Skills Archives - Expatriate Consultancy - Poland, Russia, Eastern Europe and Brazil

Why Did Nokia Fail

Starting Your Own Business Cover — This is a chapter from the book Starting Your Own Business Far From Home: What (Not) to Do When Opening a Company

In 2009, Nokia was the 5th most valuable brand in the world. Their phones were an object of desire everywhere. One year before I bought a used N80, and even with few scratches, it looked so much better than the competing phones. Fast-forward to 2014 and Nokia dropped to 98th place in the ranking. Two other phone makers dominated the market: Apple and Samsung, the first and seventh-most valuable brands of the planet respectively. Why did Nokia fail?

More than half of all profits from the mobile-phone industry went to Nokia in 2007. In 2013, they were in such a critical situation that Microsoft came to the rescue.

Nokia had a hardware-centered business model and underestimated the software revolution caused by the birth of smartphones. Apple came with the iPhone in 2007, to which Samsung quickly responded with their Galaxy series powered by the open-source Android. Meanwhile, Nokia rowed against the tide, betting on the superiority of its hardware to compensate for software deficiencies.

Nokia was a prisoner of its past success, and with the dawn of a new era, they hesitated too long to adapt.

Why Did Nokia Fail? The myth of Innovation and Adaptation as mutually exclusive

The legendary CEO from Intel, Andy Grove, instructed that entrepreneurs should be aware of the knowledge vanguard in their areas. By being aware of the industry innovations, it is possible to resort to them if needed. Few industries may disappear in the coming decades, and both innovation and adaptation can save you from a demise. The demise that comes to mind when we think of why did Nokia fail.

While innovationawareness is desirable, it should not exclude the prospect for adaptation. Business graduates may think that the two terms are mutually exclusive. Others, on the opposite side, might think they mean the same thing. Both are wrong, because while they are different, both can be part of the ethos of the same enterprise.

Innovation is often disruptive, sparked by creativity, and validated by frequent testing with a high failure rate. Adaptation, on the other side, is evidence-based, sparked by experience and knowledge of different scenarios and has a lower failure rate.

With those two definitions in mind, it is easier for an entrepreneur far from home to be innovative instead of adaptive. When I moved to Poland to open my business, I had plenty of ideas I wanted to test, but very limited knowledge of the terrain to design different scenarios. There is a way to overturn this disadvantage.

Commit not with an idea only, but with a profitable business that pays for itself.

Especially in the technology world, the widespread promotion of innovation shadows adaptation. Often people incorrectly attribute the success from previous business models to pure innovation instead of adaptation. Few examples:

Before becoming a leader in internet streaming, Netflix was a DVD-by-mail rental company. Their idea of delivering entertainment with convenience was always the same, but adapted to the progress of internet bandwidth.

With the demise of analogic photography, Kodad almost disappeared after more than a century of activity. It re-emerged later serving her core customers (photographers and film-makers) differently: with hardware and digital tools for image licensing.

During a half-century, UK residents used the Yellow Pages publications to consult local phones and addresses. With the Internet, the publishers went online and turned into Yell.com, the UK’s leading online business directory.

On its way to global expansion, Starbucks did not bet always in the same successful formula used in the USA. They developed taste profile analyses to adapt their products to each region, to the point that in China they adopted ancient tea house practices intrinsic to the local culture.

Reading the above examples, you may think it is all about innovation instead of adaptation. But see how none of the companies mentioned changed their target customers, or how the reason behind their products. It is not a case of completely changing their business, but adapting to new environments (like Starbucks in China) or technological changes (like Netflix, Yellow Pages, and Kodak).

This same adaptation that brought prosperity for the above examples (and to Samsung), lacked at Nokia. The Finnish company insisted that design and hardware superiority—with all the heavy investments to acquire it – could protect them against the mobile app revolution.

The idea of “we invested too much to change our ways now” translates into one of the most dangerous business traps: the sunk cost fallacy.

Forget Sunk Costs. Be Like Water.

Imagine you moved to a new state on the other side of the country. You just took a loan to refurbish an old building, turning it into state-of-the-art rental apartments to host MBA students from the nearby university. It is a campus city, and you are the only prime-accommodation supplier, so profits are near guaranteed.

One day, you receive the news that the state university will move all the executive programs to the capital, leaving only undergraduate courses in your city. Undergrads have less money, so either you lower your rental prices for unprofitable levels, or give back the building and close your rental venture.

While the second decision may sound the most logical, a fair share of the entrepreneurs would still take the first, using two justifications:

1. It might happen that after some time, the university decision is reversed and the MBA courses return, together with the customers.

2. The money and time invested are too high to just give up.

While the first justification, if based on evidence, is acceptable, the second is not logic. It means to keep losing every month just to not “lose” the initial amount invested. Even this phrase that I just wrote makes little sense, because this thought—called the sunk cost fallacy—does not make sense either.

Still, executives and even governments take decisions based on this fallacy, which we also name it The Concorde Fallacy. The name comes from the insistence of the British and French governments to fund the unprofitable operations of the supersonic airplane for years, just because it was expensive to develop it.

Conclusion – Why did Nokia fail

Nokia, the Concorde, or our fictitious rental-apartment business are examples of fallacies and biases blocking the adaptation to new environmental, economic, and technological realities.

There is a quote useful (and thought-provoking) for entrepreneurs facing changes and seeking adaptation in the daily struggle with competitors.

Be like water making its way through cracks. […] If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot; it becomes the teapot.

This quote summarizes why did Nokia fail. It could be from Warren Buffett when he changed his 3-decade long rule and invested in Apple Inc. It could be from Apple themselves when the company explored the still uncertain mobile-software business. Or even from Starbucks, when they invested in tea shops to expand to China.

The author, though, was the martial artist Bruce Lee.

Levi Borba is CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here. This article is based on a chapter of the book Starting Your Own Business Far From Home: What (Not) to Do When Opening a Company in Another State, Country, or Galaxy.

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Business

Types of business risk

A simple but efficient way to assess the types of business risk is the Impact vs Likehood matrix. Often we learn it at business school, but later in our careers and projects, we forget it. Big mistake! This is an exceptional tool for entrepreneurs and managers when assessing uncontrollable risks, so while you cannot suppress a crisis, you can prepare your business to survive (and thrive) on it.

You cannot predict the next crisis, but you can rehearse for it.

The first step to use this matrix is to draw a chart where the X-Axis is measuring impact—be it profit margin at risk or any other suitable measure, and the Y-Axis is measuring likelihood. The determination of the likelihood of catastrophic events must be done with extra care since humans tend to underestimate the chances of calamity (unless they just went through one). One common way to attribute likelihood is to observe how frequently the event happens. This may lead, however, to non-detection of rare-but-not-impossible situations–Black Swans, as Nassim Taleb calls them.

To detect possible Black Swans, the best way is to brainstorm every conceivable and adversity, accident, or disaster. Since you are an entrepreneur far away, bring the knowledge baggage from your land and sum the risks you know to the ones you imagine in your new place. Brainstorm together with other entrepreneurs or neighboring residents, if possible.

Once you have a relevant poll of unpleasant situations, divide them in the matrix below, according to both their likelihood and impact.

The Impact vs Likehood matrix to assess ther types of business risk — The *Impact vs Likehood matrix*

The 4 types of business risk

Fly in the soup: The name of the quadrant with low probability and low impact is self-explanatory. When you have a fly in your soup, you just take another bowl. You do not install expensive security systems or create detailed mitigation protocols for the problems of this quadrant because the investment would far exceed the avoided losses. But be sure that what you place in the fly in the soup quadrant are truly low-probability events, because even though their impact is low, if it happens frequently, it will pile up and turn into a money and time-consuming issue.

Casual accidents: The frequent bumps in your entrepreneurial road have their place in the high-likelihood, low-impact quadrant. Example? When I started my business in Poland, it was difficult to hire. A near-zero unemployment rate can be a risk for employers, even though probably this is better than high unemployment. Each expense from the recruiting effort was not significant when isolated, but summed all the costs of training, job ads, understaffing and uncertainty, it became considerable. Therefore, it was a management challenge, and a chance for improvement, something valid to most problems written in the Casual accidents quadrant.

Disasters: The high-impact, high-probability risks are the ones we actively avoid. Just after university, I moved to Santiago, the Chilean capital. The region is one of the most earthquake-prone in the world, registering a third of all tremors above 8.5 of magnitude. Earthquakes have a high-likelihood in Chile, and their impact can be calamitous. Consequently, Chile is one of the leading countries in anti-seismic technology. When we talk about uncontrollable but frequent disasters, the effort is to mitigate their effects when they happen, because sooner than later they will.

Rare catastrophes:

In this quadrant are situations like global market crashes, pandemics, or Vulcan eruptions causing an airspace lockdown in half-continent (the Eyjafjallajökull did this in 2010).

I left the rare catastrophes quadrant at last because we often neglect it. This because flies in the soup do not have the impact necessary to demand attention, and both casual accidents and likely disasters are easily identifiable because of their frequency. However we, humans, have a problem understanding the likelihood of rare catastrophes.

There is even a name for this cognitive brain flaw: normalcy bias. According to the research from Esther Inglis-Arkell, near 70% of people display such bias. This is one of the two most common biases that we often see causing damage to business. The other is The Survivorship Bias, which I wrote about in this article.

Types of business risk – Conclusion

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I will tell you again: To thrive, first a business must survive. Online commerce behemoths like eBay or Amazon are companies that survived the 2000 e-commerce bubble burst.

Black swans like enormous Vulcan eruptions or virus mutations are impossible to predict. Therefore, the best counter-measure is to get rid of the fragilities and catalysts of negative impacts. In this article, we listed 4 types of business risk. We can classify nearly everything that threatens your business as one of them and handle it accordingly

A proper risk assessment will give you a better outlook on your project or company. It will help you to be ready for crises and obstacles. Learn how to write a good business plan with a proper risk analysis. It will make it easier to raise capital among investors or impress local authorities.

Build diversified income streams, create redundancies, and avoid risks that can wipe out your company. These are some ways to build an antifragile enterprise. If you want your business to survive one hundred years, events that happen once in a century should alarm you.

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Cultural Shock

How to Adapt to a New Culture – The…

Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity Cover — This is a chapter from the book Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity

Step 1 of How to Adapt to a New Culture: Get over the fact that you will never be 100% native. And you don’t need to.

I start this article making a minor excuse: the title you see above is not 100% true. There are exceptions, subordinated to specific contexts, where expats become like a native. For example, in the French south-west, where some long-term Brits living among wineries abandoned their fish and chips and become more French than the locals, as the blog Bordeaux Expats reported:

58-year-old Darren Taylor moved to the Dordogne from Essex 30 years ago because of his love of the novels of Proust and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, which he used to borrow from Dagenham Library.
He said: “You’ll have to excuse me, it’s such a long time since I spoke English. What’s happening over there now anyway? Is Sven still England manager? Is Minder still on? I wouldn’t know. I spend my days listening to the music of George Brassens and sipping pastis.”
Pensioner Norman Kemp said, “Don’t be deceived by my prominent bulldog tattoos. That was the old me. Nowadays whenever I’m not preparing magret de canard aux pommes sarladaises, I’m practicing the accordion or playing pétanque in the village square in my favourite beret.

It is refreshing to see cases like this above, where immigrants adapt so flawlessly. However, two points make these exceptions.

1st – The United Kingdom and France are neighbors with centuries of cultural, social, and economical entanglement. Therefore, the civilizational difference decreases thanks to mutual influences, and the expat adaptation is quicker.

2nd – Even in the British-in-France context there are plentiful examples of not-so-smooth adaptation, to the point of existing a mutual-help social network. The name of it is “Survive France”.

Therefore, this advice is for anyone moving (or planning to) between countries not that similar. And if you arrived until here in this article, congratulations: you already know how to go through the worst phases of your new life. The German firm Archer Relocation designed the Expat Adjustment Curve, where the first stages remind what I described in a previous article, but with a different end:

Honeymoon Phase
Initial Culture Shock
Superficial Adjustment
Culture Shock
Recovery
Integration

The fundamental difference here is the sixth phase. Whoever reaches the Integration overcame the culture shock (our previous articles help you with it) and recovered to run the show in their new life. As much as achieving this stage of adaptation is a brilliant victory, there are different levels of it. We can break down the concept of integration in 4 different types.

The 4 dimensions of cultural integration

● Economic Integration—It is when foreigners work and generate wealth for themselves via their salaries and profits, and to their new country by paying taxes. They add their contribution both as supply, by their products, and demand, by their consumption. Skilled expats often achieve this type quickly, but for students or non-working spouses it can take longer.

● Social—When people mingle with the locals, adopt social codes of the new country and its etiquette. Although the personal efforts to achieve social integration are important, how fast you will achieve depends also on how friendly is the population. The portal Internations researched about a similar subject and concluded that in places like Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador or Colombia, to create a social circle can be much easier than in Nordic countries or Saudi Arabia.

● Cultural—This kind of integration is when people adopt the habits and culture of the new place. To reach a full cultural integration, it is indispensable to have a good understanding of the local language and go across all its components (music, literature, beliefs and celebrations). The cultural integration can be even harder than the social integration if your original country and the new one are from different civilizational foundations, for example, India and Eastern Europe.

● Emotional—This is the last type of integration in the list for a reason: it is the hardest. I may take longer to explain emotional integration because it is essential for understanding this entire article. There is a word in my native language called saudade. This term is almost untranslatable, but fits very well in this description. We may define saudade as the presence of absence, the yearning for something or someone that right now is unreachable, and whose absence creates a void in your inner self. It is not only “missing” and does not have a completely negative meaning because it brings sadness and joy together. It is, as deciphered by older generations, the love that remains. We can translate a partial emotional integration as loving your new country and shaping your personality by its influences. The fully integrated, however, will go beyond this and not feel any saudade from his origins.

If you are already living abroad for some time, you probably are thinking how far you are in those four different dimensions. The good news is that you don’t need to achieve all of them. In Chile, I was very well-integrated economically, socially, and culturally. I didn’t need to do much effort since they are close to Brazil in all those components. This similarity plays a big role. That is why in Poland, to reach the same level of assimilation from Chile, it took much longer. In Qatar, I achieved economic integration, but the social and cultural aspects were distant from my daily life.

What about emotional integration? Even though I had part of my personality changed by every country that I lived in, my core is still the same, and it is Brazilian. Therefore, differently than the British mentioned at the initial paragraphs of this story, I am still not 100% emotionally integrated, and maybe I will never be. Maybe I will always feel saudade of the southeastern plains of Brazil.

And this is ok.

It is almost the rule when you are a first-generation immigrant.

In an article of Humanity in Action Denmark, I read two stories that exemplify it. One from Savas Coskun and the other from Sabeena Din, who moved, respectively, from Turkey and Pakistan to Denmark.

It was the experience of travelling back and living one year in Turkey that convinced Coskun that whatever cultural identity meant; he had to have a mixture of both cultures in his identity. “Until ten years ago I said I was Turkish only,” he says, “because saying to say I was Danish seemed a little false to me. And then I went to Turkey for a year and realized that I cannot be just Turkish. I have to be Turkish-Danish. I have to be both. Like Coskun, Sabeena Din, a 21-year-old born in Denmark, has two identities. When she is in Denmark, she feels more Pakistani. When she goes to visit Pakistan, she feels more Danish. However, Din does not feel that it is a crisis for her. “It is not a bad thing”.

To make the best efforts to integrate into a new country is not only good for you. If you plan or already have children, this will have an enormous positive impact on them. Descendants of first-generation, well-assimilated immigrants growing up in the company of local children will carry the advantage of youth years shaping them when compared to their parents. This will allow them to adjust (economically, culturally, socially and emotionally) to a much greater degree.

The upside and opportunities of being peculiar

Even doing your best attempts, still there is a chance you will never be like a native (especially if you are a first-generation newcomer like me). Even after learning the language, you still will speak with an accent that will persist for decades. You will still have your tastes for food, music, and traces in your personality shaped in your fatherland. If you are moving to a homogeneous country like some in Asia or Eastern Europe, you will also be the person looking different.

I have some splendid news for you: all those things can turn into opportunities. Your varied taste for food and music can give way to very interesting conversation topics. Your accent and knowledge of a foreign language can be useful to understand the so common loanwords from a globalized world. Those holidays you celebrated back in your country can double the opportunities for fun. With my wife we celebrate both Valentine’s (14 of February) as her tradition and Dia dos Namorados (12 of June) as mine, so we have twice the amount of romantic dinners than a standard couple!

Sometimes, being the different person opens doors to great opportunities. This is a point that people miss when trying to understand how to adapt to a new culture.

In Poland, it is normal that younger people come to talk to me in English, since I look like a foreigner, and when I answer in their language, I hear nice compliments and salutations for learning their idiom. The same would be if a westerner moved to Thailand and mastered Thai. Inside homogeneous countries, with a quick look people will know you are a foreigner and while this may scary some expatriates, it is a significant chance to surprise and earn the local admiration.

Nobody likes the arrogant expat that prefers to show off his differences at every point while despising the social and cultural features of his new home. On the other side, the complete opposite of him-the expatriate wishing to cut his roots and be like a local in every aspect- also risks entering a road to frustration because of unachievable goals.

You don’t need to lose your roots to be the guy from a snowless country talking about winter sports with his Norwegian workmates, or the American that moved to South-Africa and now invites his neighbors for a braai (South African barbecue). In countries where people expect you to be just another foreigner without interests in common, you will be in high-regard if you go beyond their expectations.

Levi Borba is the CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here and some of his articles here. The inspiration for this article comes from the book Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity: 11 secrets to make your expat life better than you imagine.

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Business

Adapting to Life Abroad – Tips for Exchange Students…

Adapt to the local etiquette, but allow yourself minor concessions.

This is a chapter from the book Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity

At the beginning of my book, I wrote about universal instructions, not restricted to one single area of the globe. However, some rules may apply in more distinct ways than others depending on what is the difference between your current and previous country. This is especially true for what I will tell you in this article: when adapting to Life Abroad, respect the local etiquette but allow yourself minor concessions.

If you, dear reader, moved out from Canada to the USA or from Scotland to England, maybe you will see my next paragraphs and think:

Oh, Bollocks! My adjustment to the local way of life was so smooth, why such a drama?

Well, the adaptation on my first move, from Brazil to Chile, was also not difficult. The few obstacles were only internal (missing family, friends, and all other things from home – in this article I wrote about how to overcome homesickness) because the externals like language or customs were not very different from what I had before. That is because Chileans are not that different from Southeastern-Brazilians, as much as residents from Toronto are not that different from New Yorkers.

On the other hand, if you are moving to a country with a distinctive courtesy code, formalities, and behavior conventions, you may find yourself lost. Without even noticing, you might gain a poor reputation or enter a fight. My whole life I crossed my legs when sitting for longer times. For me, it was just an insignificant gesture done to feel comfortable. I thought that until I move to the Middle East.

In one of my first days in Doha, while I was in the HR department waiting for some bureaucratic procedure, I crossed my right leg over the left, leaving it parallel to the floor and with the sole of my shoe visible to everyone at my left. After a few seconds, a man around his 50s, dressing a typical thawb, told something in Arabic to me in an unpleasant tone.

I realized I made something wrong and later understood that showing the sole of your shoes to someone there is an insult. So, if you are reading this, middle-aged stranger in a white thawb, I am sorry for showing you my shoe’s sole.

There are two great ways to fire up your understanding of the local etiquette. The first one is also the easiest:

Watch other people!

The quickest way to adapt to other cultures is to watch the locals. Do not be cocky and realize that the meaning of certain traditions may be inaccessible to new joiners, particularly if you don’t know the idiom or ethos of the place. Rachel Heller, the author of the page Rachel Ruminations, wrote an interesting story about her time as an American in the Netherlands:

Sometimes the biggest differences are the smallest. It took me a couple of months before I realized that, rather than just placing a plateful of cookies on the table in front of visitors when we sat down to drink tea, I had to explicitly offer the cookies to them. They wouldn’t help themselves to cookies without being offered. I thought they just didn’t want any. And I had to offer them a second cup of tea, rather than expecting them to take it. I sat there, eating cookies and refilling my own tea, and didn’t realize how incredibly impolite I was being! So watch their behavior carefully: notice how they shake hands, how they sit, how they handle food, and so on.

Maybe Rachel could see in the guest’s faces that they were not serving themselves because she was not doing what the local etiquette tells in the Netherlands (explicitly offer it to the guests). When you live outside your country, it can be challenging to interpret facial expressions.

The research of the American psychologists Hillary Anger Elfenbein & Nalini Ambady concluded that we recognize facial emotions better when observing people similar to us in terms of nationality and ethnic group. Therefore, if you are in an unfamiliar environment, with conspicuous differences to your homeland, maybe observing people will not tell much to you. Therefore, as Rachel Heller advises, just ask people what are the local rules of politeness.

Learning the language while adapting to Life Abroad

The second great way to assimilate the local etiquette is more demanding, but (at least for me), very rewarding:

Learn the local language, or at least try.

To learn the idiom of your new country will open a whole new world to you. Not only you will be able to say things like Thank you or Please when shopping at the grocery store or ordering in a café, but you will take the nuances that shape people’s mood in their daily activities. To understand the local jokes and insults will give you a great idea of what is funny and what is outrageous in your new home.

The cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky in her research affirmed that language shapes the way we think. Therefore, by learning the local language, you will be able to think like a local, and that escalates your chances of success (or at least survival) in your new environment. Which incentive can be better than this? As the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

While I recommend you adapt to the local politeness standards, especially in public, it would be delusional to expect that someone simply changes his whole behavior just because he/she is moving abroad. The good news is: you don’t need to.

There are always plenty of concessions you can allow yourself without being rude. I am used to eating pizza with a fork and knife, something common in my region since the pizza dough there is quite thin, so grabbing it can make a mess.

Neither in Qatar nor Poland people eat in that way, but still, all the time when I go to a pizzeria I ask for a fork and a knife. Some people look to me and some probably think that this is weird. However, the comfort of eating pizza in my way outweighs any discomfort from people looking to me and asking themselves “why this guy is doing this?”. It is not impolite, but just weird. And it is not rude to be slightly weird.

The more you adjust to the local customs, the more people will allow you to be peculiar. It is almost like there is an expat behavioral bank account. If you adopt a posture of inflexibility, always answering invitations to traditional dishes with “No, I am not used to that”, or replying questions about local matters with “I am not interested in it”, the balance of your behavioral bank account with people around will be empty. When that happens, even minor signals, like your clothes, may send a message you don’t want to integrate, and people will just give up.

However, if your colleagues or spouse’s family see that you are trying to learn the basics of their language, appreciating their dishes and drinks and even commenting on the local sports news, they will not mind your eccentricities. When I am watching TV, sometimes I like to sit in a lotus position (maybe I am revealing too much in this book, sorry). My wife told me it was weird, but since I was watching their favorite sport and trying to talk in their language, they just were ok with it and thought it was some typical way of Brazilians to sit (it is not).

That is part of the beauty of being a foreigner: others often will think that whatever oddness you have is just a typical thing of your country, and you will not look so odd.

So aim to adjust to the local etiquette, but allow yourself minor concessions.

Levi Borba is the CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here and some of his articles here. This article was inspired by the content of his book, Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity: 11 secrets to make your expat life better than you imagine.

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Cultural Shock

A Simple but Life-Changing Advice for Expatriates

Vinagrete para churrasco. Imagem de misskursovie2013 por Pixabay . — This is called Vinagrete and in a few paragraphs you will understand why this picture is here.

A Bit of Nostalgia First

Before jumping to the promised advice for expatriates, a small personal anecdote. It will be useful to understand the reason for this post.

Almost everyone has a few family practices perpetuated from infancy to adulthood, which are eventually called house traditions. Mine was the family barbecue. One or two times per month my father turned on the churrasqueira (an intimidating word basically meaning “grill”) around noon, my mom prepared vinagrete, and one or two hours later all of us served ourselves from thin stripes of picanha, alcatra and all sorts of typical Brazilian cuts, together with bread rolls filled with vinagrete. Just by writing this paragraph, I feel the craving for it, something difficult to anyone foreign to my region to understand.

Outside my country is nearly impossible to find the same kind of cuisine, except in places where you have a big Brazilian community or demand for different types of meat. Qatar was in the second case. Two restaurants served those cuts there for rich sheiks willing to taste it. I was not a frequent client of those since I was not willing to pay multiple times more than what I was used to. Thus, there was me, in the middle of the desert, deeply craving the meat and the moments I had during my whole life. That is when I realized I lived with two Argentinians. They knew some restaurants where the price tag was not high, and the best: we had company discounts!

Although Argentinian cuts differ greatly from the Brazilians, the environment and the taste was still fine. Albeit there was no vinagrete, there was another remarkably tasty sauce: chimichurri. Then I saw it was possible to satiate my appetite without emptying my pockets. I also found in supermarket cuts similar to alcatra and prepared it at home. To complete my weekend replicas of childhood rituals, I used to call my parents during those times and have long talks where we updated each other about our lives.

Though I didn’t have my parents present there (as well our typical bread rolls called pão francês, which were impossible to find), the weekends with churrasco-imitation were enough to catapult my mood and make me filled with satisfaction, happiness, and protein.

I told you this story because, if you are already living abroad, probably you met other foreigners constantly complaining about how much they miss what they had back home. Maybe you even are one of them (no offense intended). Food and culinary ingredients are the most common reason for ranting. Looking for an expat products store is valuable when adapting to life in a new country. Usually, those stores will have the most famous food items from selected countries, like condiments, beverages, sweets or ingredients. It is especially convenient for anyone with kids going through adaptation.

Besides food, this dissatisfaction can build up from many other items that are inaccessible abroad. Things like hobbies, sports, climate, your favorite place, drinks and routines. The affliction takes many forms. For example, an article of Worklife described the case of Joe Watson. He relocated to Hong Kong from Atlanta for six years and not being able to watch his sports teams on TV made him yearn for life back home. The consultancy firm Expatica exemplified this problem, and the opportunities derived from it:

When you’re not in your hometown, you need to adapt to what’s available in your new environment. For instance, you may have only ordered coffee from a particular company, but you may have to adjust to whatever type of coffee you can get in your locality. Weird smells? You must just get used to it. Constantly complaining about how you can’t find the same brands as in your country or that you prefer the public transportation network back home doesn’t build a healthy relationship with your new place of residence. Try to focus on the positives and venture outside your comfort zone. Maybe you’ll find an even better brand of coffee in the process.

The Expat ANS Syndrome

The paragraph above describes a pattern I saw among many expats all over the world. A common behavior which I will call here the analogous to nothing syndrome (ANS). It happens when, longing for something they had before and now it inaccessible in a foreign country, the person completely loses the capacity to substitute his previous desire for something similar. As if that dish, hobby, or Wednesday night event was analogous to nothing, an exclusivity only his beloved country had and there is nothing in the universe to substitute it.

Sometimes the analogous to nothing syndrome comes from the pride of what we judge as typical, traditional, or just very cool in our country. Like a Chilean expatriate in France misses drinking Piscolas because of the impossibility to find Pisco (a Chilean-Peruvian national drink) and don’t realize he can instead use Grappa with a similar result. Or a Californian casual-surfer living in Austria, frustrated with the lack of waves (and sea at all) but not realizing how satisfying could be to snowboard in the challenging slopes of Tyrol.

On other occasions, the ANS results from a lack of creativity or knowledge. To exemplify it, I ask your permission to tell another personal story, which will sum in our final advice for expatriates.

Latin-American Expats and the D problem.

During my first winter in Europe, more or less around January, I was feeling tired and demotivated, since it was dark almost all the time. I was also getting sick frequently, and then I realized this was a message from my body. It was almost shouting to me “Hey, there is something wrong! I need sunlight!”. My skin color changed from the usual olive tone to a pale shade. I went to the doctor, and he asked for some exams. When the results came, we understood everything:

Severe lack of vitamin D.

There’s a good reason vitamin D is also known as “the sunshine vitamin”. The nutritionist Ryan Raman explained that When your skin is exposed to sunlight, it makes vitamin D from cholesterol. The sun’s ultraviolet B (UVB) rays hit cholesterol in the skin cells, providing the energy for vitamin D synthesis to occur. Since my genetics provided me with a darker color, ideal for places with strong sunshine like Brazil, it was over filtering the scarce sunlight of the central European winter.

Here we had a problem. I couldn’t bring the Brazilian sunshine to here, and at this point holidays were out of the question. So I needed a bit of creativity and some technology to solve the issue. The solution after all is to take vitamin tablets every morning, and an artificial light imitating the sun. The physiological problems faded and my humor, mood and productivity had a boost.

What this proved is that even the tropical sunshine is not analogous to nothing and can be substituted by something similar if you need it. Eventually, the search for a similar thing can even unveil other opportunities. Mark Callaghan, a British that moved to the USA and was badly craving for his typical “Sunday lunch swimming with gravy”, had his story told by Worklife:

“He did something most homesick expats don’t do — he turned his longing for home into a successful livelihood, later launching British Corner Shop, an online supermarket delivering British groceries worldwide, primarily to expats wanting a taste of home.”

It is likely that, freeing yourself from the inertia and frustration caused by not finding the same you had before, you will find something similar. If you are a Russian in the USA, maybe you miss celebrating Orthodox Easter. In the case your city doesn’t have many of your countrymen, use your creativity and you might find Serbians, Romanians and many other nationalities that share traditions and prepare a delicious kulich.

The same is valid for routines. I remember that during my time in the Middle East, there was a group of jogging expats. A lot of them were Australians, North Americans and Europeans. People from places where jogging is a good way to exercise outdoors and socialize. But outdoor exercising in Doha, where summer temperatures could reach 50 degrees Celsius, could be a health risk to those daring to do a physical activity outside.

So how those people were jogging?

I read more about this group and realized that they were not jogging indoors, but rather in shopping malls, multi-purpose centers, and other acclimatized environments. The association became so popular that the hotel Hyatt Plaza sponsored a similar initiative in the city.

Jogging in a shopping mall. This is what I call creativity! It is certainly not the same as what they had in their countries, but it is similar and as the success of the group showed, it was also fun.

Conclusion – Don’t look for the same things, Stick to what is similar

This similar you will find may become your new standard, who knows? I would never expect that one day I would be more interested in watching winter sports than a carnival parade. As those examples prove, the sunshine of the tropics, the mild weather of the Mediterranean, the exotic cuisines, the pacific waves or the biggest party on the planet are not unreplaceable by something analogous. So why would you think the thing you are missing is analogous to nothing?

Here is the advice for expatriates reading this post: just look, in your new country, for something comparable to what you had before and embrace it. Instead of look for the same, stick to what is similar, and enjoy it.

Levi Borba is the CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here. This article was inspired by the content of his book, Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity: 11 secrets to make your expat life better than you imagine

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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:

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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​ The Expat ANS Syndrome

Latin-American Expats and the D problem.

Conclusion – Don’t look for the same things, Stick to what is similar

5 ways to develop life-changing skills during your quarantine

Practice Deep Work.

Learn Speed Reading

Engage in Dynamic Language Learning

4 – Binge in Coursera (or similar websites).

5 – Read, wait and look to the sky.

Schedule a free 15 minute consultation!

The Expat ANS Syndrome