More career advice: Get a Diploma, but Then Get a Passport
September 1st, 2010
Q. What’s your best career advice to young graduates?
A. Three words: leave the country. Get out of here. That’s what I tell everybody — just go. I don’t care where you go, just go.
Q. Because?
A. Because the world is changing. It is no longer acceptable to speak only English if you are 25 and younger. It’s unacceptable. You have little chance of being successful if you speak only one language.
If you don’t understand Islam, you’re in trouble because Islam comprises somewhere between 1.6 billion and 1.8 billion people, and there are markets that are untapped that need to be tapped.
So you’ve got to get out of your front door, get out of the comfort and quiet of your home, and your safety zone, and step into a pool of risk where you have no idea what the outcome is going to be. Out of it all, you will have a much broader understanding of the world’s cultures, and you will have a much clearer idea of how the world perceives our culture, and all the value, and the benefits, and the beauty of our culture.
There is nothing more important. I don’t care where you went to business school. I don’t care whether your grades were good or bad. You have to leave the country.
From an interview in the NY Times ‘Corner Office’ column.
Leave a commentWhy We Travel
July 25th, 2010
It’s this time of the year again. People go travelling for all sorts of interesting reasons. The New York Times has a slide show called Why We Travel that has people describing their experiences along with beautiful pictures.
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Three weeks of Scandinavia
September 15th, 2009
It’s time for a review of the time I spent with my brother in Scandinavia. Instead of a lengthy story full of boring details I’ll give you the details without the story.
- Duration: Almost 3 weeks.
- Geographical extent: 46 ° N to 68 ° N, which, though far up north, is still only halfway to the north pole
- Temperatures: From 5 during the night to about 25 °C. And no, there is no sudden fall of temperature once you cross the polar circle. My brother did complain about being cold in Abisko national park, but he was wearing sandals and there was a rather stiff breeze. When it was warmer he usually wore his Swiss army boots. I guess he concentrated his razor-sharp mind on less mundane things than footwear, like looking up train departures, which he did with impeccable accuracy.
- Transport: Day trains, night trains, slow-moving panorama tourist trains, regional trains, fast long-distance trains. And the occasional car, bus or ferry.
- Currencies used: Crowns. Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Czech crowns. And Euro in Amsterdam. Compared to last year, we did profit from a strong Swiss Franc.
- Good food: Chili con carne with elk meat, fingerling sandwich, crab sandwich. Some Swedish and Norwegian dishes. Anything served in Prague.
- Bad food: Reindeer, pizza, sandwiches, kebab, burgers. Most Swedish and Norwegian dishes. And salad. Sugar syrup in Amsterdam.
- Most beautiful places: Abisko, Lofoten, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Bergen, Prague. Almost all of Sweden.
- Ugliest place by far: Oslo. Don’t go there if you can avoid it. I don’t have pictures to prove it because taking out my camera was the last thing on my mind.
- Most interesting people met: The people in night trains we talked to.
- The Danish guy who came back from visiting his family in Afghanistan and told us about the election there. Four weeks later the results are still not known, though Karzai is likely to win.
- The Swiss man on the Inlandsbanan who has visited his friend in Sweden every year for the last 20 years. 20 years ago, when he ordered french fries in a restaurant, he was asked if he preferred them with milk or sugar. When he wanted salt, they didn’t want to understand him for several minutes.
- The crazy Swiss woman (actually, she was really nice) who went hiking for 10 days non-stop in and around Abisko national park. She spent several weeks this year just walking around in the region.
- The 70-year old Swiss man who lives in Sweden since 50 years and walked 100km of the Kungsleden in six days. He said he wouldn’t do it again, though. When he talked to us in Swiss German, his Swedish wife didn’t say a word, but apparently she was so happy for him to be able to speak Swiss German to someone that she was glowing like a light bulb.
- The danish historian who did research on a danish minority in Germany and found the first world war a lot more interesting than the second, but published a book about the second because “no one wants to buy a book about the first world war”.
- The Austrian girl an the night train from Prague who had an InterRail ticket but had no idea where she wanted to go next. She thought about going to Bern, but after listening to me extolling the virtues of our capital, she decided to go to Basel. At least she shared our uneasiness about certain aspects of Germany. At first we were talking about that, but then came a person who did all the talking for us:
- The guy from east Germany on the same night train who, 5 minutes after sitting down in our cabin, talked about how happy he was to have left his unbearable life in Germany for a new (apparently more relaxed) one in Switzerland four years ago.
- What we learned about ourselves: We look like Swedes, Norwegians, Danes and Czechs, because we have been spontaneously talked to in all of these languages. Walking around like a tourist with backpack and camera didn’t help.