How was the Travel Boom Factory team formed?

Erica is sitting next to me, waiting for me to write. She’s forcing me to give you a few thoughts on how the Sto Gran Tour Team was born, and her enthusiasm for reading what I have to say is matched only by my very limited desire to say it. No one tells me what I have to—or not to—do.
So this company text will be as sarcastic, nonsensical, and dismissive of the world as possible—and above all of my own team.

I already know this would be a long and ordinary story. It’s like listening to the wedding story of your distant cousin: for the person telling it, it’s gripping and romantic, but it’s obvious that by now she’s living on the edge of obesity and he has a lover. Other people’s personal stories are awful, and so is our team’s. Or maybe not?

I’m a creative: a brilliant, ingenious mind, and for people like me, working in a group is not an option. There are mental flows impossible to tame and difficult to understand—let alone delegate or collaborate with. Better to snub and mistreat everyone.
By stubbornly refusing to consider potential collaborators, only the best remained by my side, the smartest ones (Erica was peeking). Personally, I think they’re just the least clever, the ones who had no desire at all to find work elsewhere because, deep down, they were like me: explosive, turbulent, and eager to create something unique.

Take Luca, for example. He’s a university professor and worked for years in creative agencies, in Milan and places like that. Why on earth would he put up with my thousands of weird requests? In the end, he shoved an elephant into a banana.

Erica had just graduated in something like international cooperation (with two master’s degrees in communication and marketing, she adds), one of those degrees that makes finding work in Italy extremely difficult. She spent six months interviewing only to end up with a highly enviable permanent contract at one of the best companies in the field.
Shortly afterward, she quit because, even though she claimed to desperately want stability, she’s the one who won’t admit that from one day to the next she would move to the other side of the world to do something different and unique. Just as she did for Sto Gran Tour.

Francesco. I don’t know anyone calmer than this man. I met him by chance and practically dragged him to Namibia with only a day’s notice before departure. On that trip, he spent one night locked in a car, stuck in the sand among lions. And yet he’s still here with us—so tell me whether a person like that is really clever. There are two possibilities: either he had nothing better to do.

There are plenty of other people on the team—I counted about a dozen. Some can’t even pronounce the letter “R,” like Marta, the one who does the filming; others wreck every rental car you put in their hands, like that troublemaker Leo. The first time in Iceland, Leo smashed a rear window into Iceland’s only pole and then drove 800 km at night, back and forth in the absolute freezing cold to get it replaced.

In the team, there’s someone I’ve never even seen, like Andrea, and then we work with a lot of external collaborators who squeeze loads of money out of us because they say they’re the best.

In short, the team is made up of people who have an unquantifiable number of flaws, who are not at all like me, and who are so skilled at following their most natural talents that they end up seeming strange—so strange that I wouldn’t spend even a minute of my free time with them.

And yet these people are the best team I have ever seen in my life. Also the only one.
And yet these people are the best team I have ever seen, in the best adventure travel tour operator. Also the only one.

In any case, I only work with strange people I happen to meet by chance, so there’s no point sending résumés.

Gab