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Which country suits me? Cultural Shock

Quiz – Which country better suits your goals?

We made a quick (but well-based by the experience of our battle-tested consultants) a quiz to help you discover which country better suits your goals, both professionally and personally. Based on specific questions and a method approach, you are about to identify the part of the world where your dreams are closer to be achieved. If you want to know more about Expat life, check our FAQ.

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Receive for FREE! Digital Book - 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While TravellingLearn the one single trick to pay almost 60% less in your airline tickets!

Subscribe to our blog and receive for FREE in your e-mail the digital book that will teach you the way to cheaper flight tickets and even an upgrade to Business Class! Written by an author that worked during years in some of the best airlines of the planet.

John
Smith
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Business

5 reasons to save our local businesses NOW

I though a lot before writing this article. Maybe it was too off-topic. However, it goes completely in line with what we do at Colligere. To help this specific part of the population will trigger the recover to everyone else. So here i list 5 reasons to save our local businesses NOW. Not after the Coronavirus epidemic crisis or just when things got better, but now.

“In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic . For there is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive —likewise, there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

5 reasons to save our local businesses NOW

1 – All sorts of business are in trouble. But local, small business are the most fragile.

The thing that separates a company from bankruptcy can be resumed in one expression: Cash flow.

If a firm don’t have cash flow and the bank account goes dry, they cannot pay their obligations and suppliers can execute them. This process has some variations between countries but the basic steps are similar in the western world.

Entrepreneur in debt

Why big corporations have a smaller risk during this crisis?

Even though their cash flow also drops or even stops during a crisis, huge companies have plenty of bank credit lines available. So when things go bad, it is easy for them to access money and keep running their operations.

Small companies don’t have such easy access to credit, or if they have, it is just too expensive.

There are exceptions (small companies with big credit lines and corporations without), but as a rule of thumb, this difficult access to money makes small business much more fragile

2 – The lion’s share of governmental help will go to massive corporations, not to small entrepreneurs.

Big firms can afford entire teams of lawyers and accountants to prepare documentations and cases with the sole target of accessing relief funds from governments.

Lion share

Meanwhile, in small business, sometimes this is done by the owner or some non-specialized employee. They don’t have the same knowledge (or contacts) of a famous law firm, so they eventually end with the breadcrumbs of all those billions that governments, everywhere, are investing to save companies and jobs.

3 – We must avoid a world like the one of the movie Demolition Man

In 1993, Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes starred a classic movie where they confronted each other in a high-tech future. There, the fast-food chain Taco Bell took over all other restaurants. As the female character starred by Sandra Bullock explains to Stallone in a classic scene, now all restaurants are Taco Bell.

Before I wrote about big corporations having easier access to credit and government money to survive during the crisis. Many of those gigantic companies can use the governmental money (which is your money) to later take over the small businesses that didn’t have the same privilege. Something similar already happened in 2008. Bigger market concentration, less quality of services for you.

4 – More meaningful jobs

meaningful job and big corporations

I write this item as someone that worked both in multinational corporations and in local businesses.

When you work in a smaller firm, the effects of your efforts are way more visible. You see it advancing, people around talk to you about it and ask questions that you know how to answer.

The same cannot be said in most corporations, if you get enclosed in a cubicle doing very specialized tasks, with an effect in the final product very difficult to distinguish.

It is much easier to be proud of your work when you see your contributions making the difference. You don’t see yourself only as another gear in the machine.

5 – Local Business more often procure their supplies in the local community

Small food stand

Let´s think about restaurants and food-chains.

Mcdonalds, Burger King and alikes buy what they need using large and long-term contracts, generally made with other colossal corporations (like when they buy meat from food-industry behemoths like Marfrig or JBS).

Meanwhile, the local restaurant will procure fresh vegetables in the nearby market, and buy meat with the local butcher. So if this small restaurant goes bankrupt, soon the butcher, the vegetable stand or the laundry that washes their table cloths will all be in trouble.

By supporting the local restaurant instead of the chain restaurant, the local hotel instead of the chain hotel, etc. you are actually supporting your entire environment to cross this difficult moment together.

Just like with the supplies, local firms let a good part of their profits in the neighbourhood.

When you stay in a chain hotel like Ibis or Marriot, a small part of what you pay (aprox. 4%) is profit for the company itself and it’s shareholders. Part of this profit is remitted to some billionaire in his yatch at Seychelles (or some other paradisiac island).

When you reserve an independent hotel, the profit goes to a retired couple, so they can buy a new car in the local dealer. Money stays in the neighbourhood.

Ok, you gave me 5 reasons to save our local businesses now.

So how can we help local business to overcome the Coronavirus Crisis?

Some suggestions are:

1 – Order delivery food from your local restaurant.

2 – Instead of Starbucks, goes to your local coffee-shop. Here in Warsaw, after discovering a small and charming local cafe called Cafe Charlie, I stopped visiting chains like Costa Cafe. It tastes better, and it feels better.

3 – Book a local hotel or hostel when travelling. More important: Book direct with them instead of using websites like Booking.com. Those sites take 15% of the reservation for them and have some very questionable practices against small hotels.

#bookdirect

4 – Do good reviews of the local places that you enjoy! In Google, Yelp, or Tripadvisor. As a Hostel owner, i lack words to explain how a good review makes my day better.

5 – Spread the word, share this article and soon we leave that behind. It will pass.

optimism during crisis
It will pass.

Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline,  co-founder of Nearby Airport Hostel Warsaw and author of the book Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity.

Book cover
Receive for FREE! Digital Book - 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While TravellingLearn the one single trick to pay almost 60% less in your airline tickets!

Subscribe to our blog and receive for FREE in your e-mail the digital book that will teach you the way to cheaper flight tickets and even an upgrade to Business Class! Written by an author that worked during years in some of the best airlines of the planet.

John
Smith
johnsmith@example.com

Social Distancing banner Skills

5 ways to develop life-changing skills during your quarantine

At this point, I bet you know most of the things about the virus, like how to protect yourself with FFP2 or N95 masks, wash your hands or keep a safe distance. You are also aware of every kind of discovery about how the Coronavirus can be treated or how important is to ask the local immigration to extend your Visa if you got stranded. So I will not spend time with that. Rather, I want to list here 5 ways to develop life-changing skills during your quarantine.

FFP 2 mask
FFP2 Mask, similar to the N95 mask, used for protection against particles and harmful agents.

However, if there is one thing I have some experience, is to be in the middle of a crisis.

                I have this strange ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

                I got stranded in Qatar once. Likewise, my wife and me found ourselves in Yerevan during the 2018 Armenian Revolution. And then there are all the civil unrests I witnessed in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Lebanon.

Still, all those finished in few days or weeks. As much as I saw the revolution explode in Armenia, I also saw them celebrate with fireworks when it finished. Meanwhile, the pandemic crisis we are experiencing now is already completing one month.

We do our part by staying at home and flattening the curve to avoid hospitals to get overloaded.  In other words: Quarantine.

Social Distancing banner
It is about protecting the most fragile!

Here is for you the list of 5 ways to develop life-changing skills during your quarantine:

  1. Practice Deep Work.

As Much as we are tempted to compulsively watch the news and scroll our newsfeed, this is a trap. Avoid living in the shallows of the Internet (grabbing the term coined by the author Nicholas Carr in his book with the same name). The time we spend at home is a great opportunity to train the capacity of reaching the maximum cognitive ability of our brains.

Great creators and entrepreneurs voluntarily “quarantine” themselves every year to achieve that. Bill Gates, for example, two times per year, isolate himself just to read and think. We call it Deep Work (another author-coined expression, this time by Cal Newport). In short, it consists of long hours disconnected, concentrating in a single task that demands a lot of our brain-power. It will boost your cognitive capacity to whole new levels.

Cover of the book - Deep Work Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Book: Deep Work Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

  1. Learn Speed Reading

This is one of those meta skills: Abilities that help you acquire another abilities. With time, they exponentially increase your value. Since I learned speed reading, the number of books I read increased from 12 in 2018, to 36 in 2019. Even that being the year I started my new business and got married, two very time-consuming things.

With the correct methods, not only your reading speed will increase but also your content retention. It is not something that will take you a lot of time to learn, but you will need to practice it.  The book from Justin Hammond, Speed Reading: How to Double (or Triple) Your Reading Speed in Just 1 Hour!, is a good start.

Book Speed Reading from Justin Hammon
Written by Justin Hammond

  1. Engage in Dynamic Language Learning

If you ever went to a language school, you probably remember those endless classes of grammar that you forgot everything after 2 hours.  This is why I am an enthusiast of dynamic language learning. This means acquiring a new idiom by practice, without spending time with grammar and rules. Just think about you and your native idiom: How did you learn to speak it? With your parents and little friends talking to you or having grammar lessons when you were 3 years old?

I achieved conversational level in one of the most difficult languages of Europe (Polish) entirely by this method, using a website called Lingq. Now I am learning Russian there. Give it a try!

Lingq
Lingq – Great resource for language learning

4 – Binge in Coursera (or similar websites).

Imagine you went on a machine, back to the century XV, when universities and knowledge were accessible only to very few people. There, you told to one of those students from the Middle Ages that nowadays, the best universities of the planet give access to some of their best content for free, to anyone, anywhere. He would find you absolutely insane to not grab this opportunity.

Coursera give access to an entire range of courses in different fields, so there will be plenty of useful material for you there. I completed the Game Theory course provided by the University of Stanford and was a ton of mind-sharpening material.

Coursera Logo
Free courses from the best universities of the planet.

5 – Read, wait and look to the sky.

If you paid attention to the points 1 and 2, you saw I recommended some books. There are plenty of good reads waiting for you (actually, there is a social network called Goodreads where people can share their reading lists and reviews. You can find me there). There you can find many other books with additional ways to develop life-changing skills during your quarantine

Last, but not least:

Wait.

Everyone I know is struggling, be it economically, physically, or both. But it is going to pass.

And just like when the revolution in Armenia finished, there will be fireworks.

When it happens, do not forget to look to the sky and remind the experience you just went through.

Fireworks in the night
It is all going to pass.

Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline,  co-founder of Nearby Airport Hostel Warsaw and author of the book Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity.

Book cover
Receive for FREE! Digital Book - 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While TravellingLearn the one single trick to pay almost 60% less in your airline tickets!

Subscribe to our blog and receive for FREE in your e-mail the digital book that will teach you the way to cheaper flight tickets and even an upgrade to Business Class! Written by an author that worked during years in some of the best airlines of the planet.

John
Smith
johnsmith@example.com

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