Make Sure You Really Want to Go
The challenges will be extraordinary — you need a powerful reason.
You will be spending 24 hours a day an ocean away from your “comfort zone,” subject to anxieties and frustrations most of which you cannot fathom in advance. You will be tested in ways you didn’t expect and may find unjust or improper, possibly outrageous. To hang on in the teeth of such discouragements, to be driven to give up the amenities and assurances of home, you need to have a powerful non–work reason to go.
My own motivation for moving to Southeast Asia was more powerful than average — the woman I married in Switzerland in 1992 lived, as it happened, in Singapore.
Maybe you want as little as “to find out what it’s like,”; to teach yourself something about the world. Maybe all you want is to scout it out, to find out how you might set up there and make a living in the long run. But many who have weighed alternatives will feel that for these gains they would be paying too steep a price. Unless you can get to the point of saying, absolutely, “Yes, I really want to go,” stay home for now.
On the other hand, those who take the trouble to explore often find compelling, even irresistible motivation to take Zorba the Greek’s advice, to “cut the rope and be free.”
You must explore and evaluate.
Don’t Underestimate the Difficulties
What will be the chief difficulty? Could it be the fact that the underlying assumptions, the “rules of inference” for conducting personal and business interactions, and the interpretations of what signs and actions mean have shifted, and that no indication appears each minute of the workday or evening to remind you that you must see and do things differently? Is it possible that such a shift, whether subtle or unsubtle, could be disorienting and create anxieties? You bet!
The only way that I know that you can come to terms with a culture that is foreign to you is by giving up and letting go of your requirement that everything and everybody should fit a North American model of culture. Instead of falsifying reality to fit a “theory” — that one-size-fits-all iron Procrustean bed you brought with you from childhood — you can make your understanding of the thing fit the thing. But that’s a lot of work.
Learning to change the size and shape of the all–purpose “understanding” — which it feels like you were born with, like a part of your body — to fit the new reality feels like taxing and somehow dangerous work. But that may be the only route to an understanding of where you in fact are and how you do and can fit in.
Keep in mind that we are talking actually about two kinds of difficulties:
- The rock. You must learn to deal with the anxiety (should we say “terror?”) and excitement that results from the fact that your new daily life no longer conforms to what your old life trained you to expect. This is the hard part.
- The hard place. You must learn to understand the practical details of how to function in this “unexpected” environment. This is merely difficult, frustrating, grueling and potentially exhausting and requires all your wits and resources.
If you cannot offer great quantities of time and openness to exploring and evaluating, you are unlikely to be able to make a decision that you will be happy to live with the consequences of.
Don’t Underestimate the Potential Rewards
Basing yourself overseas, and particularly in a Newly Industrializing Economy (“NIE”), can provide excellent conditions for enormous professional development. And the potential for personal rewards may perhaps be greater still. I’ll discuss both types of rewards below, under Big Rewards.
Learn about and weigh the difficulties and likely rewards so that you can make a somewhat informed decision.
Don’t Jump Out of the Frying Pan: Story of Three or Four Bears
The following anecdote illustrates the plusses and minuses for making a decision to jump overseas for individuals in the most usual positions.
- The Fat Bear. If you are happy at your current location and workplace you are in an excellent position to evaluate overseas destinations. On the other hand, you may have the disadvantage of little or no time for research. Furthermore, you have the “disadvantage” that you might be too comfortable to “get out of bed.”
- The Skinny Bear. If you are currently unemployed or underemployed you may have the most important advantage: time to explore, research extensively and make decisions. On the other hand, a hungry bear is sometimes not your most natural discriminator between greasy-spoon and gourmet fare. Be careful!
- The so–called Average Bear. If you’re unhappy where you are now, jumping overseas is particularly risky. Being unhappy at one workplace may be a decent reason to leave it but it is no guarantee that the next workplace will be less miserable.
- The Bear in the Earthquake. Get out of the house now before it falls down; decide where your destination is later.
The Commitment You Need
You need to commit to a lot of time and a lot of work.
My feeling is that you need a minimum of 2½ years of living in the new place. You need those years in order to have enough time to settle into the new place and begin to understand its charms and benefits before you have to set the back of your brain working on getting home or to the next place.
- Believe it or not, doing what you’ll need to do will require six to twelve months of pre–move preparation time.
- In order to create a good situation for yourself overseas, you will need 400 conversations, at least one–third face–to–face, before you're involved in work at the new place.
- You will need to work through massive doses of newness.