oRIGINS OF A rALLYING cRY
I enjoy hearing musicians or former musicians talk about their time on tour. Especially when they were just successful enough to have gone on tour, but not successful enough where it would’ve been easy. I enjoy hearing about the effort it took to find couches to sleep on, the sketchy venues, or the old secondhand van that kept falling apart. These make much more interesting stories than the luxury coaches and hotel accommodations at every stop.
I enjoy these stories because I’ve had a little taste of that life.
My music talent is pretty much nonexistent, so I shouldn’t actually be that familiar with the touring life. Except that I found my way to it by doing something that’s much more within my skillset.
Nonprofit marketing.
I went on tour to promote an organization I really care about and still do.
Technically speaking, this was my first gig out of college. It was an internship that turned into something so much more. I would be touring around the country to talk up the plight of North Koreans, sharing documentaries about the human rights crisis in North Korea and raising funds to help its refugees.
The logline for this adventure seemed like a blast: Take a roadtrip around the country… for North Koreans! It was the right combination of fun, meaningful, and bizarre that I gravitate towards.
That gig also happened to be a lot of work. We had to begin our tour by booking our took. This took a grassroots effort of identifying contacts, making phone calls, sending emails, and arranging events. Some of those days we spent over fourteen hours on outreach, and that was before the tour even began.
Once we hit the road, the work was just as demanding. Now we had to deliver the presentations and meet with people, often while still putting together later legs of the tour. I often said that it was essentially a 24 hour workday. We were always in closed quarters, often making public appearances, and never really off the clock.
We slept wherever we could find housing, often asking the organizers of our events if they knew anyone with a spare room or couch. A couple nights we were comped hotel rooms. Other nights we slept in the van. It was a total wild card.
Food was somewhat similar. I was a 22 year old new graduate at the time, meaning I had very little money. Thankfully my route covered much of the midwest where our hosts would often invite us out to eat, often showing us the quirky food item that was the source of local pride.
Along with the hard work came a rush of unpredictability.
Somewhere amidst the hustle of making this tour happen and remembering to breathe along the way, a mantra started to emerge. My teammates and other groups on tour started to echo a phrase that turned into a rally cry.
Leave it all on the road.
It’s nearly been fifteen years since that life-changing tour and the phrase still speaks volumes to me.
Leave it all on the road.
When you’re essentially living in a van with two other people for several months and going from city to city, you don’t have a lot of room to hide from each other. You need to figure out how to get along. Things will come up to work through and the best thing to do is to deal with it proactively. Be honest and forgiving and leave it all on the road.
When you hit your third month on the road and a lot of the novelty of the experience has worn off, you’ll need to stop and give yourself some important reminders. This experience you’re having, the fact that you get to do this meaningful and unusual thing, is a total gift. You don’t want to miss out on being present for this very transformative chapter of your story. Don’t leave anything undone. Leave it all on the road.
As challenging as this experience can be at times, you have what it takes to meet those challenges head on. Support your team, give it your best, and leave it all on the road.
The phrase took a much more sobering turn two years after I had toured. I had moved on to a new chapter in my life, but other groups had risen up to take their turn on the road. It just so happened that on my 24th birthday, the group that was driving in my old van collided with an oil tanker in Texas. None of them survived.
Even though I never got to meet them, they were in my circle because of the experience we shared.
One of the things I loved from when we were working on the cause, for the North Korean people, was that everyone showed up with such purpose. There was a strong sense that what we were doing mattered. So much so that we would reroute a season of our lives for doing this. That sense of clarity and meaning underscored the notion of leaving it all on the road.
This wasn’t hustle culture for the sake of hustle, or for the accumulation of wealth or accomplishments.
This was living fully.
Life this year has been strange. There are so many challenges I didn’t expect. So many changes and transitions. At the same time, the broader social climate is a big mess, and so many people in my life have endured personal losses and tragedies. When I’m taking the bigger view of things, I know it’s just one chapter of a story with many highs, lows, and plot twists. But there are times when it gets especially hard to see what’s around the next corner and this is one of those times.
All I can say is that this too, is a time to leave it all on the road.
A time to show up and to live wholeheartedly.
To put in your best effort, even at a time when trying often feels futile.
Sometimes you gotta keep faith that it’s going somewhere.
Leave it all on the road.