June 6, 2025
Never Travel in a Straight Line:
Self-Leadership Strategies to Discover Your Life’s Purpose and Live Out Your Passions
Jim Menge
Sierra Pine Productions (2025)
ISBN: 979-8992544114
New Book Advocates for Travel as a Way to Discover Purpose
Jim Menge has worked in the travel industry for more than a decade and visited more than one hundred countries so it’s no surprise that he advocates for the value of travel in his new book, Never Travel in a Straight Line: Self-Leadership Strategies to Discover Your Life’s Purpose and Live Out Your Passions. In the book, he shares his story of traveling, both for business and pleasure, and the epiphanies, lessons, and moments of awareness he experienced along the way.
The book is divided into four parts that focus on navigating your life journey, navigating toward purpose, navigating life’s challenges, and navigating epiphanies to reflections. Interspersed with the parts are excerpts from his poem “I Am a Traveling Man” that offers a humorous look at his experiences. A large part of the book focuses on dealing with the unexpected and not letting the long lines at airports, delays, or other disruptions disturb you. This passage from his poem reflects that:
I’m a Traveling Man; I’m a Traveling Fool.
I make standby look fun and delays look cool.
I’ve been checked in, checked out, and cross-checked;
bumped, booked, and over-booked.
Full-board or half-board, when I’m on board, I’m never bored.
Ultimately, Jim’s goal is to help the reader understand the value of travel and how it can teach us new things about ourselves and serve as a metaphor for life in general. He uses this metaphor in the book’s opening when he asks:
“Are life’s delays slowing the journey to your personal aspirations? Does your career feel like you’re rowing across the Atlantic? Did your flight (goals) leave you at the gate? Are you equipped to adapt and thrive in the ever-present turbulence of change, or are you being shaken out of control? What if the key to unlocking your potential is hiding in your suitcase, ready to be unpacked?”
Jim launches into unpacking his own suitcase for us. Each chapter contains a “My Story” section where Jim shares one of his travel adventures. That is followed by “What I Learned” and then exercise questions, tips, and a challenge to the reader to take what they learned from Jim’s story and apply it to their own life.
It’s hard to imagine anyone as excited about travel as Jim, and his excitement is contagious. The more I read, the more I embraced his concepts of the value of travel. He shares how from an early age he was obsessed with travel, writing to airlines worldwide for their schedules and plotting them on maps that he collected “like other kids collected baseball cards.” At fifteen, he took his first flight by buying a round-trip ticket for the fifteen-minute trip from Miami to Fort Lauderdale without telling his parents. It’s not surprising then that he joined the U.S. Air Force, where he flew in military planes and worked on electronic communications in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Hawaii. After his military career, Jim worked for American Airlines and then joined WorldVentures, a travel company, and eventually became president of Rovia, the travel services provider for WorldVentures. This job was a huge responsibility since the company had tours leaving every ninety minutes, 24/7, 365 days a year worldwide.
As Jim writes about his journey of self-leadership and how he learned self-awareness, discipline, and self-improvement, he is very humble and honest about his experiences. One of the most powerful chapters was about his battle with burnout, mental health issues, and a heart attack. These experiences helped him gain perspective on what he values.
One thing Jim highly values is his children, and I love how he documented his travels with both his son and daughter on different adventures. Another favorite chapter was when he described his experience traveling aboard a plane with a small boy named Arnie, who was traveling alone and full of the excitement of travel that reminded Jim of how magical travel can be.
The book’s title, Never Travel in a Straight Line, promotes Jim’s message that if we focus solely on our destination, we might miss a lot of the joy to be experienced. He would rather travel slowly than try to get somewhere fast. He would rather embrace the experience than get upset when plans go awry. In one passage, he describes what his visits to different places taught him. For example:
“The Atacama Desert in the north of Chile taught me to be still. With only daytime power, hotels used generators after 10 p.m., or guests learned to go without electricity. The night sky was genuinely endless in a place void of light.”
His visit to Israel was particularly poignant:
“One consultant told me the most memorable moments weren’t planned. They were the small, unexpected interactions—a conversation with a local, a spontaneous decision to take a different route. This advice echoed my own experience in Israel. The real epiphany wasn’t in the sacred sites but in the realization that travel is about how you change along the way….
“The journey also taught me the value of letting go of expectations. I went to Israel with a specific idea of what I wanted—an epiphany that would hit me like lightning. But that’s not how epiphanies work. They are subtle, creeping into your consciousness when you least expect them. I realized the search for an epiphany can sometimes blind you to the small moments of insight happening along the way. Only when you stop searching do you find what you’re looking for.”
Jim’s visit to Greece helped him reconnect with his family roots. His walking of the Camino de Santiago in Spain taught him how to be present. Traveling after 9/11 showed him how travel can make us vulnerable. Ultimately, he says, “travel is about more than just movement. It’s about connection, resilience, and being present in the moments that matter. And most importantly, it’s about embracing the journey no matter where it takes you.”
As someone who loves to travel, Never Travel in a Straight Line resonated highly with me. Travel is a chance to discover other people are not so different from us and to learn just who we really are. I hope readers will take this journey with Jim Menge and discover the value of travel and how it can improve how we approach life.
For more information about Jim Menge and Never Travel in a Straight Line, visit www.JimMenge.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of The Mysteries of Marquette and The Nomad Editor
