How Living Abroad in Your 20s Will Dramatically Enrich You as a Person

Unless you goof off and blow it

In your 20s or even in your 30s if you have a chance to go abroad (for work, education, internship, business or just to make a living) any such opportunity, simply GRAB it!

If you let go, you will be a fool.

Why?

The vibrancy of your ’20s and ’30s will be gone before you know it. You will easily spend time with your work, friends, sport, girlfriend, or boyfriend and worse, college.

If you stay all your life where you were born and grew up, without any real travel or exposure, your perspective and world view will be big enough to fit a squirrel’s skull. And sorry all the videos on the Internet will not help to get your real-world experience.

The world is a book and those that do not travel read only a page

Saint Augustine

Here is why you should go abroad (from wherever you are). Here is what you will learn. Here is how your learning will stretch your mind.

Shake off your Comfort Zone:

Great things never came from comfort zones

-Unkown

If you have grown up going to school and college, staying with your mum and dad, eating mum’s breakfast every morning and you are already 21, you need a whack on your backside.

What the heck are you doing bro?

I see this all the time, especially with Asian youngsters. You wake up at 810am and are getting ready for your 9 am office or college (just not now, thanks to COVID). And you make sure you complain about breakfast, you drive like crazy to beat traffic and arrive totally haggard.

If you live this life for five years, you will get so used to this comfortable routine, (even if your parents allow you — most Indian parents will) you will really be fit for nothing else.

Weekends are wasted, weekdays are spent at some lousy desk in an office, years roll by and before you know it, you are thirty: no great new skills, no learning — apart from something at work, no new friends, no change in scene.

Normal is boring.

Life’s richness comes from new experiences, not from how much you save or how soon you became a millionaire. Travel to a country you have never been before, make friends with people who don’t speak your language, learn new recipes, and try your hand at cooking. New foods and culture. Pick up a new form of music or art.

Not all who wander are lost

J R R Tolkien

Get bored on a weekend, rent a motorcycle and drive into the countryside. Take pictures. Fall in love. Get ditched. Fall in love again.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness. And many of our people need it sorely on these accounts

Mark Twain

Freedom:

Staying home gets you lazy. It’s easily mistaken for freedom. It is not. Freedom is not having nothing to do. If your mum is doing all the cooking, the maid the cleaning, and dad does the shopping, that’s not freedom.

Freedom is having the ability to do what you want to do when you want to. And usually comes with its own set of responsibilities.

When you are in a hostel or in your parents’ home, if the expected hour to get back home is 10 pm on weekend and 8 pm on weekdays, you call it ‘curfew time’. But when you are alone, in a foreign land, sharing an apartment with a friend and you come home at 3 am, beer in your breath, you smile at yourself and call it ‘freedom’.

But when you realize the lights are not turning on because the utility company knocked off the connection. And you check the message on your phone the last date to pay bills was the previous day and you forgot to pay the bills. That is ‘responsibility’.

Tough luck. If it's winter, it also means no heating for the night. It also means no heating for the night. Worse, you need to be up early to work on your presentation for the 9 am meeting!

That should teach some responsibility.

Expect the Unexpected:

Living in a foreign land by yourself, if nothing, exposes you to a series of incidents that you are not prepared for. And probably no one to help. When you are thrown into completely alien situations, your body’s adaptation system kicks into high gear and is suddenly prepares you for everything.

It adjusts, decides which is a lesser danger, throws up options, allows you to reconcile to your decisions, and enjoys the peace in between two fires.

You learn to respect the laws of the land (traffic rules, immigration laws) and learn not to panic on smaller issues, such as running out of gasoline on the highway.

I am not saying these are acts of courage but I am saying these things you rarely get to experience in a nice well-provided parents’ home. Most things have been thought through and someone has already arranged for multiple levels of back up.

The problem with over-facilitated families is that it makes you stupid and unprepared for the real world.

In my early days of running Tonse Telecom, a consulting company, I had to travel to Barcelona for a major industry event. It was a last-minute decision, and I wasn’t able to get hotel rooms within the city.

My accommodation was an apartment room some 50 miles from the city. On the second day, I had a breakfast meeting scheduled at 730am at the venue which meant I had to take a 6 am train from my town.

It was a 10-minute walk in the freezing rain to the train station. The suburban station was deserted, and I was the only person on the platform waiting for the train. I decided to sit on one of the wooden benches till the train arrived.

Shortly after I heard a noise under the bench. I bent to realize a man sleeping there in a hood, curled up, with a tiny revolver half out of his pocket. There were a couple of empty syringes lying next to him and some short metal blades.

It was unnerving, to say the least. The next ten minutes, that it took for the train to arrive, were the longest ten minutes I have ever been through.

Courage is not about doing a valiant thing. It is about maintaining calm during the uncommon events in life that give you the space to continue to think rationally.

As you go through new environments, more and more new experiences will raise your adaptability to a new level, thus establishing a basic calmness and avoiding panic.

If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be

-Maya Angelou

Perspective:

One of the biggest things I gained by studying and working in four different countries, is an incredible perspective of life. It is amazing how living abroad stretches your mind to a new level altogether.

It shows you what humans and societies can be and if you probe hard enough, perhaps even tell you why they are so.

When you grow up in one country, you are exposed to a certain set of things: food, culture, beliefs, traffic rules, education system, accepted practices in daily life, and so on.

When you live in a foreign land, you have the opportunity of challenging your own beliefs and may even gain new respect for your culture as well as that of others. You will accept diversity as a natural human trait, as you would, perhaps in nature. Your ability to view things more rationally becomes stronger.

These may drive your curiosity to explore more. And discover more. This increased understanding will enhance your personality and make you a more global citizen. It will make you more sensitive to global issues and brings a new perspective to what you read and hear from others.

If you think travel is dangerous, try routine, its lethal

Paul Coelho

Empathy:

Someone you trust will cheat you, and someone you don't think highly of may save your skin on a terrible day. You will see an utterly impoverished person who is happy for no reason and you will see a black-suited corporate executive in a private jet looking miserable.

You will be careful about judging people and empathetic to humanity. You will smile more often and accept limitations in you as well as others.

So go ahead and drop the shackles of dad’s home. Fly east, west, or wherever (right now just wait for the pandemic to truly pass!). But never miss an opportunity to explore the world. Bon Voyage!

About the Author: Sridhar Pai Tonse writes on tech, start-ups, marketing, and shares musings on life.