Expatriate Consultancy - Poland, Russia, Eastern Europe and Brazil Blog

Agency problem

If you occasionally spend holidays abroad, at least once you wasted money on something, and later realized how easy was to avoid the mistake. Maybe you ate the courtesy breadbasket in a Portuguese restaurant, without knowing it was not for free. Maybe during your last ski trip, you took a taxi to the slopes, just to discover later that there was a free shuttle for anyone with a ski pass. Tourists have a fair share of oh, why I did not see this before! Followed by the regret of losing a few bucks. The culprit of most of these situations is the same: an agency problem.

Agency problems also torment, with a surprising frequency, entrepreneurs. This leakage of small sums, drops of money wasted that at the end of the year could fill a bucket, is the difference between a profit and loss.

Agency problem: What is and where you can find them.

Agency problems are conflicts of interest found in any relationship where someone is supposed to act in another’s best interests.

Examples of agency problems are:

The relationship between someone selling a house (principal) and a real estate broker (agent). The owner of the house expects the broker to sell it for the best price. The broker, however, may be interested in selling it as quickly as possible, meaning that he may sell cheaper. This is an agency problem.
A CEO (agent) should manage a company in the most beneficial way for the shareholders (principal). But if the executive is going to retire next year, he may take actions that pump the short-term results (therefore, increasing his end-of-year bonus), and damaging, in the long-run, the shareholders’ equity. This is an agency problem.
A mechanic (agent) is entrusted by the client (principal) to fix his car. But the mechanic may leave hidden problems to bring the client back in few months and make more money in the process. This is an agency problem.

Agency problems also happen with entrepreneurs, who can be simultaneously agents from their investors, and principals if they are also shareholders.

It gets worse when a project has deep-pocketed investors, as more and more startups are in this age of venture capital. If scarcity is a catalyst to optimize investments, abundance can make it dumber. It is not rare to see tech companies with barely a place in the market and not making any profit, throwing lavish celebrations because of some vanity metric (like page views or clicks).

The best way to avoid the tourist mentality and not waste money on trip mistakes is to not withdrawal your maximum holiday budget. In the same way, when starting a business, do not look at all your raised capital as disposable capital. Countless companies could avoid debacle if only they reserved a part of their initial money for disasters. To have this financial backup for emergencies is the first step, so once you made it, the next stage is to tap the leaks where the money drops out.

How to avoid money leaks in your business?

Understand what is expensive and assimilate the costs

In my first book – Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity – I wrote about how specific advice for living far from home or in places full of particularities. So when I tell you to understand what is expensive in your new location, it means to do relative cost research. Visit tools like Numbeo or Expatistan and check how prices differentiate between your new and old markets.

This is not time wasted, but invested. The money you will save will compensate each second.

Does your new base have expensive square meters, making the office space maintenance costly? Invest in remote work. Since the 2020 pandemic, technological tools to facilitate home office have unlocked this option to several new areas.

Is it difficult – or expensive – to hire people for support functions? Outsource it. Websites like Upwork or Fiverr make it easy to find specialists for almost all remote tasks. But be careful to not outsource your core activities – the potential for creating agency problems when outsourcing core (or revenue-generating) activities is enormous.

Are the paperwork costs too high? Are you wasting too much time signing and sending forms? Use an electronic signature and avoid lines in the post-office and public offices.

Are you spending afternoons trying to understand new regulations in your sector? Look for someone that already deals with them and ask for an ad hoc consultation. LinkedIn is a good place to find specialists.

This last instruction goes in line with a thing I learned in a hard way:

Do not let the lack of knowledge destroy your leverages and create an agency problem

Or:

Do not be fooled.

Dishonest taxi drivers (agents) cheat tourists (principals) by doing longer paths because the victim lacks familiarity to realize all the unnecessary turns. Deceitful mechanics will test the client’s understanding to see how far they can invent problems and rip them off. In these and many other situations, your lack of knowledge destroys your customer leverages and creates the money leaks mentioned at the beginning of this article.

If you are opening a business, potential providers will assume that you have money to invest, plus the need to purchase services and materials. While I believe most people have good intentions, a capitalized entrepreneur is attractive for predators disguised as partners. When starting my business, I fell prey to a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) agency that charged me an absurd amount for very subpar service.

Realizing how money leaked out to SEO agencies, I learned the subject and discovered better alternatives. Digression: In fact, I found SEO so interesting that I created a new website just to test the things I was learning. Cool stuff, besides saving some money by assimilating this cost, I discovered a new hobby and gained an extra skill.

Be humble. Before spending hours planning targets, invest time in chats with more experienced (in your market and location) entrepreneurs. Besides discovering details like the best suppliers, you will also see how the successful ones in your field are: what are their characteristics, personalities, and abilities.

With such expertise, you may even re-evaluate the path to develop the needed skills for your triumph.

A great way to avoid an agency problem is to not start a pet shop if you are allergic to fur

Currently recruitment happens at striking speeds. Automation helps with the most boring tasks. One may think that entrepreneurs no longer need to know how to perform their core business activities, since it is so easy to hire, train and automate.

In other words, some people now think that individuals allergic to fur should run pet shops. People think that you could be always a remote entrepreneur, as long as you hire a good manager.

This belief ends with the sign of the first agency problems – conflicts of interest inherent to relationships where one party act in another’s interests. If you despise your core activity – or if it can kill you, like in the example of the allergic-to-fur entrepreneur – how to create the incentives necessary to avoid agency problems and motivate a superb manager?

How do you expect to select a good manager to perform a task you scorn? Even if you are not turning the dough yourself in your pancake restaurant, you still must be able to test your own product.

In this matter, if I could give only one counsel, would be this: even if the opportunity looks great, even if you see immense suppressed demand, do not start a company in a market you loathe. Be fond of your core business and try your core product. This is more than the way to avoid any agency problem. This is the way to excellency.

Levi Borba is CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here and his LinkedIn here. This article is based on a chapter of his 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

Why Did Nokia Fail

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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Business

Business failure risk- Avoid these assessment mistakes

An essential part of any business plan is the risk assessment. While I believe you know most of the components of a good risk analysis, there are logical fallacies that we often see even on the best plans. Things that scrupulous regulators and prudent investors hate. In this article, I will tell you how to avoid these mistakes in your business failure risk assessment.

Via Negativa and the Pseudo-Areopagite

Dionysius was a neo-platonic theologian from the VI century. He built the concept of Via Negativa (Latin term meaning Path of Negation).

According to this idea, if we admit the existence of a supreme being above the reason of all humans, it is impossible for anyone to define him. Definitions are, after all, imposing limits to the reality. Since we cannot tell what God is because it is out of our power, the only possibility to describe this supreme being is to say what he is not.

While Dionysius was the first to describe the notion of Via Negativa, the Old Testament and ancient thinkers like Saint Augustine of Hippo used the core notion[1]. Wisdom aside, Dionysius was not very original, since his name (The Aeropagite) is actually a pseudonym taken from a man that lived centuries before. That is why he also known as Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. Not a flattering way to refer to the man who compiled a notion used not only in theology but in heuristic.

The Survivorship Bias in Business failure risk evaluations

During university, I worked part time at an investment brokerage firm. An efficient tool to sell quotas of riskier funds were a dozen slides with time spams ranging from ten to twenty years.

Virtually every share or hedge fund in this time span had positive (and above inflation) returns. This sequence of slides was enough to convince potential customers that in the “long-term”, risky investments pay off.

It was flawed reasoning. Almost deceitful, to be honest, even though I do not plead guilty, but just ignorant—I had little knowledge of selection biases.

In a market where either you have positive returns or your investors withdraw and liquidate your fund, it is clear how misleading were those slides. By choosing a 10-year period, with only the current investment options, it filtered out bankrupt funds, and the investors had no idea about the failures they could face.

This is what we call survivorship bias. Every time you see solid investments with positive returns over decades, you are biasing observation by accidentally filtering out failures.

This treacherous bias turns you into a fool, making poor decisions in financial, personal, and business dimensions.

To discover the righteous path, first eliminate the paths leading to failure.

I first illustrated the concepts of Via Negativa and the Survivorship Bias because together they are the foundation for the argument I will show in the next pages.

A broad competitive analysis is a big step to build a business. To do this analysis, the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) matrix is a great tool. However, when you analyze existing competitors, the observed weaknesses and threats often are far from the worst scenarios. Otherwise, those competitors would already be out of the market.

A similar bias happened during World War II. American military specialists thought they should reinforce planes in the wings and tails because that is where fighters had bullet holes – while engines of returning aircraft were mostly intact. They did not realize that airplanes shot in the engine never came back[2]. When you analyze the weaknesses of your current competitors, you are just observing bullet holes in the wings.

In his book Antifragile, Taleb – whose books were very helpful to me – points out that the best way for a person or company to not only survive but prosper in a crisis is to first decrease his disadvantages. A disadvantage (we can also call them fragilities) comprises everything, increasing your vulnerability to risk and volatility.

Know the shortcomings of failed businesses, so the past does not repeat itself.

The reason which I started this article introducing a heuristic concept (Via Negativa), and a logical bias (Survivorship Bias) is because knowing what kills a business is equally (or even more) important than understanding what makes it succeed. In this article, you can check other logical fallacies that investors and entrepreneurs should be aware.

The first step to success is to survive. Had I never learned about the weaknesses of similar companies to mine, I would not be writing those pages about entrepreneurship abroad, because my own business would be dead.

I understand that researching bankrupt businesses and their Causa Mortis is not a motivating task. Every entrepreneur wants to keep a fair dose of optimism to keep going forward. But do not let optimism plays against you.

To discover the route for triumph, the first step is to eliminate the paths leading to failure. Assess business failure risk assessment Work with multiple scenarios, and seek to get rid of your weaknesses in each of them. By eliminating the dangerous routes, your chances of choosing the correct door are much higher.

[1] 1 Corinthians 2:9 “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the heart of man conceived,

what God has prepared for those who love him” Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition

[2] Mangel, M & Samaniego, F.J; Abraham Wald’s Work on Aircraft Survivability; Journal of the American Statistical Association

Vol. 79, No. 386 (Jun., 1984)

Cultural Shock

What to Consider When Moving Out

You just received an excellent job offer abroad, or maybe you decide to open a company abroad and have the full plan read. Either way, you concluded that you checked what to consider when moving out. You think that the chosen destination offers a good professional perspective. Now it is time to pack your things and decide the date of the flight, right?

Not yet.

If you are planning to the new place, there are other things to consider. We will call this group the non-professional elements. The reason to consider them is that it is hard to have a successful career or enterprise if you are feeling miserable, living in a place you dislike, or in an environment that goes against your values.

In my first book, Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity, I dedicated one entire chapter to exemplify why understanding your own life project is important to succeed as an expatriate. This applies if you are a big-corporation employee, a foreign student, a person moving with your spouse, or an entrepreneur.

Environmental Dissonance

A phenomenon frequently affecting expatriates is what I call environmental dissonance. It happens when your values conflict with the place surrounding you. In my before-mentioned book (Moving Out) I recounted the story of Breno, a colleague I met while living in the Middle East. Even having a good job and working in his field of specialization, he left months after arriving because the environmental dissonance became overwhelming to him.

Just imagine how more complicated is to suffer this dissonance while you hire and motivate a team, establish goals, write a business plan, pitch for seed capital, and so on. For this reason, becomes essential to assert that your target country, if also attractive to your business and career, also matches your life project and goals.

Just be aware that I am in no point advocating you should “follow your heart” or “listen to your feelings”. In fact, to follow your passion is poor advice. What I propose, instead, is to rationalize what your new country offers and how it matches your personal needs. For this, I recommend analyzing the following non-professional elements.

Cultural Distance

Probably the greatest modern researcher in comparative cultural aspects was Geert Hofstede. Starting in the 80s with his book Culture’s Consequences, he developed an extensive bibliography in the area, culminating with the institute that carries his name.

Present in 60 countries, the Hosfted Insights institute developed a model breaking down the cultural distance into 6 major areas. Below, each one of them, with the definitions from the Hofstede-Insights researchers:

· Power Distance – This dimension […] expresses the attitude of the culture towards inequalities amongst us. Power Distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power distribution is unequal.

· Individualism – The fundamental issue addressed by this dimension is the degree of interdependence a society maintains among its members. It is whether people’s self-image translates to terms of “I”, or “We”. In Individualist societies people look after themselves and their direct family only. In Collectivist societies, people belong to ‘in groups’ that take care of them in exchange for loyalty.

· Masculinity—A high score (Masculine) on this dimension shows competition, achievement, and success will drive the society, with success being defined by the winner / best in field—a value system that starts in school and continues throughout organizational life. A low score (Feminine) on the dimension means that the dominant values in society are caring for others and quality of life. A Feminine society is one where quality of life is the sign of success, and standing out from the crowd is not admirable. The fundamental issue here is what motivates people, wanting to be the best (Masculine) or liking what you do (Feminine).

· Uncertainty Avoidance – It is how a society deals with the fact that we can never know the future: should we try to control the future or just let it happen? This ambiguity brings with it anxiety and different cultures have learned to deal with this anxiety in different ways. The score on Uncertainty Avoidance reflects the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and create institutions to avoid risk .

· Long Term Orientation – This dimension describes how every society has to maintain some links with its own past while dealing with the challenges of the present and future. Societies prioritize these two existential goals differently. Normative societies. which score low on this dimension, for example, prefer to maintain time-honored traditions and norms while viewing societal change with suspicion. Societies scoring high here, on the other side, take a more pragmatic approach: they encourage efforts in modern education as a way to prepare for the future.

· Indulgence – The Hofstede-Insights define this dimension as the extent to which people try to control their desires and impulses, based on the way they were raised. Relatively weak control is called “Indulgence” and relatively firm control is analogous to “Restraint”. Cultures therefore are grouped as Indulgent or Restrained.

When I had my first contact with the research of Dr. Hofstede, my immediate action was to check how the countries I lived before (Brazil, Chile, Qatar, and Poland) scored in each ranking. The comparative results from each one – got from a tool available on his institute website – reflected with Swiss-precision the reality I witnessed living in each of them.

For example, according to the results, the Power Distance in Qatar is very high. This matches my observations of a place where the people take as natural the near immutable social differences. Similarly, the higher levels of indulgence and femininity (as per Hofstede’s definition of femininity) in Chile are noticeable in their capital. At the end, the results from Poland fused two of my biggest impressions from living in this country: it is a non-indulgent society, with a considerable level of risk-aversion.

The two characteristics mentioned above – frugality and risk-aversion – of the Polish people contrasted with my cultural baggage.

As a Brazilian, I grow up seeing people spend a fair share of their income in branded shoes, new cars (paid in installments distributed across years), and eating out. Even though nowadays Poland has a similar income to my native São Paulo, someone will rarely buy a new car, and a 10-year-old vehicle is still OK. Personal anecdote: my wife considers it absurd that someone would spend over 5 times his salary in a new automobile. In contrast, in Brazil it is not rare to see people buying cars with the price tag of their annual salary.

The Latin America vs Europe example

This difference, summarized in the Indulgence factor of Dr. Hofstede research, probably affects not only me but thousands of other expatriates that move between Latin America and Europe. Sean Lana, an expatriate living in Germany, lists how other factors of Hofstede research (Individualism) impact his daily life.

Germany is not a country you want to be if your only major goal in life is to own a Bugatti, Ferrari, Tesla and shows off! Collectivism means the country is trying to redistribute wealth equally, at least in order to mitigate poverty and support low-income earners. Expect high taxes and you will enjoy a high quality of life with infrastructures. So if you are very individualistic, consider the next flight to another country. German organisation system is based on the ideology of Max Weber (bureaucracy), Americans practice Scientific management (Taylorism). If you are not used to obeying rigorous rules, regulations, huge laws, paper works, transparency, slow process, appointments, etc then you shouldn’t stay in Germany.

Cultural differences withing a country

It is essential to remind that cultural discrepancies – of the types studied by Dr. Hofstede and perceived in the two examples above – can exist even inside the same country.

Henry Eshleman, a Park Ranger at Fairbanks North Star Borough in Alaska, USA, explained how he felt closer to foreign students than locals while in Indiana, Midwest of the same country.

In Indiana, being from Alaska made me an exotic curiosity. People would ask me questions I never got in Europe, Canada, or Mexico- “What are you doing here?” “Is it cold there?” “What it’s like when it’s light all the time?” And so forth. As a student, I rapidly realized I had more in common with the foreign exchange students, or with my buddy Angel, from Puerto Rico, than I did with the “regular” kids.

My biggest culture shock was essentially domestic in nature, the result of coming from a state which isn’t directly connected to the rest right into the Midwest Heartland.

Even in a country with the size of a single American state, cultural differences are noticeable. In Poland, the northern region of Gdansk has considerable differences to the Subcarpathian cities in the south. Differences shaped during centuries of partitions between Russia, Austria and Germany. Nowadays, the differences reflect electoral results, practices and consumer behaviors.

Besides cultural characteristics, there are other non-business aspects to consider when doing a professional shift:

· Future family prospects: It is easy to make a decision when it concerns only you. The same is not true when it involves wife and kids. Even if you are single, it is important to reflect on what you want for the next years. If you are planning to build a family, consider this beforehand. This was my case when I decided to move out of Qatar (my previous country). My first thought was to move to Panamá with my then-fiancée, but we had plans to marry and maybe have kids in the next few years. For this reason, we live in Poland, closer to her family.

· The Time zone. I already mentioned how different time zones can create business problems. This also applies to your private life. A person in South Africa, even though is distant from his relatives in Europe, is still inside a similar time zone, but not someone living in the Middle East and with a family in South-America. This was my case years ago. The 5 to 6 hours’ difference restricted the chances I had to keep contact. During my mornings, they were sleeping. During their evenings, I was sleeping.

· How friendly the country is to your lifestyle. For example, if you enjoy practicing outdoor sports, places like Dubai or Doha may not be a good idea, since it is excruciatingly hot for more than half of the year.

To go deeper into this subject, my first book, Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity, has plenty of considerations to reflect on the personal side of expatriation. Still, if there is one positive advice in business and personal life, it is to immerse yourself in the local culture from the beginning. Talk to the grocery store cashier is a good start.

Conclusion of what to consider when moving out:

· Cultural discrepancies: How you will adapt to different degrees of Individualism, Power Distance, Risk-Aversion, indulgence and so on?

· Future personal prospects: Are you planning to marry, build a family, or remain single? How the local offer of schools, nurseries, etc., fit your plans?

· The time zone difference: Is the time difference considerable? How will that affect your relationships back home?

· How friendly the country is to your lifestyle: Of your routine and favorite activities, what you can keep or adapt to your new destination?

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

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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Digital Nomads

Moving Abroad Checklist Part 2 – Researching Your New…

This is the second part of the Moving Abroad Checklist (the first you can find here). To give the perfect context to the importance of researching about where you live, I will start with a personal anecdote.

During the time I lived and worked in Doha, most of the company staff were foreigners. It was just a reflection of the country’s demographic, largely made of immigrants. Curiously, however, there were almost no other Brazilians like me, except the boss of the boss of my boss. There were rumors about people from Brazil not resisting much time there because of the vast distance to their country, plus the enormous cultural differences. To my surprise, just a few months after they hire me, they also hired a fellow Brazilian called Breno.

Breno had a respectable curriculum. Graduated is the USA, in one of the top universities in his area, worked for the pride-company of the Brazilian aerospace industry and despite being young (he was just slightly older than I was), had a list of achievements uncommon for his age. He also looked slightly like a frat-boy coming out from a B-class American comedy. Breno was a very easy-going person, making funny jokes about all things.

In one of his first days, I was at my desk calibrating some technical parameters, and Breno comes to me and ask:

Hey Levi! What’s up? What about we go for some drinks?

Qatar was not an easy country to go for drinks. It was illegal to sell alcohol in all stores except one, which was state-owned and demanded a special license to buy their 300% overpriced booze. They also sold alcoholic drinks at bars and restaurants of luxury hotels. There, a round of cocktails could cost as much as a weekend on a Greek beach, hotel included.

Despite being busy, the question of Breno surprised me, since at the beginning you don’t have so much money to spare, at least until receive your first salary. Did he know the alcohol was so expensive there? Maybe he found someone with a license to buy alcoholic drinks and was giving a house party? The guy was so easygoing, it would not be a surprise.

No. It was nothing like that. He had another idea in mind, which I discovered when I asked where he wanted to go.

“Maybe we can go to the party district! Where is it? You know, this street full of bars and clubs that every big city in the world has!”

That is it. He just asked me about a Bangkok style party district in an Islamic society where a woman could face problems if their skirts were above their knees. A place where was often cheaper to buy an airline ticket to another country if you wanted to party.

This guy had no idea where he was.

Do not rely solely on Media

The story of Breno may sound odd, but it is not uncommon. There are plenty of people that don’t make a proper field research before moving. Or when they make, they use only media sources, with information written by journalists. Some of those journalists act almost as public relations from governments, publishing information that is unrealistic or exaggeratedly welcoming.

Maybe Breno imagined Doha as a middle-eastern Barcelona because he saw so many media vehicles praising Qatar for having less strict Islamic rules when compared to Saudi Arabia. Yes, it is less strict, but what the media omitted is that Saudi is the strictest Islamic country in the world. To be less, in this case, is natural. When Qatar earned the right to host the football World Cup, there was plenty of government money going around. Maybe that is why journalists felt compelled to do unrealistic and overoptimistic comparisons, like between Doha and Dubai.

I cannot stress enough how important is to do proper research before moving out, and I am sure most expats do it. However, unfortunately, they just do not do it right. Go to the easiest source of information (newspapers, internet portals or YouTube videos) is not a good idea. Editors, presenters and reporters are not there to help someone to live abroad but to earn a living, so they may just create content to draw attention. Sensationalist talks.

This is something that I saw in Poland. More often than never I witnessed in expat forums questions about how safe is for a dark-skinned person to walk in the polish streets. The answer, from my side, is elementary: as safe as you can imagine. The number of racist assaults in Poland is negligible and even being an olive-skinned guy and knowing plenty of Afro-Brazilians, I still didn’t hear about this kind of problem. So, why people fear those hordes of racist poles which, in over three years here, I did not saw? Because they write about it in the media, they show it on the TV, and it may be one of the first things you see when you type Poland at Google. However, all this repetition does not make it true.

The difference between what the press portrays and street reality can be abysmal. So if I am telling here that the main media vehicles are not the best source to research your new country, where should you seek information? Can you guess?

The Locals

Ask the real people. The ones who went through the same experiences and endured it for years. Thanks to the same web I criticized above, you also can reach them easily.

Social media today is full of groups. They often have names as “Foreigners in [name of the place]”. I don’t recommend these groups as the sole source of information because many of their members are expats still in their honeymoon phase, before the cultural shock, or just tourists. But while they cannot provide you with the most reliable information, it is still better than the traditional media.

The real deal is to look for groups of locals. One simple way I found is to find language learning groups in the country where I am moving too. Not only you will be able to communicate with locals from your new country and learn their idiom, but they will be excited if you offer to teach them your language. It can be fun too!

Another possibility is to look for common interests. Even before moving to Europe, I was already in local groups about entrepreneurship, football and philosophy, three subjects interesting to me. While discussing things I enjoyed, I learned about local views on those subjects and other common topics. If you are already in the country but feeling you don’t know enough about it – since most of your contacts are foreigners – enrolling in a course or volunteering can be useful and pleasant.

A third way is to find people from your new country that now are living where you live. You can do that on social media. For example, if you are a Canadian moving to Argentina, you can just look on Facebook for the group “Argentinians in Canada” (or, most likely, Argentinos en Canadá). The members know how is to be a foreigner and will be glad to help with your doubts about their country.

After I told you where to look for information, comes the next question: Which information should you seek? For these answers, check this article about cultural shock.

Questions to ask yourself:

To make your life easier, I prepared the template below. Seek the information about your new country in the ways I suggested previously *communities in social media and groups related to your interests) and complete it. At the end of the exercise, should be a plethora of information useful in your journey.

1st source of cultural shock: The Rules

How do people deal with regulations? Are they rigid and play strictly by the book or there is space to some negotiation? Are systems and procedures respected daily or used as guidelines, with frequent adaptations to daily circumstances? Are plans rigorously respected, or they are adjusted according to additional requests?

Your previous country:

Your new country:

2nd source of cultural shock: The Time

Do people arrive on time on every occasion, even informal ones? Is there some tolerance for delays? What happens when someone arrives 10 minutes late for a social gathering? How do we inform at work or university that something blocked the road, making it impossible to arrive on time? Is it normal to do over-hours or to extend a meeting beyond the scheduled time?

Your previous country:

Your new country:

3rd source of cultural shock: The Humor

Which level of formality is expected in a conversation at work or public office? Is it ok to do jokes as an icebreaker? Do people laugh at small incidents or remain serious? Is a smile always considered a sign of joy or may be taken as disdain? Are puns and tricks common, or people tend to always behave seriously?

Your previous country:

Your new country:

4th source of cultural shock: The Communication

When it is time to take a decision, how is the communication process: direct and to the point, with no digressions, or it goes around many hypotheses and with space to different discussions? When people need to criticize a co-worker, do they use subtle language and avoid direct conflict, or they just say what they want to say without space for doubt? When people ask for a favor or a task, do they suggest indirectly using expressions like “maybe” or “would be nice if someone did that” or they straightforward tell you what they want? When someone needs to deny an invitation or a request, do they simply say “I can’t do it, sorry” or they use excuses?

Your previous country:

Your new country:

If you have any other important expatriate questions to suggest, send them in the comments, and see you in the next part of our series Moving Abroad Checklist.

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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Digital Nomads

Moving Abroad Checklist Part 1 – How to Make…

This is the first of a series of posts regarding the Moving Abroad Checklist that business travelers, expatriates, or exchange students should do to make their life far from home much easier. We will start with a very neglected subject.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
John F. Kennedy, former U.S. President.

It is not common to board a plane and start a new life focusing on what to do if unexpected and unpleasant situations happen. Sometimes you prepare yourself for the difficulties you judge possible, like homesickness (if you are worried about it, check this article), not passing the probation time of your new employer, or not being approved at university. As much as my experience shows me, expatriates are often well prepared for the problems arising at the beginning of their life abroad.

However, time passes and you get more settled, more comfortable with your surrounding, and take things for granted. Therefore, this rule is more useful to anyone already living far from home for some time.

The type of surprises that can storm your life vary between countries.

If you are living in the Middle East, you may get locked in civil unrest or geopolitical disputes.
In South America, a hyperinflation cycle can destroy the power of purchase and make your salary worth much less than what you had before moving out.
In the USA, if an accident not covered by your insurance happens, you might have a medical bill draining all your savings.
In the seismic region knows as the Pacific Ring, lives can change completely in case of earthquakes or tsunamis (like the one of 2004 in Indonesia or 2011 in Japan).

Even when there is no geopolitical crisis or natural cataclysms around, there are still the typical corporate problems. These, in some locations, can assume a different dimension. In places like the United Arab Emirates or Qatar, if you lose your job, you may have only one month to leave the country. In Singapore, it can be even worse, with a deadline of only two weeks to get out.

When I lived in Doha, Qatar, it was common to see used luxury cars on sale with huge discounts every time an oil company laid off personnel. This happened because their former staff had little time to pack the luggage and leave. Therefore, to sell their vehicles, even at a smaller price, was already a victory. That was the reason so many people there preferred to rent a car instead of buying one.

Moving Abroad Checklist: How to Make a Plan B.

When we start a new life abroad, sometimes we ignore the chances it might not go as expected. We want to keep our morale, confidence and spirit that this is going to be an exceptional year. This feeling increases when we didn’t witness any major problem recently, and our perception that nothing bad is going to happen inflates. It is the survivorship bias the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman explained so well in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Don’t get me wrong here. It is essential to have a positive mindset, hope and work for the best outcome otherwise, you would never board the plane to move abroad. However, it is equally crucial to analyze the risks (even the rare ones) and find out viable alternatives.

Bottom line: The chances of happening an unlikely surprise increase across the years, and eventually the implausible event will knock at your door. So have a Plan B! And maybe even a C.

The best way to start a Plan B is to know as much as you can about your risks. This is possible only by talking to the people that experienced failure. I recognize it is difficult to make others disclose their misfortunes, but it is worth to try. The next step is to compile all the possible situations representing a hazard and work in their contingency. For this, you can also use the experience of other foreigners by asking them in social media, expat meetings and blogs.

Questions to ask

What type of failures can happen?
What they did to protect themselves?
How they reacted when the event arose?
How did they prepare for similar events in the future?

For natural cataclysms there are well-known standard procedures. In Japan, for example, there are earthquake emergency packs with water, canned food, blankets, etc. In Indonesia, after the tsunami, they build shelters in exposed beaches and hotels to speed evacuation.

While I would not recommend cooling down and take a breath if a hurricane or tsunami is approaching, with a crisis of sociopolitical nature it may be better to sit back to think and not rush in making decisions.

A good example is the tumultuous relation between North and South Korea, which often scares foreigners, but nothing serious happened in the last decades. A similar situation happened in Armenia in 2018, when major protests erupted in their capital, Yerevan. The city stopped and was relatively chaotic for a few days. I was there spending holidays, and even before I came back, everything already went back to normal. Of course, civil unrest may turn into a long crisis, and sometimes even wars. But surely most of them don’t go that far and should not be a reason for panic.

Putting aside natural and sociopolitical reasons, another risk is more individual-related. In countries where there is a short time-frame to leave in case of losing a job (or student status), it is important to ask to include in the main contracts (like rent agreement) a termination clause, which would make you exempt of any fines to the landlord in the case your job ended against your will. In most places nowadays there is also a variety of job loss insurances covering those situations.

Another personal anecdote

As personal advice, one thing that always worked very well for me is to live light, in the sense of not accumulate long contracts, obligations, or assets. While for a big family this may be a challenge, for singles or young couples it is a great alternative.

During my time in Chile, I never bought a car and the contract with my company assured me that if they dismissed me, they would cover any fine of my rent agreement. It was not the case in Qatar, but since I was sharing my flat there, after resigning from my job, I just needed to find someone to substitute me. I also didn’t need to sell any car because my flatmate Matteo had a nice deal with me, where I paid for part of his fuel, so he took me to and from work. Another very helpful strategy was to always rent furnished apartments, so I didn’t need to buy and sell furniture or worse, move it from one country to another.

It was good that I was living light since my last move was not smooth. I needed to use my Plan B, for a reason that is quite common and is still not in this article. Therefore, I ask again for your patience for a small personal story and promise it can be useful for you.

After achieving my desired promotion in Qatar, and saved some money to open a business in the future, I planned to live in an environment closer to what I wanted for the long-term, out of the big-corporation world. I looked for a job and one startup in Barcelona took my attention. We exchanged some emails, made an interview via Skype, and they asked me to visit their Spanish headquarters. There I talked to the CEO and solved some of those modern challenges startups apply to their selections. Few days and a call later, I got the job.

Simultaneously, I also had a job offer from a huge e-commerce corporation in Poland. Even though Poland was a pleasant country to live (and my girlfriend was Polish), I didn’t want to move from one big corp to another, so I refused their job and accepted the Spanish offer. A few days later, I gave my one-month notice period in Doha.

Only two weeks before I finally leave for Spain, they called me and told me they didn’t have the resources needed to apply for my visa. They told me I should do it myself, by my own resources and taking the risk of losing anything invested if the government rejected my working Visa.

I knew that changing my life and depending on the bureaucratic skills of a small startup (where the CEO interviewed me with a greasy NASA t-shirt) was risky. So even before I had their job offer, I was also working on my Plan B: to have my own business.

To be specific, I started working on a backup plan one year before, doing market research to decide which cities were the most attractive in Poland and contacting business owners wanting to sell their enterprises. Some of them showed interest in a deal. Therefore, when the NASA-Shirt CEO of the Spanish startup called me and gave me the bad news of their lack of structure, I jumped into the plan B. Immediately I made an offer to purchase a Polish business from a couple that wanted to live in a calmer place with their newborn baby.

However, a few months later this plan also broke down. After I move to Poland and just before I transfer them the money, they gave up selling it. So, I went for plan C: Open my company from zero.

Conclusion (and happy ending?)

After all those years, the company is still working, so even a plan C can be fruitful if you prepare it properly. On a side note, the move to Poland instead of Spain gave me other surprises, but this time they were very positive.

Maybe the advice of this article does not look plain as the others I wrote before, like the solution for the ANS syndrome. But at the end of the day, the most important to remember is simple: do not think improbable and unpleasant situations will never happen to you. Be prepared. After all, this may become even a greater opportunity, as I will explain in a future article of our Moving Abroad Checklist series.

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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.

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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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Environmental Dissonance

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The 4 dimensions of cultural integration

The upside and opportunities of being peculiar

Do not rely solely on Media

The Locals

Questions to ask yourself:

Moving Abroad Checklist: How to Make a Plan B.

Questions to ask

Another personal anecdote

Conclusion (and happy ending?)

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

Learning the language while adapting to Life Abroad

A Bit of Nostalgia First

​ The Expat ANS Syndrome

Latin-American Expats and the D problem.

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

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The Expat ANS Syndrome