When I’m not writing my super-exciting, why-the-hell-haven’t-you-already-read-it novel, I’m a bicycle tour guide in San Francisco.

I’ve been doing this for a few years now, watching what works for me and what doesn’t. I’ve also watched others and I’m beginning to think that there are right and wrong ways to do the job.

With this in mind, I’ve jotted down some notes into a sort of manifesto, the beginnings of some ideas on how others may want to think about the honorable employment of showing folks around your city, town, park, or museum.

If you’re short on time, here’s my entire philosophy on this topic in a simple statement:

Assist, entertain, and inform…in that order.

Why do tour guides need a manifesto?

Surely tour guiding is work for students on summer break or retirees, a low-paid job, unworthy of anything so lofty as a statement of principles. In a random chat, a fellow cyclist recently told me she’d love to be a guide, but that really she should find herself a “grown up” job.

I certainly get the sentiment: tour guiding does not generally pay well; it doesn’t save lives or even change them, necessarily. It has none of the gravitas we ascribe to being a doctor, a judge, a scientist, or an artist. Notwithstanding this blog’s title (and maybe excepting a few social media influencers), there’s no such thing as a “world-famous tour guide.”

Being a tour guide means more

And yet, person after person has told me that they envy my job. That I’m living some kind of enchanted life. This comes from guests, from friends, from random interactions on the street. Doubtless some of this is because I spend my days cycling through one of the most beautiful cities in the world. But I think there’s also the freedom from a desk, the time spent outdoors, the interaction with people. To top it off, the tour guide is an ambassador: he or she has the privilege and responsibility of representing the place, person, or thing they show.

When this responsibility is taken seriously, it offers the guest a window into something fascinating and fun, something they’ll take home with them, turning them into an ambassador, the effect of which can have small but important repercussions for the destination. This isn’t earth-shattering change, it’s the hard work of changing minds a few people at a time.

The point of this (so-called) manifesto isn’t to make more of the job than it is. But understanding what makes a great tour guide can help you do a better job, make you better at your next job, and honestly make it more fun to do.

Assist, entertain, inform…in that order

I’ll break each of these down in a moment, but let’s start with looking at the big picture here. Why these things…in this order?

Bad tour guides misunderstand the job. Many conceive of their role as a kind of dumbed-down teacher, walking guests through facts and figures. Others think they’re party organizers or just babysitters. The worst among them have memorized a script that they repeat in robotic fashion.

The one thing every tour guide brings to the job — the thing we all bring to every job — is ourselves. If we’re engaged, enthusiastic, relatable, if we observe what our colleagues or customers need, we usually propagate that emotional state in others. We’ve all worked with people with whom we vibe, whose energy is enough like ours to make spending time more fun, even when the work isn’t the best. And we’ve all worked with those who seem to suck the life out of the room (my time in tech convinced me that those people have an uncanny knack for earning promotion).

Being a tour guide requires you to be part social worker, part stand-up comedian, part teacher. The social worker assists, the comedian entertains, the teacher informs. But good tour guides understand, often intuitively, that these parts aren’t evenly mixed. In fact, there’s no prescription for a “right” amount of each. The right amount adapts itself to the audience.

Priority matters

And the priority with which we do these things is important.

Assistance comes first. People will forgive a lot if they feel taken care of. As a guide leading people on bicycles, I’m always focused on safety, because nothing I do on a tour will make up for someone getting hurt.

Then comes entertainment. I’ve rarely had a tourist ask for a history lesson. They’re interested in the history, sure. But what they really want is to have a good time. Show them a good time, excite them about the topic. If they’re interested, they’ll do the rest for themselves.

Finally, inform. I think a lot of tour guides (and a lot of people who don’t guide) will wonder that I put this last. Information is important — in many respects it’s the tour guide’s “coin of the realm” — but I submit that it’s a relatively minor consideration. Yes, have your facts straight, try not to misinform people (unless you lead one of those tours that does so deliberately), be able to answer follow-ups…but only after the other two considerations are met.

Let me break these down and hopefully illuminate my reasoning.

Tour guide’s responsibility #1: Assist

I can identify a good tour guide (or a bad one) in a few minutes, sometimes within seconds. The tell is that the good ones clearly care for their guests. They watch, they listen. They adapt.

If you start with the premise that a tour guide’s core job is to inform, you miss the obvious: not everyone wants to be informed. Not everyone understands what you’re saying. These are people, and one size most certainly does not fit all.

A good tour guide observes

My first questions every day to my guests: where are you from? Do you have anywhere you need to be later? Both of these fall under the category of assistance. Can I establish some rapport? Perhaps I’ve been to where you’re from, or know a bit about it. Do I need to adapt the schedule at all for your needs?

As I ask these questions, I’m looking for tells. Do they look nervous on the bike? Are they already snapping photos? Are they fluent English speakers? If they have kids, do I expect the kids to be worried, eager, rambunctious? How long will they be in San Francisco? Do they seem like people who will appreciate a lot of information or just a little? All of this allows me to adapt, to ensure we take care of anyone needing special attention.

Obviously not every tour guide has the luxury of this type of customization. If you lead fifty people, ten times a day, along the same corridor, I can hardly expect you to hone your talk each time, establishing relationships and tweaking for each individual.

What you can do, however, is observe your audience. Are the eyes facing you? Are folks wandering off, yawning, rubbing their eyes? If you tell jokes, do the laughs land? Are there certain types of people you always seem to lose as the presentation goes on? If so, try to figure out why.

A good tour guide adapts

Make sure people who need to can sit. If you’re outdoors, consider the changing weather conditions so that your guests get shade from the sun and shelter from the rain. Go off script when you can. Let them know you’re human. Make your guests feel safe and well cared for.

Of course I do this assessment and get it wrong plenty of times. When I have a large group, I can’t always make the pieces fit together for everyone. If that happens, don’t sweat it. One of the great things about being a tour guide is that you get a clean slate to try again next time.

But do not doubt that assistance, not information, is the tour guide’s true coin-of-the-realm.

Tour guide’s responsibility #2: Entertain

In my opinion, western education is broken. Or it least it was when I was in school. Educators seemed to think that a school’s responsibility was to stuff kids full of facts, figures and — if you were lucky — tools to help you reason. These are not bad things, but they misconstrue the fundamental nature of what makes the human mind work. Humans naturally seek to unravel complexity, to solve problems, to comprehend. The only thing we need is the desire to do so.

So all education, including the guiding of tours, begins with an interest in the subject matter. If I want a kid to learn the dates of history, teach her to love history. If I want her to understand chemical reactions or mathematics, demonstrate what it is that makes those fields worth her time. She’ll do the rest.

A good tour guide brings the fun

A tour…like any educational experience…should be fun. I can spout off facts ’til the cows come home (which they never do in San Francisco). What a tour guide is doing…what I assert all teachers should be doing…is selling your guests on the idea that your subject — whatever it is — is fun. Most people will retain little to nothing of what I say. I can vouch for this because my wife and I love to take tours, and we rarely retain the details. What matters is that we gain a general appreciation for the subject. Anything more, we’ll look up on Wikipedia.

But remember this, up-and-coming tour guide, what you’re mostly selling is you.

What you’re mostly selling is you.

This is a point I’d like to make to everyone in the world who ever has to stand in front of people and present. Whether you’re teaching a class on differential equations, presenting to a board of directors, asking a VC for funding, or leading a tour in San Francisco, when you stand in front of people attempting to engage them, the best tool in your control is their appreciation of you. If you can make them want you to succeed, they’ll do everything in their power to make that happen. The same applies in reverse. Make yourself someone who your guests want to succeed, and there’s a good chance that you will.

And if you’re someone who’s demonstrated that you’re eager to assist, they’re far more likely to want to be entertained.

Tour guide’s responsibility #3: Inform

One comment I see fairly often in my guests’ online reviews is that I take seemingly small, mundane topics and make them interesting. For example, I’ll point out some of San Francisco’s endless supply of eucalyptus trees and explain how they arrived here following the Gold Rush, and how the city is dealing with them today. Or I’ll explain how an egg shortage led to one of San Francisco’s most iconic dishes. At some level these are “meh” stories. I mean, if you forgot them the moment I told you, you wouldn’t really walk away any the poorer. Certainly these aren’t the must-know moments of San Francisco history.

The way I make these tidbits interesting is by drawing connections between them and other aspects of our history. The eucalyptus trees arrived because during the Gold Rush we misunderstood our relationship with our iconic Sequoia trees. Lots of tourists come to California to see the Sequoias, so the tree you know nothing about has an important connection to the ones you’ve heard of. The egg shortage story connects to a set of islands west of San Francisco, the Farallones, painting a vivid picture of just how far money-hungry (and egg-hungry) people would go in the early days of the city.

A good tour guide can make anything interesting

These stories demonstrate an interesting point about the inform aspect of tour guiding: you can inform people about anything; even the most mundane aspects of a place are interesting if looked at from the right perspective. Sometimes what you describe is less important than how you describe it.

As I’ve already mentioned, a great many guides I’ve observed misunderstand what their job is to the extent that they think it’s about informing people.

But think about the point I made above about how much more willing a person is to want to be entertained if the guide has already demonstrated their eagerness to assist. The same principle applies with regard to information. If I already feel that the guide has my best interests at heart, if she or he had sold themselves to me so that I’m on their side, enjoying myself, I am far more ready and inclined to soak up the information they might choose to impart. They’ll listen to a story about rocks and eggs just as readily as a story about how the Golden Gate Bridge was built.

Don’t forget to have fun!

Don’t let me leave you with the impression that I think tour guiding is some solemn calling demanding stern-faced devotion.

The whole point of this manifesto is to think about tour guiding as a way to show people a great time, and that includes you. In my experience, if your guests are having fun, they’ll provide a lot of fun companionship. Hopefully you’ll all have fun together, and often that means a better day, better reviews, and better tips (in places where that sort of thing makes sense).

Assisting others, entertaining others, informing others, should be a vehicle for you to do the same thing for yourself. So go out there, be an ambassador, and make your friends envy the fact that you get to do this very cool job.

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I write about writing, about my work-in-progress novel, and about San Francisco. Please consider subscribing to my blog.

If you’d like to join me on one of my tours, book through Blazing Saddles.