The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

It scares me when I whole heartedly agree with you Rob.

Living and working in the States and Thailand and China gave me so many experiences of “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so…”

In China I learned about the blessed freedom of illiteracy and innumeracy (everyone was shouting but I couldn’t see and I could hear)
In the US it was the terror of choice and almost complete brand blindness
And the lovely Thais taught me a lot about class discrimination

Planning in another country is a great assumption killer….a great way to challenge your taxonomies and build your understanding of what ‘being human’ is all about.

Planners are very curious.

as i only do 1 lucid thought a day (reposted with my knd permission):

I think it is great advice to get better as a person/planner to travel, but as an indsutry my first thought was: hire more immigrant kids and it might have a bigger impact on ur industry. roll with me on this one.

all the stuff you (not u in person but you as western man) go through when going into a foreign country, is what immigrants live while in any western countries..(indeed u made that very point in ur preso – living multiple lives-, which could actually go a long way to explain al my disorders, if i wasn’t just bonkers)..the shapeshift thinking, the goal orientated action, the chip on shoulder/point to prove..Yes huge generalisation, but i think there is some merit to it..

Campbell is kinda an example (on normal industry standards for hiring, u should not have even known advertising was an industry, let alone get in it)

so it strikes me as odd that, esepcially in a country as Aus/UK/US, there is not more culturly sensitive thinking going on, given the fact most of the ppl are ethnically divers, unless the hiring practices are skewed towards a certain type, a type from a mono cultural backround that indeed needs to travel to ‘get’ diversity and what not..

Thanks for the post and even more for the comments. It’s motivating to hear that none of you (?) regrets having gone abroad.

The different perspective with me being from Vienna is that people here and probably also in Germany – and I must admit I’m thinking like that too sometimes – consider the US, UK as “THE CENTRE OF THE AD WORLD” and the places one should go. You know … the going where they invented it thing.

I think I’ve been around quite a bit for a student and I’ve obviously never “grown” as much as when I left my own culture and the continent but I always had the safety net of returning to “school” after half a year there or 3 months there. So I’m looking forward to find out how the decision feels once the net’s (finally) gone.

this is all well and fucking good, but ive just spoken to campbell and hes just finished one of his whore tours where he ropes a couple of gullible colleagues and goes and interviews ladies of the night and their pimps.

let me say that again slowly.

campbell
pays
prostitutes
to
talk
to
him.

and get this. he only fucking gets paid for this sort of “research”. paid. cash. not that pacific peso shit, cold hard dollars. the worlds fucking mad but its probably the best reason ive heard to pack my bags and move to fucking asia.

and germans and australians are the worst “clients”. too rough and show no respect im told. talk about cultural fucking stereotype. wont be able to look marcus, thomas, age and lauren in the eye and ill be fucked if im shaking their hand.