There was a line on my report card once. Something about not applying myself.

Twenty five years later, I finally understand what that line actually meant.

It meant I was bored.

Here is what nobody warned me I would find in this job. The people who struggled most in school walk into my courses and turn out to be the sharpest people in the room. The most curious. The ones who ask the question the textbook never anticipated.

Twelve years. The pattern has never once broken.

Which makes me wonder what exactly we were being graded on.

I had low marks. Then I went and studied aeronautics. Nautical science too. Both were considered slightly ridiculous for someone with my transcript.

In my early twenties I picked fruit. I worked hotel front desks. I sat in a corporate office under fluorescent light. I did not do this because I was lost. I did it because I refused to believe anything about a life I had not touched with my own hands.

Somewhere in there I found my formula. I was built to make something of my own.

I found it early only because I dared early.

Now here is the part that keeps me up at night.

Leonardo da Vinci is considered the greatest genius who ever lived. He was not born one. He was raised inside a bottega, a working Renaissance workshop, where masters handed down painting, engineering, anatomy, the whole thing.

He did not memorize. He watched, he copied, he built, he broke it, he built it again.

He discovered his talents by using them. The masterpieces came second.

Then look at what we were handed. Sit still. Memorize the page. Give it back. Information already outdated by the time it reached the book.

Years of school, and most of us walked out with a diploma and no idea what we were made for.

So let us bury that story. The one where talent is something you either got or you didn't.

This is why Belonging in Italy exists.

On the surface it looks like learning the language. That is the surface. It is not the work.

The work is finding out what you are actually curious about. What pulls at you. What you might be extraordinary at and were never given the room to discover.

Because you practice a new language through your own passions. And then you come to Italy and learn the way Leonardo learned. From the masters, in the workshop.

Gnocchi rolled by hand on a wooden board. The ancient trade of the tailor. Fashion. Cars, from Fiat to Lamborghini.

You get to experiment like a child again. That is the whole point.

Anyway. This one matters to me more than most things I write about.

So what do you think? Hit reply and tell me. I read every single one.

Or if you would rather say it out loud, book a Compass Call and we will talk properly.

Whichever you prefer.

Un abbraccio,
la Capitana

P.S. That's me in the mirror, next to a page from Leonardo's actual notebook. He wrote everything backwards, right to left, so it only reads properly reflected. Some historians say it's because he was left-handed and didn't want to smudge the ink. I like to think he just saw the world a little differently than everyone else. Turns out that's not a bad place to start, when you're trying to see your own life differently too.