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Seek out the 4,500-square-foot warehouse in Costa Mesa, California, 15 minutes from the plush utopias of Laguna and Newport Beach. Seek, and you will find a shrine to rebellion and self-discovery, testament to creativity and, you know, goodness. Here it is, man: a 1985 neon-green Fleetwood RV. It has 140,428 miles on the odometer and is showing its age. The Church of the Divine Road Trip.

Inside, relics from an epic pilgrimage of hope. A giant map of the United States, laminated to the kitchen table. A note to cops in Washington, DC: "Please don't ticket us." And then the autographs. Eighty-six handwritten notes in black and blue plaster the walls, the dashboard, everywhere, like a breathing scrapbook. There's one from Michael Dell. Another from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. And there on the ceiling, the most sacred of all: gently scribbled in marker on a map of the human-genome sequence, it reads, Follow your heart --J.C. Venter.

Amen, brother.

In the fall of 2001, Mike Marriner, now 28, Nathan Gebhard, 29, and Brian McAllister, 30, three existentially challenged Pepperdine University grads, set off in this very rig on a three-month, 17,342-mile lap of America. It was a supersized road trip, in search of . . . what? Relevance? Meaning? Just some decent career advice? They weren't sure, exactly. But they did know this: They weren't ready to consign the next 50 years to the safe paths--medicine, consulting, the family's landfill-operations business--that they felt pressured to follow.

Block out the noise and pave your own road guided by what lights you up.

So they cadged meetings with 86 luminaries, successful leaders in an eclectic array of professions. They switched on a video camera. And they asked: When you were our age, what were you thinking? And how did you get to where you are? "You sit in all these interviews with so many different kinds of people and ultimately they are telling you the same message," says McAllister. "Block out the noise and really pave your own road guided by what lights you up."

It was simple advice. Trite, possibly, even when it comes from a decoder of the human-genome sequence. But to twentysomething college students, it's gospel truth--enormously powerful stuff they've never heard from parents or teachers.

So it is that three naively idealistic guys in flip-flops and board shorts have created a for-profit company called Roadtrip Productions, their green RV now a seemingly ubiquitous symbol of self-definition on college campuses across the country. They produce a television series for PBS, have published three books, and are launching an XM radio program and Current TV series. They're spreading their unique brand of career advice through partnerships with 100 American and 22 British colleges, giving them unique grassroots access to career centers, student newspapers, even Greek systems.

The founders still spend months each year on the road, filming interviews with people from all walks of professional accomplishment, screening their documentaries, and meeting with students. They are "inspiration junkies," Marriner admits, still thrilled, even after 400-plus interviews, by evidence of human passion and self-determination.