Name: How a traveler's mindset can grow your understanding | Rick Steves | TEDxSeattleSalon
Uploaded: 2025-10-14T11:04:18.000Z
Duration: 20 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm here today with Rick Steves, travel writer, author of numerous travel guides, host of TV and radio programs on travel, and

While his books and media deal with travel, mostly in Europe, his ideas are relevant for any of us who would venture from home and into unfamiliar territory.

Rick, welcome and thank you so much for being here.

All right, so you have mentioned this idea of a traveler's mindset.

Can you tell us a little bit about what that is?

You know, there's two kinds of travelers, and it's really determined by what you bring to your travels.

And that's kind of a pre existing mindset.

To me, good traveler's mindset is positive.

It's excited to get out of your comfort zone to try new things.

If an opportunity presents itself, you say, yes, a good traveler's mindset is ready to change, to seek out a transformative experience when you travel.

A lot of people travel just to affirm the way they see the world.

I travel to change my understanding of the world.

And can you say a little bit about how that mindset is different from a tourist or a homebody mindset?

In my estimate, if I was to kind of divide it up, there are tourists, there are travelers, and

And there's nothing right or wrong about any of them.

I just think it's fun to mix it all together.

You know, they want to check off famous things.

A tourist is likely to say how many countries they've been to.

To me, that means nothing because how many people did you talk to?

How many preconceptions did you challenge?

You know, that's not a function of how many airports you've landed in.

But a tourist is looking for fun in the sun.

A traveler, I think, is interested in learning, in broadening their perspective, in trying new things to gain new appreciations.

I'm endlessly interested in just learning on the road.

For me, the road is a school, and a pilgrim is beyond that.

I mean, if for a traveler, the road is school, for a pilgrim, the road is church.

And you travel to seek, you travel to not learn about other places, but

you travel to learn about yourself, that's a pilgrim.

And as you travel the mindset you bring with you determines if you're going to travel as a tourist, a traveler, a pilgrim, or a little bit of everything.

So how would you say your travel mindset came to be?

Did you start out as a tourist and become a traveler or, you know, Phil.

I can assess that by looking back at a lifetime of travel.

I've spent 100 days a year, ever since I graduated from high school, in Europe.

My favorite countries, by the way, are beyond Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and so on.

But I've just decided my mission in life is to teach Americans how to travel.

And for me, Europe is the springboard for world adventure.

And if I look back on my teaching and I've just been a workaholic about this, I travel 100 days a year, and

I'm at home teaching the rest of the time.

I've evolved in what I consider kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of travel needs.

Back in the 1980s, it was just cheap tricks.

I was just slumming around Europe and learning from my mistakes and come home and teach people how to sleep on the train, how to find a good meal, how to, you know, where to get a hotel, and

And then in the 90s, I realized the most rewarding thing for me to teach was also the most rewarding thing for me to travel.

Not just catching the train, but appreciating history, art, culture, cuisine, and so on.

So I started writing books about art and history instead of guidebooks to where do you get a cheap meal?

And I started teaching history and art for the travelers.

So I was sliding up Maslow's hierarchy of travel needs.

And then after 9 11, I found myself realizing the beauty of a traveler is you are gaining a better understanding of the other 96% of humanity.

And I thought that ultimate accomplishment for a traveler is to travel with this idea that we can learn more about ourselves and our home and our baggage by leaving home and looking at it from a distance.

It enables us to bring home the most beautiful souvenir.

When I get home, I'm happier than ever to be an American, But

I'm also a better citizen of this planet.

And for me, that's just the endlessly gratifying, rewarding thing about being fortunate enough to travel and explore the world, not just as a tourist, but

So how would you say that travelers mindset or, you know, as you grow and go up that Maslow's hierarchy of travel needs you, how does that change the way and what you learn from your travels?

Well, you learn from your travels by connecting, I think, with people who are different than you.

One of the things I love about travel is I meet more interesting people on the road than I ever meet at home.

I mean, some people travel by bringing the world to them at home.

Other people travel by venturing out and finding themselves in a situation where they're surrounded by things that are different.

Sitting around at a truck stop in Afghanistan while they're passing around some marijuana and they're skinning a goat, that's a different experience.

And I vividly remember that sitting naked in a sauna in Helsinki with a bunch of working class Finns that don't have enough money to have a sauna at their home or at their cabin.

Sitting in a salon in Warsaw listening to people appreciate Chopin, being played on a beautiful piano in his, the country of his birth.

I could list off all sorts of situations where I have been in a different situation and I've gained an appreciation.

Worshiping with Coptic Christians in a city of 20 million Muslims in Cairo.

That's an interesting situation to be in.

You know, I just love the thought of that.

And you have that wherever you go now you can travel in a way where you're sitting on folding chairs with six tour bus loads of people watching slap dancing on stage.

And then you can go back to your American style hotel and complain about the air conditioning.

Or you can immerse yourself intellectually, emotionally and physically in a foreign culture.

Two different ways to travel and two different ways to learn.

My challenge as a travel teacher is, is to inspire and equip Americans to travel in a way where they get out of their comfort zone and they risk changing themselves.

I mean, culture shock, some people try to avoid it.

For me, culture shock is the growing pains of a broadening perspective.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How a traveler's mindset can grow your understanding | Rick Steves | TEDxSeattleSalon

perspective

mindset

recognize

situation