A life designed around travel and teaching

Rick Steves: Designing a Life of Travel Teaching

How a piano teacher from Edmonds, Washington, turned a love of travel and a love of teaching into a life that fit his values, served millions of people, and made him wealthy.

Written by Claude (an AI made by Anthropic) at the request of Craig Rusbult, PhD, for his website Education for Problem Solving. The ideas of life design used here are explained in the companion page, Designing Your Life, from Childhood to Retirement.

Most people know Rick Steves as the friendly, enthusiastic guide on public television, walking through a European market or a cathedral and explaining why it matters. Fewer know how he got there. His career was not the result of one big plan. It grew step by step, through small experiments, honest reflection, and a series of choices guided by what he valued. In that way, his story is an excellent example of the ideas that Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans teach in their course Designing Your Life: be curious, try things, learn from what happens, and let your values steer.

A piano family, and a first look at Europe

Rick Steves grew up in Edmonds, a town just north of Seattle. His father imported pianos, and the family ran a piano store. In 1969, when Rick was 14, he traveled to Europe with his parents, partly to visit piano factories in Germany. The trip made a lasting impression, and he resolved to return. After graduating from high school, he did, traveling on a very small budget in what he later jokingly called "Europe through the gutter" style.

He studied at the University of Washington, earning degrees in European history and business administration in 1978. Music remained part of his life and work: he taught piano lessons, and after graduating he opened a recital studio in Edmonds.

Teaching in the Experimental College

While still a student, Rick began teaching a class about budget travel in Europe through the University of Washington's Experimental College, a student-run program that offered low-cost, non-credit classes taught by anyone with knowledge to share. His first class was in 1975. In those early years he worked out a rhythm that supported both of his interests: he traveled in Europe during the summer, gathering experiences, photos, and ideas, and he taught classes during the winter, earning enough money to travel again the next summer. Each half of the cycle fed the other. The traveling gave him something to teach, and the teaching funded more traveling and helped him organize what he had learned.

That cycle was a small, workable life design. It let him do what he enjoyed, test whether people valued his teaching, and earn a modest living, all without betting everything on an uncertain future.

A class that taught him how not to teach

One experience in the Experimental College shaped his career in an unexpected way. In 1978, Rick and his childhood friend Gene Openshaw were preparing for an overland adventure from Istanbul to Kathmandu along what was called the Hippie Trail. They signed up for a class about the route. The teacher had made the trip himself, and about twenty eager young students came hoping to learn from him. But in Rick's telling, the teacher didn't take their needs seriously or make the effort to share what he knew. The students left frustrated.

Rick has said that the frustration stayed with him. He knew how it felt to want useful information and not get it. That empathy became a motivation: when a person has valuable travel knowledge, they should organize it and share it so that others can benefit. Decades later, he described that disappointing class as planting the seeds of his lifelong passion for making travel information genuinely helpful.

The fork in the road: piano or travel?

For a while, Rick split his time between piano lessons and travel classes, and he taught travel seminars in his piano studio. Then, as the travel classes grew in popularity, he made a decisive choice: he stopped teaching piano and put his energy into travel education. In 1976 he had already founded a small business called Europe Through the Back Door; now it became his life's work.

It would be easy to describe this as a business decision: travel teaching had more room to grow. But that is only part of the story. Rick's own explanation of his work, repeated throughout his career, centers on education and people. His company describes its mission as educational, aiming to make travel transformational, and its staff describe themselves as travel teachers first. Choosing travel education meant choosing work that could help many more people have experiences that broadened their understanding of the world and of themselves. Growth came as a result of doing that work well.

One prototype at a time

Rick's business did not appear all at once. It grew through a series of experiments, each one tested on real people and improved by what he observed.

Notice the pattern. The class came first. The book grew out of the class. The guidebook series grew out of a handout that students kept taking. The television shows grew out of the books. Each new venture was a prototype that grew from the one before, and each was tested by an audience that could show him whether it was useful.

He also kept his early generosity. His first book included a playful warning: "Anyone caught reprinting any material herein for any purpose whatsoever will be thanked profusely." Much of what he has created is still freely available, which builds trust and spreads his ideas further.

Learning from experience, again and again

Rick has described how regular reviews helped him improve his tours: looking honestly at what worked and what didn't, then adjusting. His guidebooks are updated through repeated research trips, by him and by a team of researchers, and his television episodes are planned, filmed, scripted, and then carefully revised.

He also learned to collaborate. His childhood friend Gene Openshaw wrote much of the history and art material in his books. Producer Simon Griffith and cameraman Karel Bauer have worked with him for many years to make the television shows, and co-authors and researchers such as Cameron Hewitt help keep the guidebooks current. Burnett and Evans call this kind of teamwork radical collaboration: a good life is rarely designed alone.

A compass made of values and people

Many of Rick's goals are about people. He encourages travelers to become "temporary locals": to stay in family-run places, eat where local people eat, talk with people whose lives are different from their own, and try on new ways of looking at the world. In his view, the best souvenir of a trip is a broader perspective. His book Travel as a Political Act develops this idea: travel can help Americans understand other cultures and see their own country more clearly.

Science educator Bill Nye has a saying that captures this attitude well: "Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't." Rick's approach adds a corollary. The people most likely to know what you don't are those whose experiences differ most from yours: people in other places, other cultures, and other circumstances. Meeting them is one of the richest ways to learn. In life design terms, every conversation with such a person is a kind of prototype conversation, a chance to learn from someone else's experience of life.

His values also shape how he runs his business. In a TEDx talk in Seattle, he described leading his company ethically and for the long term, rather than for the quickest profit.

Becoming wealthy, and deciding what wealth is for

Rick Steves did more than make a living from travel teaching. His company grew into a major business that includes guidebooks and phrase books, tours, travel gear, and television and radio production. He became a wealthy man. What makes his story especially interesting from a life design perspective is how he has used that wealth, because those choices also come from his compass.

Exploring as a way of life, near and far

Rick's teaching is about Europe, but his deeper message applies anywhere. He encourages people to be open to new experiences, to step out of their comfort zones, and to approach unfamiliar places with curiosity rather than judgment. That is a mindset, not a destination. A person can explore their own city in the same spirit: walking new neighborhoods, visiting a local festival, talking with a neighbor from another country, or simply stopping to watch a sunset or a snowfall with full attention. Each of these is a small adventure that produces experiences worth learning from.

This is exactly the attitude that life design encourages at every age: curiosity, a willingness to try things, and attention to what you learn from your experiences.

What Rick's story teaches about designing a life

Notice what energizes you
His early trips, and his eagerness to share them, pointed the way.
Turn frustrations into goals
A disappointing class showed him exactly what kind of teacher to be.
Start small and keep it workable
The summer-travel, winter-teaching cycle let him test his idea while earning a living.
Choose with your compass
He chose travel education over piano teaching because it fit his goals for people, not only because it could grow.
Prototype, then build on what works
Class, then book, then guidebook series, then television, then radio and a free online library.
Reflect and improve
Regular reviews and constant updating kept his work getting better.
Collaborate
Long-term partners and a skilled team made his work possible.
Let values guide success
Wealth became a way to serve others, not the point of the work.

Sources and further reading