After three weeks in Vietnam, the speaker shares five lessons: ditching his phone increased his awareness and creativity, short distances took hours teaching patience, unplanned detours led to better experiences, locals helped despite language barriers, and being uncomfortable forced him to trust others and the process.
So I just returned from almost 3 weeks in Vietnam, and I thought I'd share 5 learnings from that trip. The first one was that shutting everything down opened everything up, right? So I deinstalled everything on my phone. I didn't look at my phone while I was gone except for Maps and WhatsApp for communications with the locals. And so all of a sudden my brain had all these moments where I wasn't fixated on the screen in front of me, but could look up and experience things. And that generated a whole new openness and creativity in my brain that I found tremendously energizing and reminded me again, while looking down at our phones all the time limits our perspective. The second thing I learned was going even short distances can take forever. 200 kilometers could take 8 hours. So you would get on a bus or get in a car, kind of sit back, sleep a little bit, relax, and just have to come to terms with the fact that it was going to take a long time to get to where you were going. And the same thing applies in business, right? We, we may think that we just need to do this little thing and then a wonderful thing will happen, but that little thing might actually take much longer than we think. And so we have to be patient. And still persevere. A third thing that I experienced, of course, was my plans changed. That is something I hate, right? If I make a plan, I want to, I want to go execute that plan or go do that. But lo and behold, when the plans changed and I ended up in a city that I didn't expect to be in, I had the most memorable experience of the trip in that city with the people there. And so something wonderful came out of that change. Similar in business, your plans change. Um, typically something good will happen and you'll see that that change actually wasn't as, as horrible as you might otherwise have feared. Um, uh, everyone wants you to succeed was another one that I wrote down. Uh, you know, I didn't speak the language. They didn't, they didn't speak my language. Uh, but everybody was trying to, to help me get to where I was going or explain what food I was eating, or just be helpful. And I think sometimes in our life we forget that. We forget that the people around us are actually always ready, willing, and able to help us. Maybe we just need to ask them. So that's another thing I brought home. And then lastly, trust is comfort. So because I was beyond my comfort zone and there was a lot of things that I didn't control, something that's really important to me, I had to trust that the things were going to work out, that people were going to take care of me and help me out. And of course they did. And that became comforting. This, this feeling that I, I gave myself away to, to the ones around me and I could trust that things would work out. So 5 things that I reflected on upon my return from Vietnam that I wanted to share with you. As always, if you have things you want me to record videos on or anything that you're interested in me writing about, comment where you see this or send me a note, and I'd be happy to elaborate on some of these points or anything else. Thank you.
