Vanessa Paesani

Leaving home for a while is a good reminder of how lucky I am.

In order to leave, a lot of things had to line up: my brother is staying at my place and taking care of my cat, another friend is taking care of my dog, I’m in a financially stable position, and I’m very lucky to be healthy.

Before leaving, I chatted with a lot of folks that I know who have been to Southeast Asia who gave me advice on where to visit. I also hosted a small get-together and got to catch up with some truly amazing folks who are doing truly amazing things.

Over the last decade, I’ve come to realize that networking is about making friends – about being genuinely interested in the people you meet. I never felt very good at networking – especially as an introvert – and I often wondered what networking really meant at large events like conferences. Contrasting that, I’ve always been interested in having small, genuine conversations with people and getting to know what drives them.

I’ve come to realize the truth in Bill Gates oft-quoted, ‘most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years’.

Catching up with people over the last couple of months knowing that I’d be heading out has been deeply gratifying – I realized just how many awesome people I know that are doing so many truly remarkable things. I didn’t meet all of them in a year, but instead over many years.

Part of the goal of this journey for me is setting a decade-long trajectory. I know it of course won’t work out exactly as I’m envisioning them today, though if I’m lucky and work hard enough, maybe they’ll be even better than I can envision right now.

And speaking of not underestimating what can be accomplished in a decade (or longer), we checked out the Royal Palace in Bangkok today. What an incredible complex of buildings, murals and temples. They started building this place in 1782 – exactly 200 years before I was born. I bet they couldn’t have exactly foreseen just how many people would flock to see it all these years later, though I do know that they built it with the intention for it to stay around for quite a long time.