I used to describe the hotel rooms as a problem.
Two hundred nights a year on the road — that was the consulting life for several years. Airports, taxis, unfamiliar beds, the same four walls in a different city. I described it to people as the price of the work. The sacrifice. The part of the career that you tolerate because the career itself is interesting.
Then I discovered magic, and the hotel rooms became bearable because I had something to do in them. And I described that to people as: magic helped me survive the hotel rooms.
I had the whole thing backwards.
Rilke on Solitude
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to Kappus about solitude with a precision that I find unusual. He was not offering consolation — not saying “loneliness is hard, but you will get through it.” He was making an argument: solitude is not the absence of community. It is a specific kind of environment, and it is the only environment in which certain kinds of work can happen.
“Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. Solitude is a great and not easy thing, to bear.” But it is the condition of serious creative work. The withdrawal into oneself that solitude enables is not a deprivation. It is a resource.
I did not come to Rilke when I was first in the hotel rooms. I read him later, when the pattern of my learning was already established and I was trying to understand it. And when I read his description of solitude as a workshop — as the productive condition rather than the unfortunate circumstance — I realized I had been narrating my own story incorrectly.
The Real Story
Here is what actually happened, in the narrative that is more accurate.
The consulting career took me away from my ordinary context — home, friends, routines, familiar comfort. Stripped of those things, I was left with unstructured time and a particular kind of freedom: the freedom of someone who is not embedded in a social context that creates expectations about how time should be spent.
Two hundred nights a year of that. In the ordinary framing, this is deprivation. In Rilke’s framing, it is resource.
The hotel room, in Rilke’s sense, was a workshop precisely because of what it lacked. It lacked the social obligations that make it difficult to go very deep on something. It lacked the comfortable defaults of familiar environments that make it easy to not engage with difficult things. It lacked the presence of other people whose needs and expectations create legitimate claims on your attention.
What it had: time, quiet, and the particular kind of focused energy that comes from being away from everything familiar. That is an extraordinary set of conditions for learning something hard.
I used them. Not strategically — I did not sit down in a hotel room and think “I will now optimize these conditions for deliberate practice.” I stumbled into something that worked and then kept doing it because it worked. But the conditions were doing something important that I did not fully credit at the time.
What the Hotel Room Actually Gave Me
The hotel room gave me volume. More practice sessions than I would have had in any other configuration of my life at that time.
If I had been home every night, the practice would have competed with all the things that home brings: family, friends, obligations, the seductive comfort of familiar environments that do not require anything difficult. The practice sessions would have been shorter, more interrupted, easier to skip.
In the hotel room, there was nothing to compete with. After work — after whatever consulting engagement had brought me there — the evening was genuinely empty. And a genuinely empty evening, if you have a deck of cards and a thing you are trying to learn, is a practice session.
Not always a good practice session. Some evenings I was too tired. Some evenings the work had been demanding enough that the remaining cognitive capacity was not adequate for the kind of focused attention that technical skill development requires. I learned, over time, to distinguish between the evenings when practice would produce something and the evenings when it would not.
But the volume was real. The sheer number of evenings with a deck of cards in a hotel room — across multiple years, multiple cities, multiple countries — added up to something. The tree was being watered. Repeatedly. In conditions that, while uncomfortable in some ways, were genuinely conducive to the work.
The Reframe
Rilke’s framing is a reframe in the strict sense: taking the same facts and interpreting them through a different lens that reveals a different meaning.
The facts: I was away from home two hundred nights a year. I was often alone. I had significant unstructured time in environments stripped of familiar comfort and social context.
Original interpretation: this is a cost. Magic helped me survive it.
Rilke’s interpretation: the solitude was a resource. The workshop was where the work happened. Magic did not help me survive the hotel rooms. The hotel rooms are where magic became possible.
These are not equivalent interpretations. The second one changes how I understand the entire arc. In the first, the hotel rooms are the obstacle and magic is the coping mechanism. In the second, the hotel rooms are the condition and magic is what the condition made possible.
And the second interpretation is, I now believe, more accurate.
The Things You Do Not Notice at the Time
There is a pattern I have observed in the stories of people who develop serious capabilities over long periods of time. The conditions that made the development possible were often not recognized as resources while they were occurring. They were experienced as circumstances — often difficult circumstances — that had to be navigated.
Only in retrospect, when the capability is visible and the journey can be mapped, do the conditions reveal themselves as formative rather than incidental. The difficult circumstance was not the obstacle to the development. It was the medium in which the development occurred.
I think Rilke understood this. His argument about solitude is not “bear the loneliness until you can escape it.” It is “recognize that what you are experiencing as loneliness is actually something else — a condition that the work requires, and that most people never have enough of.”
The consulting career that took me away from home two hundred nights a year was not, from one perspective, an ideal arrangement. But from the perspective of what I was trying to build — a craft, a practice, a depth of engagement with something difficult — it was almost perfectly designed.
I would not have designed it that way deliberately. I did not recognize it as design while it was happening. But retrospectively, the conditions were better than I could have engineered.
The Practical Lesson
The practical lesson is not “go spend two hundred nights a year in hotel rooms.” The lesson is about how to interpret constraint.
Every person who is seriously trying to learn something difficult has constraints — time constraints, environment constraints, social context constraints. The default interpretation of constraint is obstacle. The thing that is making the learning harder than it should be.
Rilke’s interpretation, which I have found more useful and more honest, is that constraint often defines the practice. The limitation that makes it impossible to do the thing the easy, comfortable way forces you into a relationship with the thing that might be more productive than comfort would have permitted.
The hotel room was not comfortable. But comfort is not what produces capability. Consistent, repeated, often lonely engagement with something difficult is what produces capability. And the hotel room, precisely because it stripped away the comfortable alternatives, was very good at producing that.
I still travel. Less than before, but regularly. I still carry a deck of cards. The hotel room is still a practice space, though I now recognize it as one rather than experiencing it as a circumstance to survive.
The workshop has always been there. I just needed the right frame to see it.