Four Hours Without Silence

I circled the planet in three weeks.

And it's a beautiful thing to realize that the world can only be explained to you by someone who lives it from a different point of view.

Because looking isn't enough.

Three weeks, eleven flights, twelve cities, three continents. I left Rome heading east and came back to Rome from the west, closing the circle.

I know that video looks stunning. The line moving across the globe, the cities lighting up one after another. It looks like the trailer for a wild life.

The reality is that I had problems to solve — work problems — and I decided to go solve them in person. In the truest sense of the word: get on a plane, show up, sit down in front of people and look them in the face while we talk about the things that aren't working.

The time difference dismantles you. It's not the normal kind of tiredness, the kind after a full day that goes away once you sleep. It's something else: your body is in one place and your head is in another, and they can't agree. You wake up at three in the morning wide awake and razor-sharp. At two in the afternoon, in a meeting you spent three months earning, your eyes start to close.

Taking a dump becomes a challenge.

Then, every day you have to plan the next one. Where you're sleeping, what time you leave, how you get around, who you're seeing, what you're going to say to them. There's no routine holding you up, no autopilot working on your behalf. You wake up and the world has to be assembled again piece by piece, in a city where you don't even know which side of the road to cross on.

And — not a small thing — every action you take has to produce a result.

For three weeks my life was: land, work, plan tomorrow, sleep too little and badly, take off again.

(Then someone messages you "how amazing, always traveling." Yeah. I'll see you after the eighth flight, with your suitcase, in an airport where you can't even understand the announcements.)

I'm telling you this because I don't want to make it sound easy. These things cost. Money, sleep, and pieces of life you never go back to reclaim.

But look at what came from it: all of this started from a single moment.

A moment where I looked at a situation that wasn't working and instead of sending yet another message I thought I want to understand. Not "I want to fix it" — I want to understand.

Who are the people on the other side, really. How they think. Why they do things in that way that seems absurd to me. Why things aren't going the way I know they should.

From that thought, which lasted three seconds, came eleven flights.

The truth is that I fall in love with these trips for one reason only, and it's not the places or the money (okay, the money too, but not first).

It's the people. The ones who think in ways I had never seen before. The ones who look at business from an angle that would never occur to us even by accident. Every time I come back with my head shifted a few degrees, and the only way to get that is to go out into the street.

Anyway, in China, if the meeting went well, everyone goes out to dinner together.

And I'll admit it had gone very well, so the client takes me to dinner.

He doesn't speak English. I don't speak Chinese. In between there's an interpreter, whose job is to be the bridge between two people who without him would have nothing to say to each other.

On paper it's an evening destined to die within half an hour. Two polite exchanges, a toast, everyone goes home.

Instead we were there four hours.

Four hours without a single moment of silence. We laughed our heads off. We drank, and we ate local things I still haven't fully figured out. Every sentence went through the interpreter, so every joke arrived with a two-second delay, and we laughed out of sync — first one, then the other — which was already funny on its own.

Stay here with me for a second.

We tell ourselves about our barriers constantly. I don't speak the language. I don't know anyone. That evening I had all of them at once, in the most extreme form possible: we didn't even share an alphabet.

Four hours, never once going quiet.

Limits don't exist. What exist are the excuses we give ourselves for not trying.

Then, toward the end, my client looks at me and says something that stayed with me.

He thanks me. Not for the deal, not for the dinner. He thanks me for traveling all the way there and for giving him the chance to see the European world through me.

I sat there for a second.

Because think about it with me: I am one billionth of Europe. Someone from Galluccio, a thousand inhabitants, with his own ideas, his own blind spots and his own fixations. As a statistical sample, I'm terrible. If Europe were a book, I'd be half a line, and not even a well-written one.

And yet that evening, for him, Europe had a face. Mine. And he, who had never been to Europe, walked away with a piece of a place he'd never set foot in — for free.

And that's the thing that's been turning over in my head since I got back.

We think we know the world because we read about it. News, videos, people explaining China from a studio in Milan. But that's not knowledge — it's a photocopy of someone else's photocopy. Real knowledge only passes one way: a person physically moves, sits down in front of another person, and for a few hours lends them their eyes.

(But seriously, with someone intelligent — otherwise you end up with the resident pessimist and you walk away believing in a fake reality.)

It works in reverse too, clearly. That evening I walked away with China through my client, an interpreter, and too much alcohol. Half a line of a huge, partial, lopsided book. But before that evening I didn't have that line, and no article would have given it to me.

And there's something that happens afterward, that I didn't know about.

Since I got back, the world has started sending me signals I didn't see before. News I used to scroll past now stops me cold. A word in a client's pitch that three months ago would have meant nothing and now tells me everything about how they think. People introducing me to other people. Information arriving on its own.

It's not magic, and that's exactly why I like it: when you direct your intention toward something, you direct all your energy behind it, and then you start seeing things that were already there, passing right beside you without registering.

First curiosity switches on. Then you move. Then the world starts speaking to you. And things become real one piece at a time.

And the most beautiful part is that the real business came after those four hours, after two people had spent an entire evening making each other laugh.

Because the best business is the kind that puts people first. And it's not idealism — it's mechanics: we're living beings, not cells in a spreadsheet. Real things don't happen because of money. They happen because of emotions that were felt, and then the money follows — as a consequence, not a motive.

Let me show you how long it took me to understand that.

One year ago exactly, I was in that same part of the world, the exact same kind of trip: Hong Kong, a tour of China to open up markets. And that evening, before going to sleep, I picked up my phone and wrote:

▎ I'm writing again while having dinner with myself. Once again, alone. [...] I will build relationships with powerful people. I need to make sure that everything I do produces money.

— October 11, 2025, Hong Kong.

Same place, same mission. Except that evening I was eating alone, writing to myself about building relationships with powerful people.

A year later I went back. And the real relationships didn't come from seeking out the powerful: they came from sitting at a table for four hours with someone who doesn't speak my language, without having a clue what I'd get out of it.

So the question this week is about your next week, not mine.

Who do you have around you who sees the world from a completely different place than you? Your supplier, your grandfather, the guy at the bar, the colleague who's twenty years younger than you.

How many things have you never asked them because you already decided you wouldn't understand each other?

For years I chose my tables based on who could be useful to me. And at the right tables, often, I was sitting alone.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the twenty-third. Best, Stefano.

If you feel like it, reply to this email and tell me. I read every single one, myself.

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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