Tuesday, August 7, 2018

How Living and Learning Abroad Makes You a Better Entrepreneur


Working abroad improves your problem solving and creativity. It’s well established that working and studying abroad can make you more creative, entrepreneurial and mentally agile. Essentially, working in a new country and culture provides a host of mental benefits, such as flexibility, problem solving, deep thinking and an improved ability to discern subtle underlying connections and associations.
There are many reasons for this, but the critical factor is novelty: as an evolutionary trait, humans crave new experiences. One study centered around a problem-solving game where adults could match and pick select pictures for cash prizes, had a surprising result: it found that participants often went for new options, even over tried-and-true choices that had yielded cash in previous rounds. Thanks to MRI scans, researchers soon discovered the reason behind this puzzling behavior: apparently, choosing new tiles were associated with spikes of brain activity in areas–suggesting that people are, after all, hardwired to seek out the unfamiliar.

A similar dynamic is at work when you go abroad, whether for travel, study or work. From living in an unfamiliar nation with a different culture, your brain will have to deal with a flood of unexpected, exciting stimuli, forcing it to form new neural connections in the process, and strengthening your overall mental capabilities. Cultural experience can help your career.

Globalization and world trade have deepened ties between countries. In 2016, America imported $2.3 trillion worth of goods and exported $2.7 trillion of products overseas, mostly capital goods like aircraft and industrial machinery, along with industrial supplies and consumer goods.
Economies that are interdependent to a degree never seen before need skilled, culturally savvy individuals to navigate this complex business ecosystem. Those who have done business in foreign nations have a leg up on competitors who have never ventured abroad


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