What happens away from the keyboard

A hundred countries so far, and every continent except Antarctica. The habit started as curiosity about how other places actually work and turned into the thing that shapes how I operate professionally — most of what I know about reading a room in Riyadh, Nairobi or Istanbul I learned on my own time first.

Ten years playing semi-professionally, for Hassania Agadir in Morocco and later for IMT Grand Est in France. It is the closest thing I have to a management course: a futsal court is five people with no room to hide, so you read the play two passes ahead, you cover for whoever is out of position, and you learn quickly that the loudest person on the pitch is rarely the most useful one.

Long days on trails, usually somewhere with altitude — the Alps, the Andes and the Himalaya among them. It is the one activity that resists optimisation: no shortcut, no clever trick, just hours of steady work toward something you can see the whole way. Good thinking time, and a useful corrective to a job spent mostly in front of screens.