In the summer of 2016, I got on a bicycle in Paris and set out for London — a 300 mile bike tour on the Avenue Verte. Eight days of traveling, the only American in a group of 20 Italians, Germans and Australians. I was not a cyclist. I was a middle aged single mom / career woman who had signed up for something slightly beyond her abilities.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was collecting library leadership lessons the whole way — the kind you can’t get from a conference session or a management book. The experience taught me that I can take on new things and unforeseen challenges, even when things don’t go perfectly.
Looking back, it’s no surprise that two years later, I left my job and started a consulting business. I had no prior experience running a firm. No clients, no small business experience, no roadmap. What I had was a set of tools I’d picked up somewhere in the English countryside without realizing I was collecting them.
The trip was not about the trip
Here’s what nobody tells you about a long-distance bike tour: the training is the easy part. You can follow a plan. You can buy the gear. You can read about seat position and hydration and routes until you’re an expert on paper.
Then you get to the real trip and the route is wrong, your knee is complaining, the group is lost on a stretch of English back roads, and none of your preparation tells you what to do next. You just have to decide.
That’s the part that turned out to be useful.
What the trip actually taught me
1. You can plan the route and still get lost — plan anyway. We had cue sheets. We also had a closed road and one memorable detour through an industrial park. The plan didn’t prevent the deviation. It gave us something to deviate from intelligently.
When I started my firm, I wrote a business plan. It was wrong in most of its specifics. But because I’d written it, I knew which parts mattered when reality arrived and rearranged things.
2. Nobody is coming to check on you. On a bike, there’s no manager. No one notices if you coast. No one notices if you push too hard, either — until your body sends the invoice.
Running a business is the same, and it’s the part people underestimate most. The absence of supervision is not freedom. It’s a transfer of responsibility, and it lands entirely on you.
3. Learn the language of the room you’re in. I had tried to learn French for the trip, but I needed Italian. Because my co-travelers were more important than the lady at the coffee shop, and she knew English anyway. I remembered enough from previous trips to get by in broken Italian — and it changed every interaction I had. My new Italian friends met me halfway because I tried.
When it came to my business, the same applied. I had earned my Accreditation in Public Relations years before, and the lesson I kept from it wasn’t the credential. It was that fluency in the vocabulary of the people across the table is the whole job. When I started consulting, that meant speaking the language of my clients — not just the language of marketing.
4. Take in the sights. Somewhere in the French countryside I stopped worrying and just looked around in wonder. That’s the part I remember most. I even started laughing to myself in disbelief. Am I really here? Is this really happening?
In my first year of consulting I was so focused on the next deliverable that I nearly missed the fact that I was building the thing I’d wanted to build. Looking up is not a reward for finishing. It’s part of the work.
5. Don’t burn yourself out. My knee started really hurting on day three. I had five days left. I finished, but I had to skip a couple of legs of the journey, and during the last two days I was in constant pain. I didn’t know it then, but I live with a connective tissue condition that sometimes lets me push my joints too far, or into the wrong position. I know now that stability matters just as much as flexibility or endurance.
It turns out that’s also the most useful thing I know about running a business. The founders who last are not the ones who ignore the early warnings — the ache, the gut feeling, the thing you’d rather not look at. They’re the ones who treat their own capacity as a resource worth protecting. I have had to turn down projects even when I needed the revenue. And not once have I regretted doing so.
6. You start alone, but you finish with others. I rode into Paris not knowing a single person in the group. Twenty strangers, three languages, and me. By day three we’d learned each other’s cadences — who needed to stop first (usually me!), who was good at reading a map, who would wait at the top of a hill without being asked.
One of them was Anita, a retired German school teacher. We met on that trip and rode two more together, one in 2017 and one in 2019. She started as a stranger in a group of twenty and became someone I now plan trips around.
That’s the part I didn’t expect, and it’s the part that changed my business. A few years after starting my firm, I began bringing in collaborators — people I’d met through my work, people whose strengths covered my gaps. The lesson isn’t that collaboration is nice. It’s that the people who make the work possible are usually already around you, and the only thing standing between a stranger and a collaborator is whether you ask.
7. The destination is not the point. I have a photo of myself at the end of the trip in front of Westminster Abbey. I look tired, happy, and already a bit sad that the trip was over. What I actually brought home was the experience of those eight days, not the arrival at the finish line.
I’ve been working in and around libraries since 2000, and I’ve stopped measuring my career in arrivals. I’ve had some amazing projects — like when I was chosen to create the new brand for the Hawaii State Public Library System in 2024. Our small but mighty team beat out much larger firms and collaborated with the library to create a brand that everyone was proud of. That was a genuine arrival — but I still had to do the work, live up to the award, and figure out what came next. The engagements that mattered were the ones where the process changed how a team saw itself. And how my team saw itself.
The part I didn’t know I was doing
Here’s the honest version of what happened in 2018. I didn’t leave my job because I felt ready. I left because I knew it was time, and that somwhere deep inside I already had the tools. That 2016 trip hadn’t given me courage or a new life philosophy. It had given me something more concrete: evidence that I could operate without a net, make decisions in the moment, and keep going when the plan fell apart.
That’s not a small thing to have in your pocket when you’re building something from nothing.
What I didn’t have was a system. I had instincts from twenty years of library work and a stubbornness I’d earned on a bicycle. The first year of my firm was largely the work of figuring out which of my instincts were transferable and which were habits from a job that no longer existed.
That’s the part of these library leadership lessons I’d want anyone to take away: the skills you already have are usually more portable than you think.
If you’re standing where I stood in 2018 — with the skills, without the roadmap — that gap is real, but it’s smaller than it looks. You’re not starting from zero. You’re starting from everything you’ve already done, most of which you’ve never had to name.
If you’re working through a strategic plan, a fundraising assessment, or a communications challenge at your library or organization, I’d love to hear about it — you can see how I work on my case studies page, or find out where I’m speaking next.
If you want the original version of this story — the one I wrote in 2016, before I knew any of this was a lesson — you can read it here: 10 things cycling from Paris to London taught me about work
