Note: This is part of an ongoing series of articles that mine the Be Epic Podcast for lessons and insights that students and practitioners can apply to their lives as business leaders.
Ammen Jordan has spent much of his life alone in his thoughts, usually while doing the sorts of things most people think of as recreation – hiking, biking, camping, or paddling down a river in a canoe. But while introspection generally is seen as a useful and wonderful thing, it’s hard to make a career of it. Then again, maybe it’s actually essential to every successful career, especially for entrepreneurs. It certainly has been for Jordan.
As he told Walton College Dean Matt Waller on the Be Epic podcast, introspection has regularly played a key role for Jordan in identifying and pursuing his passions and marrying them with his quest to improve people’s lives through his work. That introspective mindset took him all over the world before bringing him home to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he now serves as the active transportation coordinator for the Office of Sustainability at the University of Arkansas.
Two decades ago, Jordan wandered through the woods of Northwest Arkansas during much of his sophomore year the UA. As J.R.R. Tolkien put it, not all those who wander are lost. But like many young adults, not to mention the rest of us, Jordan wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life and he used the time to think about his future.
“I had a little Ansel Adams landscape calendar,” Jordan said. “Every weekend, I would kind of plot where I wanted to go and who I might be able to invite to go with me. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time in the woods by myself. And on those little sojourns, I had a lot of time in my hands, no one else to talk to. So I started thinking about what is it that intrigues me (and) what do I want to get out of this period here at the University of Arkansas.”
Jordan also took a broad range of courses – pottery, Spanish, recreation, chemistry, and anything else that looked interesting. Eventually he settled on a degree in earth science, not because he wanted a career in that field but because he wanted to better understand the “human relationship with the landscape.”
After college, he worked as a photographer and videographer, eventually starting his own production company and spending several years traveling the world for shoots involving adventure recreation.
“I had a good run with that,” he said. “It took me all over the world, and I got a bunch of free flip-flops out of the deal, but ultimately it wasn't enough.”
Floating down rivers in foreign countries gave him plenty of time for more introspection, and he couldn’t connect the fun he was having with what he saw as a responsibility to make the world better. “As trite as it sounds,” he said, “I believe that my, or our, responsibility in the few moments that we have here is to make it a better place. Otherwise, we’re wasting everybody else’s time.”
Jordan and his wife were living on a houseboat in Seattle in 2008 when he shifted his career focus. The area was full of creative, idealistic entrepreneurs with great but under-funded business ideas. It also had lots of financially wealthy individuals who worked or had worked at tech companies. So Jordan began helping investors connect with entrepreneurs to fund companies with environmental and sustainability objectives.
In 2018, not long after the birth of their daughter, they decided to return to Arkansas, which lead Jordan to his current role with the UA.
Jordan’s job description on his LinkedIn profile is “Problem Solver,” and the problem he’s working to solve for the university involves encouraging and supporting healthier, more sustainable options for moving around. Active transportation, he said, “really just means trying to get from A to B in anything but a car.” It includes using e-scooters and buses, he said, “but I tend to focus on the active part of the definition, which is really just using your body. So walking, biking primarily.”
Those types of options not only are good for you physically and good for the environment, but they are good for you emotionally and mentally.
“There’s simple pleasure that comes from fresh air and sunshine,” he said. “There’s mental clarity that translates to attentiveness in class, which translates to a higher GPA. It’s just fundamentally simple, and so simple we forget how imperative it is to our life experience and our day-to-day quality of life.”
Plus, you never know what great ideas you might come up with during your times of introspection. It could change your career path, and you might even get some flip-flops along the way.
