Part Four: I Quit – Jedidiah Jenkins

At the time, Jenkins was a copywriter and lawyer for the nonprofit Invisible Children. (You might remember the viral Kony 2012 campaign—that was them.) “I had spent my 20s trying new things. I went to law school, then moved into human-rights work. I never predicted I would do any of that,” he says. His job was all-consuming, so he figured that his dream of writing a book would fail if he didn’t have the time to dedicate himself to it fully. “I realized that I wanted to write a memoir, but felt inadequate at only 30 years old. I hadn’t lived long enough to have a lot to say,” he says. So then I thought, ‘If I do something objectively interesting, I can write about that.’” And the big bike trip came to be.

He had two key role models to look to: His parents walked across America in the 1970s and wrote about it for National Geographic. “They lived adventurously and authentically. That had a huge impact on me,” he says. After garnering a massive online following while writing about his travels, Jenkins has returned home to LA, where he recently launched a magazine, Wilderness, and is working on a novel based on his cross-continental adventure. “Once this book is born, we’ll see what happens next. I try not to climb another mountain until I’m at the top of the one I’m already climbing. You can see better up there.”