I’m a Milellionaire

I spelled that correctly. This article is not a celebration of making a million dollars but a celebration of a life filled with adventure and experience. I’m typing this article on a cross-country flight. I land on the West Coast around 8:30 am PST and will be on a return flight 16 hours later just after midnight local time. It’s flights like these that have brought me to where I sit today, 996,797 miles flown on Delta Air Lines . At the end of this flight, I will be a Milellionaire.

This wasn’t in the cards for me initially. I took my very first plane ride ever when I was 23 years old. Up until that point, the furthest I had ever been from home was on a Greyhound bus ride from Pittsburgh, PA to Jackson, MS shortly after I graduated from high school. If someone had told me then that I would cover that distance a thousand more times and by airplane, I would have dropped to the ground and rolled around laughing at the absurdity of their prediction. Yet, here we are 26 years later. I should mention that I have actually flown many more miles in my life, just on other airlines. I was Chairman’s Preferred on USAir and 1K on United. I flew Singapore Airlines between Newark and India exclusively for 5 years, but 1 million miles on a single airline was something I truly couldn’t have even imagined over the first half of my life. Here are some of the life lessons I have learned as a frequent business traveler.

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The World is Smaller Than You Think

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I should probably mention that I grew up without a car in my family. I took the bus everywhere I went until I was 21 years old. When you don’t have transportation, the world is a much bigger place. A neighborhood friend would move 30 miles away, and we would all know that we would never see them again. They had “moved away.” When I first moved to California (my 3rd flight ever), my family gathered for a party to send me off. At the time, I was preparing myself for saying goodbye to some of them for the final time. It had taken me nearly a quarter century to fly to California. Realistically, how many times did I expect to be back over the next 25 years? When you don’t travel, the world seems like a bigger place.

Honestly, moving to San Francisco wouldn’t have seemed any further than moving to China for me at the time. It all seemed much too far away. When I started to fly, I realized just how quickly you could move from place to place. I was able to drop in on customers for a coffee in Virginia, eat dinner with another customer in Los Angeles on the same day, and then sleep in my own bed in San Francisco that night. Over the span of a few months, I started to realize that there was an entire swath of the public who were completely mobile.

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The World is More Similar Than You Think

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When you don’t go anywhere, you imagine every place in the world as completely different from every other place. It’s not that there aren’t local/regional things that make places unique, but I would posit that Dallas, Texas is much more similar to Miami, Florida than you would initially think. Sure, there are people walking around Dallas in cowboy boots and people walking around Miami with surfboards, but “normal” life in both places still consists of driving on highways and byways, shopping plazas filled with anchor stores that you recognize, and national food chains serving items from the very same menu with a promise of food that tastes the same in each location. I learned to celebrate the uniqueness of each place, but I also appreciate the familiarity in helping to get immediately acclimated. If you have boarded a plane, landed in Phoenix, Arizona, jumped in a rental car, checked into your hotel, then headed out for dinner, you may have never done the same thing in Salt Lake City, Utah or Huntington, West Virginia, but I promise you that you are more than prepared to do so.

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There are More Opportunities Available Than You Think

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When I graduated high school, I enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s a fine institution with a great academic program. That isn’t why I enrolled there, though. I enrolled there because I literally had never been anywhere else, and the thought of attending a school out of state seemed a lot like being asked to attend university on the moon.

Travel means you don’t have to limit yourself to education, business, or social opportunities inside of your area code. When a great job opportunity later opened up for me in Philadelphia, I packed my bags and moved back across the country with 10% of the anxiety of the first move. By the time opportunities opened up in Manhattan, Washington, DC, London, Denver, Miami… the idea of moving wasn’t stressful at all. I knew what to expect, and I appreciated the opportunities that were available to me in each new place that would have eluded me for longer if I only thought locally. Traveling to a bunch of places made it easier to live in a bunch of places. Living in a bunch of places made the path to turbocharging my career more efficient.

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Face to Face is STILL the Best Way to Close a Business Deal

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Before the explosion of video conferencing tied to remote work, there were plenty of ways to stay in contact with customers and prospects: phone, email, text, video, etc. But the top way to connect with people was face-to-face. Now that the whole world has gotten used to meeting over Zoom, Webex, TEAMS, Skype, Chime, Spaces, Telepresence, FaceTime (and on and on and on), it turns out that face-to-face is still king. In fact, I would argue that face-to-face is even more valuable now that everyone is not doing it.

Today, I am investing 24 hours and 3,400 air miles into a customer relationship on the West Coast. I almost certainly could have lobbied for this meeting to take place virtually, but I would have lost the opportunity for cross talk, lost the opportunity to eat a meal with my customer and catch up on their plans for the year. I would have missed an opportunity to discuss their personal goals instead of just the goals their company has for them. If you aren’t traveling to see your clients, then good luck competing against the person who is doing it.

You don't become a Milellionaire by yourself. You need the people in your life that hold you down and take care of things at home while you are conquering on the road. You need the hospitality of 10,000 airline and hotel workers plus taxi drivers, uber drivers and a willingness of other people to meet with you face to face on the other end of the flight. If you have the opportunity to travel for work then take the opportunity. Every trip makes the world a smaller, more familiar place and expands your network outside of your immediate proximity. If a person who had never flown at all for 23 years can become a Milellionaire then so can you.