I stopped spending time with naysayers. No, really I was doing it [cross country bike adventure] for myself, not for anybody else. I've always felt that that's a mistake a lot of people make. You learn in school along about third or second grade that you don't learn to satisfy your curiosity, you learn to satisfy the teacher. So we go through school and by the time you go through high school and college, you become very good at satisfying other people to the point where your own interests are pushed into the background. And then you get employed and you work to satisfy your employer and you get married and you work to satisfy your spouse and you go through an entire lifetime trying to satisfy other people. I've always though that that was kind of stupid. So with making a crazy decision to go off and live on a bicycle it didn't really matter to me that the people around me would somehow lose something from it because it's my life not theirs. Not to be crassly selfish, but it is in fact my life.

So to stay in Columbus, Ohio, because my girlfriend would be sad if I left would be a really stupid decision. It really wasn't an issue. My parents of course were horrified. The first article that came out about this, in fact before I even left, was in the Compuserve magazine. It was called "Steve Roberts: Computing Across America." I hadn't mentioned this [my bicycle journey] to them yet so I sent them a copy of the article thinking this was a good way to inform them. It explains it well and they can deal with it. About two or three days later I get a phone call from my Mother saying "What's a matter Steve? Are you going to be a bum all your life?" Well, it depends on how you define that, Mom.

Having technical consulting and writing background [past occupations] in my bag of tricks, even though I haven't done it for years, gives me a little bit of security. Security is not what's in your bank account at all. It has nothing to do with it and people who think that security is the dollars they have in their investments and the relationship they have with their employers are really in for a nasty surprise when their employer goes belly-up or the value of their investments turns around because of some merger or something and all of a sudden they're panicking. Well, security is what's in your head, that's all. Nobody can take it away from you.

One of the things that's always sort of bugged me, especially in new age culture, is the tendency to have this view that we're talking because we were meant to meet. Oh, give me a break. Yes, the universe is watching out for us and put us next to each other on this plane where we are supposed to have this conversation. I prefer to think that we accumulate wisdom through life and that wisdom helps us decide which of these millions of choices we have per day that we're going to make. You're walking down the street and how many people stop and pass you on the way to the market. You are making eye contact with some of them and maybe one of them smiles in the right way or moves in the right way that you have the wit to seize the moment and say something to that person. So it's recognizing opportunities. In all the little conversations I have on the road and with people I meet I'm just watching for interesting opportunities in people who have something to teach or communicate something worthwhile. So to say if particular events or people have led to my way of thinking, I'd say yes, lots of them. Which in particular, I can't tell you, but every event has some implication. I try to collect events that have implications that move me in interesting directions.

Success is the ratio of all you put out to all you get back. I thought about this for awhile, and I think it was some conversation I was having once with somebody who was about my age and technical bent with about my same technical skills and intelligence and so on who had made completely different choices in life. He was married and had two kids and a secure job with stock options and all of that kind of stuff. He was an old friend and was kind of giving me a hard time in a gentle way for wondering through life in this sort of playfully irresponsible fashion that didn't accumulate "success".

So that got me thinking. It's not your dollars or relationship with your company that makes success. You put out some combination of things: time and effort and risk and maybe money, and inconvenience. All this stuff you spend: effort, sweat, etc. And you get a back a bunch of stuff: money, interesting friends, sex, and interesting places to live, and fun conversations, and new toys. So there's this whole set of transactions that are going on all the time. How do you choose to spend your time and what are you getting in return?

Success is just coming up with a nice ratio of these things. And the silly way to do that is to just figure "I'll just make lots of money and then anything I want I can buy," and some people do that. I have friends who are multimillionaires and have taken that approach that everything else is secondary to accumulating cash. The theory being that if they need a house or computer or bicycle or whatever it is, they can just buy it. But what that often ignores is the quality of life and the environment you end up living in. Would I want to be a millionaire in Los Angeles? No, I'd rather have 10 percent of that and live here on this island.

Pay attention to your passions. I think a lot of people sort of push their passions into the background because of things they "should do." Making decisions based on other people's expectations or paths that are supposedly laid out for you as the right way to do it. You've got to go to school, get your degree, be an employee for awhile, work the career path. All of this is sort of defined as the way things are supposed to happen in our culture. I think that's a bad mistake because listening to your passions, especially if they're valid passions and not just fleeting interests, takes a lot to figure this out.

I mean that's really all I've done. I don't have any grand plans for life. I just do what's fun. That kind of automatically leads to success. If you're enjoying yourself and being creative presumably you'll be doing something interesting. There's a lot of ways to approach this whole body of potential knowledge in this world.

I sometimes use this metaphor of the mind. So you're staring at the Rocky Mountains and all the mineral veins represent knowledge and wealth and products and technology and cool stuff. There are three ways you can interact with this thing. You can kinda hang back and look at it from a distance and say, "Someday I'm going to go up there and know those people." Or, there's two valid ways of doing it. One of them is to be a specialist and chase a mineral vein and be a miner. And you can dig a mine chasing one of the mineral veins and produce things. There's an infinite amount of interesting stuff that you can do, but the personal cost of spending that much time focusing on something is huge. You end up living in a mine. You can spend five years writing the code for a GPS receiver, but in the meantime you haven't done anything else and your view of the world is like this and you see the whole world through the filter of a GPS receiver.

And it's all very good and I'm not saying that it's a bad choice, but it's not the only choice. You can take my approach which is to wonder around everyone else's mines and cross-pollinate. So the guy doing the GPS receiver thing, you can say, "Hey you ought to get together with the guy who's doing the laptop." So I tend to be a cross pollinator rather than the inventor of core technology. That's a lot of the stuff I've done is making the links between different technologies. It's great for me because it keeps me from spending huge amounts of time building all these key parts. And what I do is good for them because often they need to meet each other to make those connections as well.

Most of the interesting stuff happens at the boundaries between specialties. So both are equally valid, both need each other. If somebody is a generalist I like to give this as encouraging advice to people who have been accused in their lives of never finishing anything. I always did that. That's the hallmark of a generalist; you dive into something until you learn it enough to satisfy your curiosity and then you move onto something else. Conventional wisdom is that you can't make a living at that and that you're just wasting your time. "Jack of all trades, master of none," I mean there's all these phrases that sort of downplay the value of that way of looking at things. So my position is that it's absolutely essential and in fact it's called consulting.

The world always dumps on new ideas because they are different and people are really afraid of change. Coming up with a new idea that you actually believe in can actually create hostility. A lot of people get jealous and others are skeptical. There's always obstacles. Just like when I started out on the bike trip. The obstacles were financial, social, family. They weren't huge or insurmountable. But basically my attitude was, "Screw you, I want to do this and don't bother me if you're not going to believe in it, then don't hang around." Some people probably viewed that as very self-centered, but again whose life is it?

And having fun is a key point. A lot of people forget the amount of fun that can be had in life. There's this whole Puritan work ethic that we've been brought up to think that is very important. Work hard with your nose to the grindstone. And that's a component and tool, but the fundamental drive and passion is fun. That's what turns you on and that's what motivates you.