Let me tell you what I did the moment I landed in Paris.
Nothing.
Not in a "vacation mode" way. More like: I have no idea where I am, so I'm going to walk until I figure it out. No agenda. My Flykitt had done its job on the flight over so jet lag wasn't an issue, and I just... wandered.
I ended up in a park at lunchtime and found half of Paris already there. People with actual food, actual wine in some cases, actual books. Not Kindles. Books. And almost nobody on their phone. I stood there longer than was probably socially acceptable and thought: I didn't plan for this. And that's exactly why I found it.
Before I left, someone asked me if I was nervous about the language barrier. Honest answer: I learned just enough French to barely converse with a kindergartner, and then I stopped.
I knew how to greet people properly, order food without accidentally offending anyone, and apologize sincerely when I inevitably messed something up anyway. That was enough. I showed up with enough and trusted the rest would come.
That sounds simple. It is not, especially if you're wired like me.
The instinct is to overprepare. To cover every scenario. To study the map until you could draw it from memory. But there's a ceiling on what preparation can actually do for you. Past that ceiling, you're not getting more ready. You're just managing anxiety in a more productive-looking way.
At some point, you have to board the plane.
"We do this in business constantly. We research the market until the window closes. We refine the proposal until the client goes with someone else. Done and learning beats perfect and waiting every single time." -- Sarah Shepard, COO, StringCan Interactive
Here's what locking in every detail of your itinerary actually does: it turns every unexpected opportunity into an inconvenience.
You find out there's an incredible local market on Thursday morning in a neighborhood you didn't know existed. But you can't go because you already committed to being somewhere else. You meet someone at dinner who offers to show you something you'd never find in any guidebook. But your calendar is full.
The plan that was supposed to make the trip better is now actively making it worse.
I watch this happen on teams all the time. Someone builds a detailed project plan, which is genuinely useful, and then something shifts. A client changes direction. A competitor does something unexpected. A team member surfaces an insight that reframes everything. And instead of absorbing that and adjusting, the team defends the plan.
Because deviating feels like failure. Even when the plan is now clearly wrong.
Leaving room isn't a lack of discipline. It's actually a more sophisticated kind of discipline. The kind that trusts your own judgment in real time instead of outsourcing every decision to a document you wrote three weeks ago.
Here's some practical wisdom I picked up along the way. Stay in residential neighborhoods if you can. Buy food at the grocery store for lunch and have a picnic sometimes. If the menu is eighteen pages long with photos, keep walking.
Ask a local instead of Googling. And when you ask, actually listen to the whole answer before you start talking again.
The best meal I had in my first week came from a recommendation I got while attempting to buy cheese and failing in spectacular fashion. None of that was on TripAdvisor.
There's a professional version of this too. We walk into client relationships, new markets, and new team dynamics already thinking we know what's going on because we did the research. The research is useful. But it's the grocery-store-baguette version of actually knowing something. Technically it's bread. But it's not the same thing.
The people who are actually inside the thing you're trying to understand know things that don't live in any report. They'll tell you if you ask and if you actually seem interested in the answer.
What I keep noticing about Paris is that nobody seems to be performing presence. They're just present.
People eat lunch outside in droves when the weather is nice. In the park, with food they brought, at no particular pace. They're reading. They're talking to whoever they came with and not also checking something on their phone at the same time. Bread shows up at the end of the meal, not the beginning, because it's for finishing the sauce, not filling time.
The experience you're in is worth your full attention.
I've been thinking about how often we don't give it that. We stuff the calendar, the roadmap, the project plan so full that there's no oxygen left for the thing that could actually change the outcome. We optimize for looking thorough instead of being responsive. And then we wonder why the breakthrough never seems to come.
I'm going to be in France for two months: moving around, working, showing up to places I've never been and figuring it out when I get there. Some weeks will be messier than others. That's fine.
What I already know, just a couple of days in, is that the best parts of this trip are going to be the ones I didn't engineer.
And I suspect the same is true of the best parts of what's coming at work. The conversations I don't script. The directions I don't predict. The ideas that only surface because I left enough space for them to show up.
At StringCan Interactive, we help growth-minded businesses build marketing strategies that are smart enough to adapt when the plan needs to change. Because the best outcomes rarely come from the most rigid roadmap.
If you're ready to work with a team that knows when to hold firm and when to pivot, let's talk.