The Google Earth session that changed my life

There was a night I sat in front of a screen and dropped down into Ghana on Google Earth. Not a photo in a book, not a documentary. Streets. Rooftops. Coastline. A place people were living in at that exact moment while I sat where I was sitting.

Something cracked open. I had spent years hearing about Africa in the past tense, as history, as a story that happened and ended. What I was looking at was a present tense place with traffic and markets and schools letting out.

That is the whole gap, and it is the gap most of us are raised inside. You are told about a place instead of shown it. You inherit somebody else's summary. And a summary is always smaller than the thing itself.

I went. That first trip turned into another one, and then into a way of working. More than 55 countries later, including more than 25 in Africa, I still do not have a better explanation for why I kept going than the one I had that night. I wanted to see it for myself.

Here is what I would tell you if you are sitting where I was sitting.

You do not need the whole plan. You need one honest look at the thing you have only heard about. Pull the map up. Find the city. Read the local news, not the travel section. Look at what a week there would actually cost. The point is not to book anything tonight. The point is to move a place out of the category of stories and into the category of options.

Most people never do that, and it is not because they lack money or nerve. It is because nobody ever handed them the idea that it was allowed.

It is allowed.

That single session cost me nothing and changed the direction of my work, my business and my family's sense of what is normal. My children do not think of the world as far away. They think of it as reachable, because they have reached it.

Start with the look. The rest follows faster than you think.