Becoming A Road Warrior For Beginners: Start Here

You have been lied to. You have been told that travel wears on everyone, that it’s normal to be exhausted after a long business trip, that it’s expected to just need some recovery time.

Except you don’t have recovery time. You have more work to do, and another flight to get on next week (or even sooner). So you just have to suck it up and live with the exhaustion.

Hi, I’m Coleman, author of The Road Warrior, and I can tell you firsthand that none of this is true.

Traveling for work doesn’t have to be exhausting. It doesn’t have to sap your energy and focus. Every person who tells you otherwise just needs a better way to travel — a better way to live their life on the road.

It’s possible to be in control of your life and your health, anywhere. No matter how much time you spend on the road or in a plane.

Welcome to The Road Warrior, where people who travel for work learn how to achieve their full potential.

This site started as a byproduct of writing the book — a place where I could elaborate or expand on its ideas and explain things that weren’t going to fit in (or were a little too much of a tangent for) its pages.

But it’s since taken on a life of its own, detailing a variety of experiments, adventures, and research in helping busy people (and specifically busy people who travel for work) achieve their full potential, anywhere.

What exactly does that mean? Glad you asked.

Achieve your full potential, anywhere

Achieving your full potential means getting the most out of your day, your week, and your life whether you’re at your home office or 1000 miles away from it.

But really, it means making intentional choices about what you’re doing, and how, and why. It’s about refusing to go on autopilot or believe ‘bleh’ is a fine way feel. It’s about doing your own research and making the best choices that lead to the best outcomes for you, including deciding what exactly those are.

Work travel is a weird, counterintuitive lifestyle. The problems aren’t all that different from the ones homebound folks face, but they’re harder versions of the same problems. There’s less room for error, and fewer ways to stumble your way into success.

Which is to say: if you aren’t regularly, actively molding it to what you need out of it, it’s molding you. Probably into something you’re not going to enjoy seeing in the mirror in one, five, or ten years.

Even more specifically, it means a major focus on your health, your time, and your stress.

Health doesn’t need to be your only concern, but it should be one of your top priorities. Healthy, fit professionals get more done, get treated better, and are better able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Health is the ultimate productivity hack.

Many, many things in business (and life, really) rely on chance. Especially when you’re on the road.

Thankfully, just as many don’t. Achieving your full potential anywhere is about identifying the things you can change, and changing them.

How to use this website

To borrow from Merlin Mann’s inimitable 43 Folders, start by asking yourself a small-but-important question: why am I here right now instead of making my life a little bit better? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now?

As someone whose favorite procrastination tool is reading productivity blogs and research studies, I can tell you firsthand: gathering information without taking action is no better than doing nothing at all.

There’s no one right place to start, no such thing as a perfect plan, no obvious finish line, and no sudden Whole-30 lifestyle overhaul to accomplish. You’ve just got get to it.

Stay on this website long enough to pick exactly one thing to improve, and then find one new angle, approach, or tactic to help you make the next step towards improving it.

Then, get the heck out of here.

Seriously. Stop reading. Close the tab. Spend a few days, weeks, or even months actually doing the work of making your life better. We’ll still be here.

Eventually, you will find yourself either stuck or victorious. That’s when you come back, to find the next thing that will move you a little bit farther down the path.

Glad to have you.