Why I Keep Choosing the Harder Thing

There is a version of my life where I stayed at Qantas.

I joined the airline in my early twenties, starting in the contact centre in Brisbane and working my way up over seventeen years to senior executive roles I had no business holding at the age I held them. I was on the team that introduced the A380 to the fleet. I built the Qantas First and Business lounges at LAX. I managed the customer service operation at Los Angeles International, and later headed the inflight entertainment department. By any reasonable measure, I had made it.

The job was everything a career in aviation is supposed to be. Status. Access. The particular satisfaction of running something complicated and running it well. I flew in the pointy end of the plane and I understood, more than most, what went into making that experience what it was.

And then I walked away from it.

I have been asked many times why I left. The honest answer is that I had done what I came to do, and I knew it. There is a feeling you get when a chapter is finished, not when things are bad, but when they are as good as they are going to get, and you know staying longer means staying for comfort rather than purpose. I recognized that feeling and I trusted it.

So in 2019 I opened a café in Paddington.

If that sounds like an odd next move after seventeen years in aviation, you are not wrong. But it made sense to me in the way that decisions made from instinct often do when you are in them. I had spent nearly two decades managing teams, obsessing over the details of a guest experience, thinking about how every touchpoint in a journey makes a person feel. A café is not so different. The product changes. The principles do not.

I loved it. The regulars who came in at the same time every morning. Learning the rhythms of a neighborhood at close range. The particular satisfaction of a small operation run well. There is nothing abstract about a café. The feedback is immediate. People either come back or they do not.

I ran it for four years, through a pandemic that tried its best to end it, and then I sold it in 2023. Not because it had failed. Because something else had come up.

I had entered the US Green Card lottery years earlier, the way you do when you are Australian and it costs nothing to try and you figure you will never actually win. I won. And standing at that crossroads, with a café I had built and could sell and a country I had always wanted to live in, the decision was not as difficult as it probably should have been. I have always believed that when a door opens at the right time, you walk through it.

I left Sydney in mid-2023 with one carry-on bag and one backpack. I have not had a fixed address since.

Adventures By Adam did not start as a business plan. It started as the obvious answer to a question I kept getting asked. I had spent seventeen years inside one of the world’s great airlines, learning how the industry works from the inside. I had traveled extensively and personally to every destination I now recommend. I had the contacts, the knowledge and the perspective that most travel advisors spend a career trying to accumulate. People who knew me kept asking me where to go and how to do it right. At some point it made more sense to formalize that than to keep giving it away over dinner.

What I did not anticipate was how much I would love this work in a way that surprised even me.

At Qantas I could shape the experience up to a point. I could make the lounge better. I could make the entertainment system better. But I handed my clients off at the gate and hoped the rest of it held. As a travel advisor I get to design the entire journey, from the first conversation to the moment someone comes home and tells me it was the best trip of their life. That completeness is something I did not know I was missing until I had it.

I am newer to operating as an independent travel advisor than I am to the industry itself. I say that openly because I think it matters. What I am not new to is the industry, the destinations, the hotels, the cruise lines, the standards that separate a genuinely great trip from an expensive ordinary one. That knowledge does not have an expiry date.

The through line in all of it, the airline career, the café, the nomadic life I live now, is that I have always chosen the thing that felt right over the thing that felt safe. That is not a strategy I would necessarily recommend to everyone. But it has brought me here, designing trips to places I know personally for people who want to travel well and want someone in their corner who actually knows what that means.

I think that’s a reasonable trade.