A week is not a checklist

People arrive at a first conversation with a list. Usually it has between nine and fourteen things on it, gathered over a year from friends, magazines and an algorithm, and usually about five of them are in the wrong country for the time available.

The subtraction conversation

So the first useful thing an advisor does is subtract. Not because the things on the list are bad, but because the list is a collection of highlights and a week is a sequence of days, and those are different objects.

In Sumba this matters more than almost anywhere, because distances are measured in hours rather than kilometres. Forty kilometres can be ninety minutes. Two things in a day is a full day. Four things in a day is a day spent in a car looking at things through glass.

Nobody has ever written to thank us for the fifth thing we fitted in. Several have written about the afternoon we left empty.

What to bring to the conversation instead

• The two or three things you would be sorry to miss
• How you like to travel, not where you have read about
• What you did on the last holiday you loved
• What you have already ruled out, and why

From that, an advisor can build something. From a list of fourteen, they can only build a compromise.