People romanticize business travel.
They picture the airport lounges, the business class upgrades, the exotic city names on your itinerary. They imagine you’re out every night exploring local restaurants, wandering cobblestone streets, living some kind of jet-set life with a briefcase and a cocktail.
Here’s what business travel actually looks like when you do it two hundred nights a year.
You wake up and for half a second, you don’t know where you are. Not in a fun, adventurous way. In a disoriented, which-city-is-this way. The alarm goes off at 6:15 because the workshop starts at 8:30 and you need to eat something that passes for breakfast in whatever hotel you’re in. You shower in a bathroom that is identical to the one in last week’s hotel and the one in next week’s hotel. You put on one of the three shirts you packed, all chosen because they don’t wrinkle badly in a suitcase.
The work itself is fine. Better than fine — the work is why you do this. Walking into a boardroom, assessing the strategic landscape, building frameworks that help companies see what they couldn’t see before. That’s the drug. That’s what makes you good at this job and what keeps you coming back.
But by 6 PM, when the workshop wraps and the team disperses, you’re standing in a hotel lobby with an evening stretching out in front of you like an empty highway. Your colleagues head home to their families. Your client contacts head home to their families. You head to the elevator, press the button for your floor, and walk into a room that smells faintly of cleaning products and recycled air.
This is the part nobody tells you about.
I used to fill the time with music. That was my thing — my identity outside the business world. I played drums, I loved the creative energy of it, the way rhythm could take you out of your analytical brain and into something more primal. Music was how I decompressed. Music was how I stayed human in a career that was all frameworks and analysis.
But you can’t bring a drum kit to a hotel room. You can’t even bring an acoustic guitar without it becoming a logistical headache. I tried for a while — a travel guitar, headphones, trying to practice quietly enough not to get a noise complaint. It didn’t work. The instrument was too small to feel right, the setup was too annoying, and by the time I had everything plugged in and ready, half my evening was gone.
So I defaulted to what every road warrior defaults to: screens.
Netflix. News. Email. Social media. Scrolling through nothing in particular, looking for nothing in particular, finding nothing in particular. Going to bed feeling like I’d wasted another evening but having no clear alternative.
This went on for years.
I’m sharing this not because it’s unusual — every consultant, every traveling salesperson, every pilot and flight attendant knows exactly what I’m talking about — but because it’s the context that made everything that followed possible. The void created the conditions. The restlessness created the need. And when the need is strong enough, your brain starts looking for solutions whether you tell it to or not.
The cards showed up in that context.
When I bought that first deck and started fumbling through tutorials in my hotel room, something clicked that went beyond “here’s a new hobby.” It clicked because cards solved the exact problem I’d been struggling with for years.
Think about what a deck of cards actually is, from a practical standpoint. It’s fifty-two thin pieces of cardboard that weigh almost nothing, fit in your jacket pocket, require no electricity, no WiFi, no setup, no noise, and no audience. You can practice in bed. You can practice at the hotel desk. You can practice while waiting for room service. You can practice for five minutes or five hours. You can practice in silence or with music playing. You can stop and start without any transition time.
For a road warrior with nothing to do with his hands? It was perfect. Almost surgically perfect.
The first few weeks, I didn’t take it seriously. It was a fidget. Something to keep my fingers busy while my mind wound down from the day’s work. I’d practice a basic card shuffle while watching TV. I’d try to do a one-handed cut while listening to a podcast. It was occupying the same slot that a stress ball or a Rubik’s cube might occupy.
But then I started watching more videos. And I started noticing something that pulled me in deeper than I expected.
The people doing this at a high level — the people on YouTube who could manipulate cards with the fluidity of a pianist playing Chopin — they weren’t doing kids’ tricks. They were doing something that looked like art. There was a precision to their movements, a musicality to their timing, a confidence in their hands that I recognized from the best musicians I’d ever played with.
I started studying their hands the way I’d study a competitor’s strategy in a business case. What are their fingers doing? What’s the sequence? Where’s the economy of motion? I’d slow the videos down to half speed. I’d rewind the same three-second clip twenty times. I’d try to replicate a move and fail spectacularly, then try again, fail slightly less, and feel a little spark of something that I can only describe as… progress.
And progress, I was learning, is addictive.
Not the big, dramatic kind of progress where you suddenly leap to a new level. The tiny kind. The kind where last night you dropped the deck during a certain move and tonight you only dropped half of it. The kind where your fingers are starting to develop a memory of their own, a muscle memory that means you don’t have to think quite as hard about every individual motion.
I started looking forward to the hotel room.
Let me say that again, because if you’ve ever been a road warrior, you know how insane that sounds. I started looking forward to the hotel room. The same beige box that had been my prison for years was now my practice studio. The same empty evenings that had felt like a waste were now sessions — thirty minutes, an hour, sometimes two hours of focused practice that left me more energized than drained.
I’d finish a consulting day, eat dinner, walk into my room, and immediately reach for the deck. Not because I was disciplined. Not because I had a practice schedule. Because I wanted to. Because somewhere between the fumbled shuffles and the dropped cards, I’d found something that engaged my brain in a way that nothing else during travel hours could.
Here’s what I think was really happening, though I didn’t have the language for it at the time.
The consulting world trains your brain to be analytical. To think in systems, in frameworks, in cause-and-effect chains. You spend all day in your head — processing information, building arguments, anticipating objections. It’s exhausting in a very specific way. Your cognitive muscles are fried, but your body has been sitting in a chair for ten hours and has energy to burn.
Card practice flipped that equation.
Suddenly my hands were doing the work and my analytical brain could take a back seat. But it wasn’t mindless work — it was challenging enough that I couldn’t zone out completely. I had to be present. I had to pay attention. But it was a different kind of attention than I used all day. It was physical, tactile, immediate. When I got a move right, I could feel it in my fingers. When I got it wrong, the feedback was instant — the cards told me, no analysis required.
It was meditation. I didn’t call it that at the time — I would have rolled my eyes at the suggestion. But looking back, that’s exactly what it was. Focused attention on a physical task that quieted the analytical noise and put me in a state of flow that I hadn’t felt since the last time I’d sat behind a drum kit.
The hotel room became a sanctuary.
I started keeping notes. Not intentionally at first — just little observations scribbled on hotel notepads. “Right thumb pressure too strong on the fan.” “Second finger needs to come under earlier for the pass.” “Watch the Ammar video again — his wrist position is different from mine.” The consulting brain was doing what it always does: organizing, systematizing, looking for patterns.
And the patterns were there. The more I practiced, the more I could see that this wasn’t random. There were principles. There were techniques that built on each other in logical sequences. There was a structure to the learning curve that reminded me of the best business frameworks I’d ever encountered — not because someone had designed it that way, but because skill acquisition itself follows structural patterns.
Within a couple of months, I had a routine. Not a magic routine — a practice routine. Every evening in the hotel room followed roughly the same arc: warm up with the moves I could do (ten minutes), work on the moves I was learning (thirty to forty-five minutes), mess around with the moves that were beyond me just to see how they felt (fifteen minutes). Then put the cards away, go to sleep, and look forward to doing it again tomorrow.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was instinctively doing something that would later become a central theme of this entire blog. I was spending my best energy on the hardest material and leaving the easy stuff for when I was tired. I was doing exactly what the best practitioners do — what the literature calls “deep end practice” — without knowing there was a name for it.
I also didn’t know that this instinct would eventually fail me. That my analytical brain would eventually hijack my practice sessions and push me back toward comfortable, familiar material. That the same consulting mindset that made me a good strategist would make me a bad practitioner. And that it would take reading some very specific books and meeting some very specific people to show me what I was getting wrong.
But that’s for future posts. Right now, I just want you to sit with this image:
A strategy consultant in a hotel room in some European city, sitting on a bed that isn’t his, practicing card fans and shuffles by the light of a bedside lamp, with the TV on mute and a half-eaten room service sandwich on the desk.
Nobody knew. My colleagues didn’t know. My clients didn’t know. My friends back home didn’t know. It was my secret. A private obsession that lived entirely in the hours between dinner and sleep, in rooms I’d never see again, in cities I was just passing through.
Two hundred nights a year. And finally, something to do with my hands.