How To Get Rich Quick. Travel!

Thanks, Steven, for inviting me back to share my thoughts and learnings from my own journey. Last year I discussed how integrity shapes our own personal compass. This time, I would like to share thoughts on increasing your personal wealth.

How to grow wealth. Most of us will read that statement as an invitation to increase our income, asset wealth, or maybe build a financial nest egg, and you wouldn’t be wrong. In fact, the Oxford Dictionary defines “wealth” as a large amount of money, property, etc. that a person or country owns; or the state of being rich. However, I want to use our short time together to consider a different definition of “rich”. One that doesn’t depend on the balance in your bank account. Let’s talk instead about how each of us has it in our capacity to enrich our personal lives in different ways. We enrich our lives when we experience personal growth along our own journey of self-discovery and improvement. Growth happens when we learn new skills, new knowledge, new behaviours and habits. Growth is important.  It enables us to enhance our well-being, relationships and abilities to reach our own potential. The title of this article references travel; so how does travel then pave the way for growth and personal enrichment? Before I try to answer this, allow me to digress for a moment. Indulge me.

Small mining town in Canada. For Illustration Only.

A short story. I was born in a small northern mining town in my native Canada; a small nothing place really. As a teenager growing up in this place, I simply hated it. At the time I was unable to appreciate how this place was setting me up for the personal growth that would come later. You see, the nickel mining industry needed tons of skilled and unskilled labour to make it all work and, as a result, this nothing place attracted people from all corners of the world (my parents emigrated from Ukraine). I grew up accustomed to hearing different languages (and the same broken English), and experiencing different customs, clothing and points of view. This town had an outsized number of churches, a synagogue, a mosque and multiple ethnic community halls. The one common hall was the local ice hockey arena that everyone visited on Friday nights. I left this place behind as soon as I could pursue a life in the big city.  Later in life, I would work in multinational organisations where I needed to travel to the US and later to Europe and then to other continents. This was also how I also came to meet and work with Steven. 

Travel provided me with an opportunity to experience my "mining town" experience, when meeting many wonderful people from across the globe whom I now call friends. Photo: Barcelona, Spain. Circa 2010.

It was only when I started to travel that I was able to connect the dots back to my experiences in that mining town; realizing they were a gift. They served to cast a mindset that was not threatened by personal differences and different ways of doing things. For sure, not everyone grows up in a multicultural setting and then their job pays for travel to distant lands. The point I want to make, is that travel provides each of us with the opportunity to experience our own “mining town” and to use those lessons to grow personally.  

Travel is an accelerant to growth. Growth is not limited to travel experiences. We grow through education, raising a family, caring for the aged, sick or disabled, by teaching, by practicing faith and/or charity, and exposure to something different. Each of us can find similar examples in own lives. But travel concentrates these opportunities, and the resulting experiences serve to accelerate personal improvement. When we travel to another country and culture, those experiences always challenge our understanding of how the world works and how people make things happen. 

Steven and I were invited to speak at a Technology Conference held in Hong Kong. Circa.1999

Steven and I learned this when we worked together to develop global solutions to common business problems. When we are exposed to the necessities of how others live and solve problems, we can challenge the rigor-mortis mindset of “that doesn’t work here!” This expression describes the biases and opposition that some people inherently bring to oppose new ideas or methods. By spending time listening to and learning from others, the “art of the possible” can be revealed. These experiences expand our understanding and challenge our own personal and organisational limitations.

When we spend time with others who speak a different language, practice different customs or hold different beliefs, these experiences are often uncomfortable. But that time outside our own personal comfort zone is exactly when growth is accelerated. Whether those experiences are good, great or terrible, they are still golden opportunities to rethink how we see ourselves and others. You don’t have to travel far to earn the rewards of “mining town-like” experiences.

Joanne and I were thrilled to be in Agra, India to see the Taj Mahal

Hey, but wait a tick. Travel can be expensive and many simply do not have the capacity to leave for an extended time to head to foreign lands. Does this mean that the growth opportunities afforded through travel are therefore out of reach?  Not at all. There are things that each of us can do to replicate the experiences of travel. For example,

• Source news from other countries to get a different viewpoint on the same issues.

• Go to a restaurant where you can try different or non-traditional food.  Ask your server about the dishes and how they are prepared.

• Go to a cultural event where you are in the minority.

• Visit other lands in virtual time. YouTube is a gateway to seeing and hearing about any place on this planet. Take a virtual tour of Buckingham Palace or the Catacombs below Paris.

• Attend or experience a religious ceremony that you are not accustomed to.

• Learn a language. Learn sign language, or

• Just talk to people you don’t know rather than ignore them. Especially if they look like they are “foreign” to the environment you are in.

I hope that I have made a convincing argument that personal growth is essential to our well-being. Travel provides us with fantastic opportunities to live different experiences and then share them with others. Enrich your life. Get out there and build your personal wealth.

[About the Author. Mike Sadiwnyk wrote the essay entitled "The Problem With Integrity" which was published on this blogsite in July 2024. Mike, a resident of Toronto, Canada is a very close friend of mine. We first met at an international working group event in Brussels, Belgium. We both represented our respective organisations, inferred to in Mike's essay above. We worked together on global supply chain standards for many years during our professional careers. Mike is now retired and in a recent email to me shared the realization which I came to a few years earlier, that retirement life is even busier. He writes, "As you have learned yourself, retirement is crazy. Just not enough hours in the day to do everything that we want to do. Joanne is part of a local choir, and I am involved in the charity work that I have wanted to do for a while."]