Sam Goodwin

“I Don’t Want To Be Known For The Things That Happen To Me”

Some travel stories are impressive. Some are entertaining. And then, once in a while, you come across one that quietly forces you to rethink what travel actually is — not as a hobby or an aesthetic, but as something that tests you in ways you never anticipated. Sam Goodwin’s story lands in that third category.

Sam is originally from St. Louis, Missouri, now based in Tampa, Florida. Over roughly a decade, he visited all 193 UN-recognised countries. But the reason this conversation stays with you isn’t the number. It’s what happened while chasing it, and more importantly, how he responded.

Sam didn’t grow up as a travel kid in the conventional sense. His childhood was built around ice hockey, crisscrossing the US and Canada for tournaments, with a couple of family trips to Europe thrown in. That kind of travel isn’t glamorous, but it teaches you something useful early: how to operate outside your normal environment, how to be flexible, how to feel comfortable in unfamiliar places. The foundation was there. It just needed the right location to activate it.

That location was Singapore. After college, Sam moved there for what was supposed to be a three-month internship. It became six years. I studied in Singapore myself from 2020 to 2024, so I understood immediately what he meant when he described the city as a launchpad. The world feels closer from there. Changi airport in your backyard, two hours from Bali, connectivity to every corner of Asia. Travel stops feeling like a rare annual event and starts feeling like part of the rhythm of your week. It’s where my own travel journey accelerated too, hopping on Scoot to some random corner of Indonesia on a Friday evening and figuring out the rest when I landed. Sam did the same thing, just for six years longer.

During those years he traveled solo and with friends, hockey connections, work colleagues, whoever was available. He spoke about both styles with balance. Solo gives you full control and forces a certain kind of growth. But there are moments that feel incomplete without someone next to you, a view, a meal, a discovery that deserves to be shared. I’ve felt both sides of that. Most people who travel seriously have.

One of the most unusual chapters in his journey is how he ended up in North Korea, not as a tourist, but as a hockey coach. In 2016, a Canadian organiser put together a sports exhibition and invited Sam to coach the North Korean men’s hockey team. He was clear-eyed about the experience: he knew he was being shown what they wanted him to see. But the bigger takeaway wasn’t about monuments or controlled itineraries. It was about what happens when people stop thinking about division and focus on something shared.

Once the puck dropped, he said, the teamwork ran like a Swiss watch. Political tension, global narratives, the idea of us and them, it all faded. Nobody cared about demarcation lines or nuclear weapons. Hockey became the common language. It’s the same thing I’ve found with diving. Drop into the water with a stranger from anywhere in the world and within minutes you’re communicating through hand signals, pointing out the same fish, sharing the same silence. A shared activity collapses distance faster than anything else.

That experience shaped one of Sam’s strongest travel convictions: never judge people by the actions of their government. He described how stereotypes dissolve the moment you meet people directly. He also repeated something I’ve heard from several travellers in this series but that never gets less true: people who have the least often give the most. Not sentimentally, but practically. The hospitality, the generosity, the small kindnesses that don’t make headlines but end up being the most memorable part of being somewhere new.

Sam didn’t start out chasing 193. Travel was just something he loved and learned from, the best education he’d ever had, in his words. What built the momentum was a single preference: he didn’t like to repeat destinations. Even when he loved a country, the next opportunity meant somewhere new. That one habit, applied consistently over years, is like compound interest for travel. By early 2018 he’d already been to around 120 countries. That’s when it clicked. 193 UN sovereign states, 73 remaining, and the competitive athlete in him took over. He set a goal and started moving toward it deliberately.

But the most intense part of Sam’s story, the part that completely reshapes how you view the number, comes in Syria. In spring 2019, Sam was at around 180 countries. Syria was one of the remaining ones. On May 25th, he arrived and within two hours everything changed. He was walking through a roundabout to meet his guide when a black pickup truck pulled up. Two armed men got out and told him to get inside. He was calm in how he described it, no dramatisation, no performance. They had guns. You don’t argue. You get in.

The men were loyal to the Syrian government and suspicious of his travel history. They couldn’t understand why an American would have visited so many countries. They accused him of espionage, a spy, they said, collaborating with terrorists. For the first time in all his years of travel, Sam had no control over what happened next. This wasn’t a difficult border crossing or a rough neighbourhood. This was a closed room, armed guards, and serious accusations with no one coming to help.

He was held for 63 days. The conditions were, in his careful words, “pretty uncomfortable.” He didn’t dramatise it. The restraint in how he spoke about it is what makes it land. The experience became the basis of his book, Saving Sam, and on July 26th, after weeks of effort from a long list of people working behind the scenes, he was released and came home.

And then he said the line that defines everything: “I don’t want to be known for the things that happen to me. I want to be known for the way I’ve responded to them.”

After Syria, most people would stop. Nobody would blame them. Sam didn’t stop. He recovered, reflected, and went back out to finish the remaining countries. Brazil was last, December 31st, 2019. The final day of the year. The final day of the decade. The close of a chapter that had started in a hockey rink in Missouri and ended, somehow, exactly where it was supposed to.

Today Sam speaks professionally, at corporate conferences and faith-based settings, on the subject of uncertainty. He built a framework from what Syria forced him to learn: lean into gratitude, control what you can control, and recognise uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a threat. It’s not a complicated framework. But simple things, applied consistently, tend to be the ones that actually work.

His advice for young travellers was equally simple: just go. You won’t have enough money. You won’t have everything planned. Go anyway. The turtle, he said, doesn’t move forward unless it sticks its neck out. You can be responsible and still take risks. In fact, in your twenties, not taking risks is the bigger mistake.

The countries are impressive, yes. But Sam’s story is really about something smaller and more portable than 193 passport stamps. It’s about what you build when you keep choosing new over familiar, keep showing up in uncomfortable places, and keep deciding, even after Syria, that the response matters more than the event. That’s the thing that lasts long after the journey is over.