There's a point in life when you tend to give up. You believe that you need a cause or a motivating force in life, or dream of doing something different. There are very few people who tend to achieve something similar. Shosho Chang is one of them. He is doing a wonderful job of trying to eliminate the cultural difference by cycling. Let's have a look at his journey.
Shosho has a master's degree in Computer Science and Engineering and has worked for two prominent tech companies in Taiwan. After around six years, he realized that this was not what he wanted to achieve in his life. And, guess what — he picked up a guitar, a bicycle, and started this wonderful cycling journey.
In around two years, he covered a whopping distance of 25,000 km around Asia, Europe, and Africa. Shosho adds that he was fortunate enough to come back to Taiwan alive and well. He has published his book about this journey, namely "10,820,000 Revolutions."
After this hustle and bustle, he realized that the best place on this entire planet to cycle is Taiwan. He also has a list of reasons including cultural diversity, robust infrastructure, safe cities, and friendly and welcoming people as the key reasons to cycle in Taiwan. Apart from that, Taiwan is famous as the cycling center of the world.
An adventure of this sort sounds exciting but requires quite the persistence. Shosho has made some great records by riding up to an altitude of 4,762 metres. He has been at a location with an unbearable temperature of 52 degrees Celsius. He has travelled 186 km in a day and even changed a flat tire 9 times in a single day.
Currently, this adventurer, YouTuber, photographer, and storyteller is pedaling every mile of Taiwan to meet new people, hear and document their stories, and share them with the world. We can't eliminate cultural gaps and differences by sitting in a cubicle and discussing the news. We need to take a step forward and do something like Shosho.
The Quiet Decision That Changed Everything
What strikes you when you read about Shosho's career pivot is how quietly it happened. There was no breakdown, no dramatic resignation letter, no viral video. He had spent six years inside the kind of professional setup that other people aspire to, and one day the math of his future stopped adding up. The cubicle and the salary were doing their job. The rest of him wasn't.
Plenty of travelers tell a similar story. The leap from a stable career into an open road is one of the most common ones in long-distance cycling and walking communities. What is less common is the precision with which Shosho turned that leap into a purpose. The bicycle and the guitar weren't accessories. They were the toolkit for the work he had decided to do.
What Twenty-Five Thousand Kilometres Teaches You
When you put that many miles between yourself and your starting point, your perspective on what people share and what divides them shifts. Shosho speaks about cultural difference not as something to overcome through performance but as something to listen for. A village in Mongolia and a coastal town in Greece have very little in common on the surface, and yet by the time you've slept in both and shared dinner with strangers in both, the underlying patterns become clearer. People want to feed someone hungry. People want to know where you're from and where you're going. People want their kids to be healthier than they were.
The records along the way, the 4,762-metre altitude, the 52 degrees Celsius day, the nine flat tires in twenty-four hours, are not the point. They are the price of admission for the conversations.
Why Taiwan
After Asia, Europe, and Africa, the idea of returning home as the climactic chapter of a cycling life would feel anticlimactic to a lot of travelers. Shosho frames it differently. Taiwan is where the road taught him to come back to. The island has tropical south coasts and snow-capped mountain ridges, dense cities and rice terraces, all stitched together by some of the most cyclist-aware infrastructure in Asia. The bike-sharing system in Taipei is a small civic miracle. The drivers on the smaller roads are unusually patient with two wheels.
There is also the question of how a country chooses to introduce itself to the world. Taiwan has leaned into cycling as a part of its identity, and the loop around the island, often called Cycling Route 1, has become a quiet pilgrimage among riders who know about it.
The Project Continues
Today, the work continues at a slower cadence. Shosho documents the people he meets, publishes their stories, and pushes a small but steady volume of content through his channels. The book that came out of the long ride is the longer-form version of the same impulse. The day-to-day version lives in short videos and photographs and the people whose names appear in his captions.
What he is doing is not journalism in the conventional sense. It is closer to long-form listening. The bicycle slows him down to the speed at which conversations happen. The camera gives him a reason to ask questions. The guitar gives him something to offer back, late at night in a guesthouse common room.
How to Follow Along
If Shosho's story has nudged anything loose in you, the easiest first step is to ride somewhere unfamiliar this weekend. The longer step, the one that takes years, is to design the kind of work that puts you in a position to hear people for a living. Few of us will pedal twenty-five thousand kilometres. Most of us could do with a little more attention to the strangers we already pass every day.
Cultural difference, in the end, does not get eliminated. It gets known. And the only way to know it is to spend enough unhurried time alongside it to recognize the patterns underneath. Shosho's bicycle is one way of getting there. Your bicycle, or your walking shoes, or your weekend train ticket, can be another.
Lessons For The Rest Of Us
You don't have to ride twenty-five thousand kilometres to extract a useful idea from Shosho's pivot. The transferable lesson sits in the question he eventually asked himself: was the work he was doing the work he actually wanted to be doing. Most of us never pose that question with the seriousness it deserves. The pivot, when it comes, is often easier in retrospect than it looks from inside the moment.
The bicycle itself is doing several things in Shosho's story. It moves him slowly enough to meet people. It gives him a frame that strangers recognize and warm to. And it imposes a daily physical practice that has the side effect of clarifying his thinking. Most long-distance riders will tell you the same thing in different words: the body sorts something on the bike that the mind cannot sort at a desk.
The Practical Side Of A Big Idea
Anyone considering a similar undertaking will find that the practicalities are less glamorous than the journey itself. Visa runs, gear repair, food planning, weather routing, language barriers, the slow grind of social media management when you're trying to fund the next stretch through small sponsorships and book sales. Shosho keeps these moving parts spinning quietly in the background, and the smoothness of his content output disguises the work involved.
If his story has nudged you toward a smaller version, start with a weekend tour. Then a week. Then a month. The patience required for a long trip is a habit you build before you ever leave home.
