What You Are Looking For in a Trip of Your Own

I want to share an author with everyone — and a question of his that made me more aware of looking for meaning, and of understanding myself better, in what I hope for and what I learn from the trips I have taken and may yet take.

Pico Iyer is a British-born writer of Indian descent who writes books and essays about travel, and someone who until quite recently still refused to use a smartphone, to hold on to his concentration and to his own way of writing. When he talks about experience — whether it is a one-day trip, a trip of many days, or a whole journey of moving to and living in another country — beyond his advice about observing, about walking in order to look, Pico lays particular weight on REFLECTING on those experiences of your own.

Let me share Pico’s 3 questions on TED Ideas again:

"3 questions that turn a trip — even a day trip! — into a life-changing one."

1. "What moved me most over the course of my trip?"
2. "What surprised me most on my trip?"
3. "How might my trip move me to think or live my life a little differently?"

After reading up on the Peak-End Rule in travel, especially as it applies to people who design experiences — it is a principle from psychology which says that people tend to judge an experience by how they felt at its most intense moment (peak) and at the moment it ended (end), rather than by the whole of it — I realised we can put those questions together with this principle: build any experience at all for the people we love, or for our customers, and it is bound to produce a great many memorable ones.

The most recent time I had an experience that answered question 3 was last month, when I dropped by Ân’s La.Kao Tea in Hội An. Drinking that cold-brewed "welcome tea" inspired me to start trying cold-brew earl grey at home — something I had never once done in all these years.

https://ideas.ted.com/3-questions-for-a-life-changing-trip/