Go Where You Are Treated Best

[kangarunner]

@Winston Why don't you do a podcast on your channel with Andrew Henderson?

 I was 12 years old. I was given one of the greatest gifts by my father. A lot of my friends were starting to have conversations with their parents. They were told, one day you'll have to stay here and take care of us. My father said, we don't believe it's your obligation to take care of us. You don't owe it to us.

We owe it to you to make you empowered to do what you want. My father said, the world is changing, it always is. He said, you don't have to stay in the same city, in the same U. S. state, or in the same country. You should go where you're treated best. This was a permission slip that I received. In a sense, go where you're treated best is the natural human reaction.

We seek out pleasure, we avoid pain, but many of us don't. Always go where we're treated best. And many of those friends of mine felt restricted that they couldn't live the lives they wanted to because they had obligations based on what society told them they were supposed to do. The writer Megan Drahim says we should root for the home team.

Go to your local stadium. Go to your arena. Rub elbows with 40, 000 people who live nearby you. Build the camaraderie of being next to people from down the street, people who were born in the same place. I always ask myself, why don't we go to stadiums and rub elbows with people who share our values, not based on where we're from, not based on us people telling us we share values, but based on we want to start a business together, or we share a common cause, or whatever the reason.

And we do do that. But the one thing that we're told we're not supposed to question is, Don't question the home team. Go where you're treated best says, it's okay to question rooting for the home team. It says that for you to accomplish everything that you want, for you to be the most productive and give the most to the world, you have to be in a place and you have to be around people that share your values.

Those people may not be, uh, where you are. I believe it's a mathematical Improbability. That the place that each of us are from would be the best at almost anything. Let alone everything. It's almost an uncertainty that where we're from is the best at absolutely everything. And yet, it's the one thing that you're not supposed to challenge.

You're not supposed to have competition from where you're from. We're told, uh, you know. Don't go out and look for a better deal. We're told, the people where you're from, that's your identity. And, it's not human nature at all. If you go to a restaurant, you expect good service. If you go to a shop, you expect a good deal, or else you don't buy there.

And even in human relationships, you get together because of shared interests, you get together because of shared values, you get together because of common respect. But there are boundaries in those relationships, and if at some point those interests and those values and those boundaries change, the relationship may change.

You shouldn't stay in a relationship that's abusive, that doesn't serve your needs, just because that's what you're supposed to do. And yet, how many people do? And how many people do that in their relationships with where they're from, even though they know there are other places where they can go?

What's interesting, where I'm from in the United States, As you've seen for years, stories of people moving from California to Florida, California to Texas. I happen to think that many of those people would find more of what they're looking for moving to California to somewhere in another country. But we're told, okay, you're going to move, stay in the own country.

Okay, that, that we can live with. But they move from California to Texas because the taxes are too high. Because, uh, the government isn't competitive enough. There's too much crime. There's too many regulations. They can't run their business. And so they, they go to Texas. But more recently I'm seeing people from Texas are going from, to California now.

Is it because Texas now has so much higher taxes and has so much higher crime? No. They're different people who have different needs. They don't feel that their values are respected in Texas. And to them, California is the panacea. And so they go where they're treated best. But in each of these circles, people have this idea that, well, you shouldn't, you know, challenge that this is the right path.

California is bad. But obviously, California is a good place for some people. And this idea of individuality is somehow frowned upon, that we're not supposed to go somewhere different. We're not supposed to do something different. This is good, this is bad. I want to talk to you about three, uh, concepts. How you can go where you're treated best.

How you can realize that everybody has their own unique interests. And that only when you're truly aligned with those can you achieve your highest purpose. For me, uh, I identified for the first 33 years of my life as an American by a matter of chance. Geographical randomness. And yet, when I decided to give up that citizenship a number of years ago, there were people where I'm from who got angry.

Who said that's not a good thing to do. And I said, if we all go where we're treated best, we'll feel perfectly comfortable with the people who want to do what I did. They want to go to California. They want to go to Texas. Everyone has their own set of options and we can all respect that each of us, not because we're rooting for the home team in the same stadium, but because we have shared values and that's the arena we should be in, are going to make our own choices and we want to be with people who are going to inspire us to be the best that we can be.

We're going to talk about identity. We're going to talk about mobility, and we're going to talk about optionality. Where I was born, uh, in the United States, the randomness, was that I was born and identified as an American by being born on the, the one side of the lake. And in the grand scheme of the entire world, a small number of kilometers separated my identity being American from the fact that it could have been Canadian, just on the other side of the lake.

Two countries that aren't entirely dissimilar, again, in the scheme of things. But, imagine what could have been different. A different reputation when traveling. Different business conditions at home and when traveling. Different upbringing. Different people you'd meet. Your life could be entirely different being Canadian versus being American.

Even though, again, the countries are relatively similar. And so I looked at that, that randomness. I looked at the mathematical probability. The idea that where I'm from is the best. And I looked at this town of Cleveland. There's a certain humility, there's a humbleness in Cleveland. Part of it, that's just perhaps the identity of that part of the country, that part of the world.

But part of it is, in Cleveland in particular, if you ask some Americans, or if they ask you, where are you from, you say, I'm from Cleveland, they might say, I'm sorry to hear that. And people in Cleveland. So many. They almost adopt that as their ethos. Yeah, we're kind of sorry too. I grew up my entire childhood hearing people in the neighborhood, seeing people on the radio and television saying, We'd love to leave.

The jobs aren't good. The weather's terrible. Why aren't we here? But we're planted here. A sort of defeatism. We can't go anywhere else. We can't go where we're treated best. We were here. It wasn't our choice. We don't get a choice in the matter. This is a city where one year the professional football team lost the game.

One zero games. People kept rooting for the home team. That's what you do. And yet I saw people almost absorbing that approach of what can we do? We're just people who don't win. The home team here doesn't win. We're stuck. And how many people never accomplished? What they could accomplish because they bought into that ethos they may defend it as saying well our identity is we're from this country It's the best they may have nothing to back that up, but it's the one thing they have while they're defending the fact that this Identity of their own can't be changed Then you travel around I've been to Countries all around the world where they almost go to the opposite you say hey you you're doing this really well What if we fix this over here and people get angry?

Because they have a sense of pride about where they're from that covers up the fact that maybe there's some things that they'd like to have but they're lacking. But that's not how we do things here, they say. That's not how blank people operate. If you don't like it, why are you here? And so they go to the opposite direction.

And I, I see these people, they want to accomplish more. They think, oh, maybe we'll elect. certain politicians. Maybe they'll solve the problem. Not realizing that the, the geographical identity that defines the culture of the people there dictates, in many cases, what they accomplish. Whatever you define success as.

And yet, in many of these countries, you'll find people who are the so called black sheep. We hire people all around the world and they'll say, I'm not the normal fill in the blank. I'm not your standard fill in the blank country. Because they want you to know that they don't necessarily subscribe to.

That's how we do things here. And yet, while some of them have moved, many of them haven't. They felt, in a sense, planted because the geographical identity they were given was too strong for them to overcome. They didn't want to go where they were treated best. They wanted to stay somewhere, not able to affect change, not able to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish.

And I asked myself, how many black sheep are there around the world? I had a friend from Germany. Say, our goal here is go to school, get a good degree, get a job at a big corporation, BMW, Siemens. If that's what you want to do, that's great. But how many people with a black sheep who didn't want that, who because they bought into the geographical identity, I can't move, I can't change, this is who we are, this is how we do things, never accomplished what they wanted.

Meanwhile, the book, Geography of Bliss. You read that Iceland, one of the happiest countries in the world, despite the Nordic countries, have some, the lowest levels of patriotism. There's a, a lack of that geographic identity where instead it is, you're okay to fail. Parents teach their kids, even adult kids, yeah, go try poetry for a year.

If that doesn't work out, you'll open a cafe. If that doesn't work out, you'll, you'll do something else. Keep trying. And so that brings me to mobility. There's so many people. That aren't getting everything they need from where they're from. Because we're taught that you have to get everything from one place.

And what Go Where You're Treated Best says is, Be mobile, not just yourself. You can move, and many people should. Again, there's a randomness to where we were born, but perhaps you go and make friends, or employees, or business contacts, or whatever it is in some other country, and you have a sense of mobility where you're learning.

What happens in other places. What mobility in my mind does is it creates a friction that builds self awareness. Because you're exploring other places. You're detaching yourself increasingly from a, an identity that may not serve you. And you're seeing what you might not see in your own country.

Different cultures and they do things in different ways. And you're seeing it right up in front of you. And it builds a self awareness of, this person isn't a black sheep. They don't not know how we do it. This is someone in another country and maybe we can take the best of what works here. And there are places that take the best of what works.

And those are the places that are thriving. Not places that say, here's how we do it and we don't want to change. I met a gentleman from Nicaragua a couple years ago. Nicaraguan passport, pretty strong passport. He can travel really all over the world, except to one place that his culture tells him is the place to go if you want opportunity.

That country he needs a visa for, and that country doesn't easily give out visas to people like him. It's the United States. He told me that's the one place we all want to go. I've seen that. I've talked to so many Mexicans now, after Donald Trump, they all want to go to Canada. Successful people, even as they're trying to escape the geographical identity and go where they're treated best, want to go to the same place.

And, uh, I told him, I said, there's an incredible niching down. of mobility options today. It used to be there were a couple of different places. But as my father told me, the world changes. Places that weren't available 25 years ago are available now. And so a place like Dubai, where one of the wealthiest men in Dubai once told me, he said, there's just a feeling of people who want to work here.

They want to build their identity. You have non judgmental countries now that want to welcome The businessman from Nicaragua to come. They don't care where you're from. Do you have grit? Do you have hustle? Do you want to start something? Do you have an income? Please come and build this. That wasn't there 25 or 50 years ago.

But we're seeing an incredible niching down of opportunities. Places you can go. If you want to be an AI, there'll be a place that'll be the place for that. They want innovators. They don't want to just tolerate you. They will welcome you. There's places for that. If you want great weather, if you want low taxes, whatever it is.

And what you can do is you can pick and choose different options. I want this and I want that. And rather than trying to build where you're from into a place that the people there may not share those values, you can go to the place where that already exists and you can create an identity of choice, not one that was merely given to you.

You can find the place that you want that already exists somewhere else. You can go there and you can create, uh, an incredible self awareness by improving everything that you're doing in your life. Where does what I want already exist? It may not be in a place that you've heard much about, but the world changes.

Optionality is important. This is not about just moving to one country. You might want to meet the love of your life. Where is it you're going to find that person? Is it likely that the love of your life lives down the block and the entire scope of the world? With all the different interests that people have, is it really so likely the way we've always done it?

You've got incredible optionality. Imagine everything in your life is a puzzle piece. It doesn't have to be just starting a business. It doesn't have to be where you live. Every single thing in your life is a puzzle piece. Where's the matching puzzle piece? They don't have to be in different places. You can have different puzzle pieces matching up around the world.

And so the places that those puzzle pieces might match up. My ancestors a hundred years ago, some of them moved to the U. S. a hundred and fifty years ago. The Nicaraguan businessman is no longer welcome there, but he is welcome in Dubai, he is welcome in Singapore, he's welcome in Georgia, he's welcome in a lot of other countries around the world.

He has more optionality than ever because there's more places than ever. There's more opportunities to take your puzzle pieces in different places around the world and say, you may not be the best at everything, but I know you're the best at this. And if we can just learn from each other, we can build something that's better.

That's why the places that are open and that do want to welcome you, not just tolerate you, they're the ones that are learning who's best at this, who's best at that. How do we bring the best of everything together? We'll never be perfect, but we want to strive to be better. There are more options than ever.

You can incre increasingly, uh, choose from the buffet. And you can, again, you can go to a country, if you spend five to ten years there, you can adopt an identity of choice. You can become a citizen of many countries. But don't identify just because this is where I was planted. More than ever, the world is no longer I was born here, I went to school here, my friends are here, I get married here.

I live here, I work here, I do business here, I invest here, I save here, all my money's in the bank. Everything I do is here. I don't know about those other places. It wasn't that long ago in a country like the United States, I mean, just nobody you know would not be American. Nobody in Georgia would not be Georgian.

It's incredibly open now. We have to embrace that and take advantage of all the good things that each different place has to offer us to build our optionality. And so if the movie Midnight in Paris. attacked the idea that perhaps there's nostalgia in thinking we were born in the wrong time. I would posit that it's much more likely that we were born or we're doing things in the wrong place.

So we can't control when we were born, and we can't control the year in which we live. But we can control living intentionally, making choices based on what is the best, detaching ourselves from dogma, and by doing all that, We can improve our lives, improve the lives around, of those around us, improve the contribution we make to the world, and we can truly, intentionally, go where you're treated best.

Thank you.

[kangarunner]

@Winston Why are you not responding to my mentions? Are you over there in Taiwan living in your own world?

[yick]

I enjoyed reading it and am big fan of Andrew Henderson's message. What he says is correct, you have to get out! It will never go back to how it was because it never ever does, it will go up or it will go down but it will never ever stay the same and what people had in the sixties and seventies won't ever return.

Places like Cleveland and the town I am from - an industrial town with no industry any longer - they're twenty years away from becoming those cities in the former Soviet Union which are full of drug addiction, high crime, violence, teenage pregnancy, poverty and hopelessness and though we're behind those cities in the Soviet Union we will soon catch up - who wants to live in such a place? A Nigerian or a Pakistani or a Guatemalan? Fine, let them have it because what was the community and the identity of these places are now more or dead or at least dying.

You can't try and wrap yourself and your own life into something that is in terminal decline - you have to get out and if you are from a first world country like most of us are, you get out! I have two passports and can live or at least travel visa free to most countries in the world and more and more people are doing this.

People are against third worlders coming to take my place in my home town - fine! Let them! I am doing the same as them but getting on a plane with my powerful passport but if I wasn't me and I was them, then I would get on a dinghy and cross the English channel to a better life or cross a desert border in Texas - I would do it without thinking about it. I want a better life and so do they - we all want the same thing and the world is more mobile than ever and they are voting with their feet - literally.

You only have one life and I would rather spend it somewhere nice with nice weather and nice food and friendly folks than the shithole I was born in because my identity is wrapped around the place.