life. If that's not you, you may prefer to not even think about what it might mean :-), which is fine.

Or, you may choose to function that way in other areas, but not in the realm of travel. Which is OK as well. But travel has a way of reminding us of these and other realities that quietly influence the quality of our actual, every-day lives. And one of the gifts of traveling “over there” is that we tend to notice some things about life back home — to see ourselves and our world afresh — when removed from our familiar props and settings.

However, no matter our innate style, each of us will find that a proactive, baseline 20% investment in advance yields disproportionate rewards, over time. This is frequently true in the travel realm. And surprisingly true in life, as the decades roll by.

In both areas, choosing not to do so means you will, more often than would be necessary, find yourself in situations where you realize you have no real clue what is happening and how to resolve it. You will thus be forced to react, and/or find someone else to do the thinking for you, for better or for worse … which often comes at a cost. But in either case the choices you're left with at that point will likely be less than optimal.

Or, alternately, you can invest just a base amount of effort, in advance. Which allows you — later, in the heat of the moment — to draw on that limited but suddenly useful prep work with surprisingly little effort. When and as needed, you'll be able to tap just the right resource.

You’ll have just enough at hand to be able to respond, rather than react.

You'll be equipped and empowered to choose your course of action. You'll find that you can "lean in" rather than break and run for cover or try to just quietly extricate yourself. Situations that might otherwise lead to meltdowns, or become experiences you'd be happy to just survive, can actually morph into enriching markers on your life-journey.

Stories from your travels — around the world, and in life! — might even grow beyond survival stories that are fun to tell at a party, into stories that people around you find encouraging, inspiring, even useful on their own journeys, down the road.