Coincidentally, Brian's parents were donating their family RV to charity for a tax break. Even though it was an old broken down 1985 RV with a huge round nose, we pooled our savings, matched the tax break Brian's parents would have received, and bought the rig for $8,000.

Having spent our collective cash on the RV, the trip itself would have to be financed with credit cards. We filled out applications for several cards, got rejected by a couple, but collected a credit limit of about $20,000.

We knew this was risky but believed that, in comparison to the loans we had amassed from college, it was an important investment for our futures.

The next step; plan the route and book the interviews. Rather than just rely on random encounters with people on the road, we wanted to research interesting people to meet and schedule conversations with them along our journey.

How did we find people and get the meetings with complete strangers? First, we scoured Web sites and read lots of magazines-Wired, Sports Illustrated, BusinessWeek-and if someone intrigued us, tried to meet him or her.

Anyone was fair game; the woman we read about in Entertainment Weekly who was the first female director of Saturday Night Live, the chief executive of National Geographic Ventures whose name we found in the masthead of the magazine, and the guy who founded Clif Bar. But because we had no connections, booking the interviews was all about cold calling. It took common sense and courage.

We'd look up company phone numbers in the telephone directory, and naively call and try to get people on the phone. If we did make it past the secretary, we politely asked people if we could come by their office and learn how they got to where they are (It wasn't always that easy, and there's more about how to make successful cold calls in Section Three).

Although many people refused to see us, many actually said yes.

Why would anyone agree to meet with four college kids they didn't even know? Maybe out of sympathy for our dilemma. We would soon learn that even the most successful people could relate with our post-college confusion. To our surprise, and relief, most people had once been at a point in their lives where they had no clue what to do as well.

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