Oktoberfest, driving 911s through the German and Austrian countryside, a tour of FC Bayern München, and bonus surf at Endless Surf (very impressive if you ever have a long layover in Munich) on the way to the airport.
That's the itinerary, and it's the version that's easy to post about.
It's not what I keep thinking about a week later.
What I keep thinking about are the one-on-one conversations that happened in the gaps between all of that. Off to the side of a biergarten table, in the back of the bus between stops. Some with people I have sat in this same forum with for years. A couple with people I met for the first time on this trip.
That's the part that surprised me. It didn't matter which. Ten years or ten hours, the conversation went the same place: not this quarter, not the fire I was putting out the week before I left, but the long-horizon question, who you are becoming as a leader, not what you are dealing with this week.
Normal life does not give you that conversation regardless of who it's with. It gives you twenty minutes between two calls, with someone checking the time. This format does something else. It gets a stranger and a decade-long friend to the same depth, because everyone in the room has already agreed to the same level of honesty.
That is the actual return on ten years in this chapter. Not the country we fly to.
What's the long-horizon question you're circling right now that you haven't given real, unhurried time to?
