Travel, then startup. I'm kinda doing it backwards at the moment, but I did a fair amount of traveling before going to work at this place and it was some of the

Travel, then startup. I'm kinda doing it backwards at the moment, but I did a fair amount of traveling before going to work at this place and it was some of the most valuable life experience I've ever had. I think that if I can sum it up in a thought it's this: there is a remarkable difference between reading and thinking and reasoning about a subject, and actually experiencing it. Even if I don't use many of the facts I learned while traveling (i.e. the odds and ends of the Knights of St. John's defense of Rhodes against the Turks and their subsequent move to Malta), I learned that it's one thing to read about the layered defense of Rhodes, and another to actually walk among it. In other words, I can read and reason all I want about the situation of my customers, and their problems and solutions to those problems, but until I actually get about working with them, in their space, on their problem set, with their data, and within their constraints, I'll never really get their issues and thus never really provide a 1-1 solution for those issues. It might seem like a simple concept, one I thought I understood before I set about traveling far and wide, but I really grokked it much better after seeing the world and trying to understand. (oh, and the never ending different national interpretations of historic world events I find endlessly fascinating and very perspective setting -- very helpful when understanding how to think like your customers)