CNBC Make It

Traveling is one of the most meaningful experiences you can have in life. It’s an opportunity to see the world differently and learn about new cultures. But what are the cities you must visit before you die? It can be hard to narrow down. As travel journalist of over 20 years, Sharael Kolberg interviewed more than 50 travel enthusiasts, experts and agents. She asked each of them for their No. 1 picks. Here are the most popular answers. Read about what makes each city a favorite for travel experts at the link in bio.

When Todd Graves and Craig Silvey came up with the idea for a restaurant in southern Louisiana that only sold chicken fingers, they probably didn’t expect to get the lowest grade in a startup-pitching assignment for Silvey’s LSU undergraduate business class — or to get rejected for bank loans when they tried to make it a reality. Yet the concept, which eventually became Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, propelled Graves to his debut on the Forbes 400, a ranking of America’s richest people. Today, Raising Cane’s — named after Graves’ yellow lab Raising Cane — has more than 800 locations internationally and brought in $3.7 billion in net sales in 2023, a company spokesperson tells CNBC Make It. Graves owns more than 90 percent of the company, and has no plans to take it public or sell his stake to private investors, he said. See how he built Raising Cane’s into the company it is today at the link in bio.

When Rick Senko started re-selling used items on eBay, he was “flat broke” — a recently unemployed single father who was desperate to earn enough money to support his 5-year-old son. That was 2008, and the first item he sold — a cell phone he bought for $35 on Craigslist and flipped on eBay for $75 — felt like discovering a “glitch in the Matrix,” says Senko, now 41 and based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Realizing he could turn a tidy profit by flipping used items online, he went all in. Learn more about how Senko built his business at the link in bio.

Cintia Diaz, 33, took on various restaurant roles over the years. Today, she is a private chef and culinary educator in New York City. Cintia offers meal prep services and private dinners for her clients. In 2025, she brought in around $66,000 in gross income. See what her life is like as a private chef at the link in bio.

Rosalyn and Irwin Engelman met in 1953 on a blind date and got married three years later, in November of 1956. They were just teenagers when they met, Rosalyn 15 and Irwin 19, but Rosalyn knew pretty quickly that she was in love. After marrying, each built their careers, Rosalyn in art and Irwin in business. They had two daughters and lived in various parts of the East Coast. Today they live at the Apsley, an assisted living facility in New York. In their 70 years of marriage, the couple has built some rituals. “We always say ‘I love you’ and kiss waking up and going to sleep,” says Rosalyn as an example, adding that, “I think every gesture of kindness and love strengthens the relationship.” The Engelmans have also seen from the outside what a bad relationship can look like. They share the No. 1 red flag that says a relationship might not last at the link in bio.

In 2023, Tomislav Mikula started negotiating car deals for free for strangers he met on Reddit. He wanted to start a business, but he needed to educate himself first. So he asked a question the car industry wasn’t asking: What would make you happy? Mikula closed about 50 deals before he took his first paying client. Three years later, his company, Delivrd, charges a flat $1,000 fee to negotiate a car purchase for anyone who does not want to walk into a dealership. Delivrd has closed over 3,000 deals, and brought in $2.3 million in revenue last year. It’s on pace for more than $3 million this year and has 15 employees, all remote. See how he built his business into what it is today at the link in bio.

Kiki Klassen has a monthly routine: She spends hours neatly tucking typed letters and a 4 inch-by-6 inch printed postcard of one of her illustrations — both centered on an artistic theme, like “Year of the Horse” or “stars align” — into brightly-colored envelopes. She repeats the process almost 900 times, one for each of her monthly subscribers, sometimes for six hours per night for an entire week at her dining room table in Niagara, Ontario. When finished, she heads to the post office. “I know all the ladies there by name, and they know me,” says Klassen, 28. “Sometimes they even help me put stamps on.” Each subscriber to Klassen’s “snail-mail club,” called The Lucky Duck Mail Club — which she’s run as a side hustle since 2024 — pays roughly $8 per issue, and Klassen brings in a monthly average of roughly $4,385 in U.S. dollars in revenue, she says. She’s among a cohort of Gen Zers who’ve launched subscription-based mail services, where they send personal letters, art or zines to thousands of subscribers per month. Some ship out stickers and prints. Others specialize in jewelry and short stories. Planning, creating and shipping the content can take weeks of work, but some make thousands of dollars in monthly profits, a variety of mail-club founders say. See why mail clubs are gaining popularity — and take a look at how other mail-club founders have built their follower bases — at the link in bio.

As scammers adopt tools that can mimic voices and carry out conversations in real time, even picking up the phone carries new risks. Kris Sampson was working from home in Missoula, Montana, when her phone lit up with a call that appeared to come from her adult daughter. Sampson says the caller ID showed her name and photo, and the familiar ringtone sounded. But when she answered, she heard what sounded like her daughter crying. “It was her voice, I know her scared cry,” Sampson tells CNBC Make It. “I thought maybe she’d been in a car wreck.” Moments later, a man came on the line, Sampson says. He spoke calmly at first, using her first name and asking if she was her daughter’s mother. Then his tone shifted. Sampson says he began shouting, making threats and demanding money, warning her not to contact the police or try to reach her daughter. Sampson says she had seen a news story about similar kidnapping scams, but her daughter’s voice sounded so real, she says, she didn’t want to risk being wrong. Then she heard her daughter say “mom,” which she says made it harder to believe it was a scam. Sampson's sister, who was with her at the time, called 911 while the caller periodically hung up and called back, Sampson says. Sampson used those gaps to try to reach family members and her daughter’s workplace in Helena, Montana, about two hours away. About 15 to 20 minutes after the first call, Sampson’s daughter was located at her workplace after briefly stepping away from her desk. Shortly after, the calls stopped and did not resume. The caller was never identified, Sampson says. Voice-based scams are changing how people use the phone, says Ian Bednowitz, general manager of identity and privacy at LifeLock. Experts share how to respond to voice scams at the link in bio.

Theo Wolf has spent almost 10 years as an independent counselor working with hundreds of high-achieving high school students and their families on college planning. Students he coaches are regularly accepted to top schools like Harvard, Stanford and Princeton. In addition to academics and extracurriculars, a big part of his job is helping them plan meaningful school breaks. Summer is a consequential time for kids. It’s an opportunity to recharge, build new relationships and explore their interests. When it comes to planning summers, the parents of the most successful kids avoid making 4 mistakes, says Wolf. He shares what they are at the link in bio.

Joshua Curry and Vishal Patil have seen a lot of customer service chatbots. The chat windows that pop up on your screen while visiting sites from online retailers to cell phone companies, asking what you need help with, have proliferated in recent years. Curry and Patil have built similar chatbots. But theirs don’t live on business websites or solve customer service issues. Theirs are on their portfolio websites — and are meant to help them find work. Curry and Patil’s personalized AI chatbots draw on their application materials and professional experience to interact with recruiters visiting their websites. They hope the chatbots will help land them jobs in today’s tough, “low-hire” job market; U.S. employers added just 116,000 jobs last year, compared to 1.46 million in 2024. Their approach is just one creative solution among many — like sending snail mail or turning to reverse recruiters — that applicants are trying in the hopes of getting noticed. See how they’ve built and used their AI chatbots at the link in bio.

When you’re looking for your person, you shouldn’t be selling yourself — you’re buying, says New York-based psychologist Sabrina Romanoff. She shares more of her top dating tips at the link in bio.

For students, the anxiety of over-stressing about an upcoming test or project can hurt their academic performance, research shows. When parents help their kids learn to manage that stress, sometimes referred to as “test anxiety,” their results can improve — and their healthier mindset gives them a better shot at growing into successful, well-balanced adults, says clinical psychologist Tram Huynh. Allowing kids’ anxiety around tests and other potentially stressful tasks to go unchecked can “impact their self esteem, academic competence, how they select coursework, what college they’re going to apply to,” says Huynh, founder of the Arlington, Virginia-based Prep4mance, which offers programs to address students’ anxiety and performance issues around testing. “All of that’s [ultimately] impacting their mental health and their career trajectories.” Huynh shares 5 tips for parents to teach their kids how to manage test-related stress at the link in bio.