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A very common question that I get in interviews or even casual conversation about our trip is, “What was the most important thing you learned while traveling?”  This is a great question, much better than “What was your favorite place?”  But I get the sense that my answer is not always satisfying for people.  Maybe it’s a little too soft.  Patience, after all, is not as exciting as learning Mandarin, but it was the most important.  Let me illustrate why.

One of the first things you learn when you travel abroad is that the rest of the world, especially the developing part of it, is in much less of a hurry than we typically are in the Western world.  And getting upset about a difficult situation will never, ever help things.  While daily life can often seem hectic, as the streets of Vietnam do, people are less likely to be multi-tasking their way through their day.  More than once, Amy and I benefited from the kindness of strangers taking the time to assist us with directions, often walking us all the way to our destination.   After 16 years in a highly competitive school and professional work environment, this all seemed a little strange.  I was quite used to multitasking  all the time. iPhone in my right hand, Blackberry in the left hand, participating in a conference call,  all while riding a train to yet another meeting in New York City was the norm.  All of it seemed so important and critical, and if anything slowed me down or presented itself as a roadblock it was quickly dealt with and I moved on.  Well, it is not so easy to deal with an overheated broken down bus in the middle of Turkey when you have a plane to catch in 3 hours.

In fact, if you remain calm and ask for some advice on how to deal with the situation instead of quickly jumping to what you think is the solution (which for me in that instance was the inclination to get off the crippled bus and grab a taxi) you can learn that what you think you know isn’t really that useful at all.  Thanks to Amy helping me find my patience, we spoke with another passenger who told us that with the rush hour traffic a taxi was actually a very bad idea, but that jumping on the train at the next stop would get us to the airport in short order.  As it turns out, if we had not solicited that advice we would have surely been sitting in a taxi, stuck in traffic and spending another day in Istanbul instead of Cairo.

So while we have rather quickly readapted to our fast-paced, frenetic lives in the States, I do feel that I have retained a small part of the patience and ability to recognize what I can affect, and when my energy is better spent elsewhere.  This post reminds me vaguely of the 80/20 rule I learned while at Wharton.  That is 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.  The key is to take the time to recognize what is the 20% of effort that is making the difference.   Slowing down, remaining present and questioning my initial reactions has allowed me to incorporate this idea more effectively into my life.  Just one of the many benefits of investing the time we took for this trip, because after all it was an investment in our most valuable assets, us.

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