673: Why Immigrants Outperform. 3 Traits You Can Build Without Immigrating

0:02And when there is no vision, the people perish. We choose to go to the moon. If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast, where strategy partners teach you the tools and techniques to solve mankind's greatest problems.

1:04dot com forward slash overall approach. And if you are looking to advance your career and need to update your resume, you can get a McKinsey and BCG winning resume template as a free download at www.firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. That's www.firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. Immigrants have hard life and many people trying to avoid that. but the mere fact that they go through this experience is what allows them to succeed and today we're going to talk about some of the key things that allow them to succeed and also how you can build those for yourself even if you are not an immigrant and how you can leverage it a little better if you are one and I can tell you I consider myself a professional immigrant given that I immigrated three times both times became first-time permanent resident because there was no path to citizenship, second-time citizen, and third-time citizen.

2:06So I know what I'm talking about. And Michael has also his own journey of immigrating multiple times as well. Well, I think you're missing one side of things. Yes, what is it? When you had to move from Samara, I think, to Moscow, you had to get a certain kind of residence paper. Yes. And you didn't get it. They wouldn't give it to you. Well, I actually got it. I got some document that allowed me to work, but it was very hard. So the first point is radical resourcefulness. Because you're arriving to a country where you don't know anyone usually. You usually don't have much money. Often you don't have money to buy lunch.

2:41And you just have to figure out how to survive initially. And often your degree cannot be found in the database or cannot be recognized. Nothing you accomplished prior to arriving really means much. There's also works at a macroeconomic perspective. And I would flip around the statement a little bit. It's not that you need to be resourceful. The challenges are going to make you resourceful. I remember reading and studying why programmers from the former Soviet Union were so skilled at programming. There's a very specific reason why they were so skilled. In the former Soviet Union, Armenia used to be the center of the sort of programming world of Russia.

3:21It wasn't the only center, but it was a major center. And the Soviet Union had fallen behind the United States in the development of PCs and microprocessors. So the PCs that the Armenians and the Soviets had to work with had a much smaller memory than the equivalent American computers. So the Soviets learned how to code in a very, very efficient way. Less lines of code, lighter programs, which means they ran faster programs. So here's an example whereby they had some kind of adversity, the lack of something they could use, and they had to be resourceful to overcome that and learning how to code without any of the advanced chips gave them an advantage.

4:02Yes, it is incredible to see how people can do the most with what they have. They find a way. I remember when I was preparing for exams, the most of the work you always do, at least in my case, three days before the exam. Even though you work so hard throughout the entire time, three days before the exam, your mind finds a way to get to NA from wherever you are. Going back to the macroeconomic example, because you can flip it around and look at a country where the citizens have an abundance of excess and how it's led to them not creating world-class companies. Now, the example I use, you always ask someone, name me a famous Australian brand or company that's not in mining.

4:46It's very hard to do. Very hard to do. The reason I use the example of Australia is because Australia is a resource exporting economy. That's where it makes the bulk of its money. It's completely hollowed out its manufacturing sector because it didn't feel it needed a manufacturing sector. If you look at Australia, the structure of the economy is it has a couple of big banks, a couple of big retailers, a couple of utilities like Telstra, and resources companies. But if you go around the world and you look for a product made by an Australian company, you can never find it. The only two big Australian brands, and they're not very big, they're quite tiny, is Canva, which you can never compare with Apple, and there's Atlassian.

5:24which you can never compare with Google. So this is an example whereby if you get an excess of abundance, like oil and mineral wealth, which means you get money without having to really work for it, you do not, and you're not forced to create products, services, and companies that create wealth. Yes. When you remove adversity, you don't have a challenge forcing you to learn in advance. So you see it differently at the macro perspective, and you see it at the perspective of an individual as well. Definitely. Why are we comparing Canva to Apple? As I said, not? Because when I tell people, name your famous Australian brand, they say Canva and Atlassian.

6:05But you can't compare Australia's version of the best brand to America or Europe. Yes, that is very true. It's not even comparable. So comparing an unborn fetus to an Olympic app, no offense to Canva and Atlassian. Yes, yes. But that is the reality. They were better than nothing, for sure. They achieved much more than most people ever achieved. But the point is when you get things are given to you. Because the Australians are not brilliant. I mean, they are a brilliant nation. Not a great rugby team or cricket team, but they're a brilliant nation. But the point is, it wasn't because of their genius that they had mineral wealth.

6:39They just happened to be lucky. It was there. They extracted it, and they sold it. They didn't have to work hard and create new ways of doing things to get this out. Yes. And you can also see it with children of wealthy parents. They struggle to be happy and they struggle to do something meaningful. Yes. Because they don't have the conditions that allow you to develop the skills. And the conditions are almost always some version of adversity. Whether something is deliberately well held from you, or you're in an environment where you can't get what you need, and you're forced to innovate your way out of it.

7:14This is the key thing. Adversity leads to innovation. Yes. In the past, when I used to do more innovation work, innovation strategy, companies would always ask me, how do we develop an innovation strategy? And to me, it's really easy. Put yourself in a situation where you have a disadvantage and try to advance. You'll have no choice but to innovate. Yes. That's the easiest way to innovate. Put yourself in a place where you must win, but you have a disadvantage. And you have to find ways to overcome the deficits you have because your assets or capabilities are being neutralized. And even if right now, for example, you are struggling a little bit because of being afraid to lose your job to your eye or your business is struggling, on the bright side, it puts you in a position where you have to reinvent things.

8:01But you shouldn't give up. And this is the thing I see with most people. They face adversity. They know there's one path out of it. They take a little step down that path. They fail, which is normal. It's called experimentation. Your first few experiments fail. but they're unwilling to realize that you have to try and keep trying, fail multiple times, learn from your first failure. So your second failure is not so much of a failure. Your third failure is not as big as your second failure. And eventually you get there. But adversity leads to innovation. But innovation is not a direct payoff. It takes time.

8:32You have to build a muscle memory of how to do research, how to think, how to try things, how to learn from failure and so on. Now you had a good example when you were studying for your second degree, in French, where you didn't understand English as well. Yes. And you had to translate everything. Yes, that is very true. So how do you write an exam where English is the first language and you don't speak English well and still finish with a distinction? I was surprised myself. I think what helped is I knew material really well. And then I also wrote, please excuse my English. It's not my first language.

9:07I think that helped a little bit. You also told me the story, and I've also read it in your bio. few times, that when you were in Russia, you were obviously discriminated against because your father was not sort of the traditional Russian. The worst I was ever discriminated anyway was in Russia. Every country in the world, including Germany, the worst was not Germany. Yes. So the worst you ever discriminated against was in Russia. Yes. They tried to kick you out. They made your life so difficult in Moscow, you basically left. But then three years after leaving, you came back to advise the Ministry of Finance on their strategy to, I think, launch a low-cost or short-term insurer or something like that?

9:47Yes. It wasn't a ministry of finance, but it was very, very senior people, top people in the country involved. And yes, it was quite incredible to be there within such a short period of time. But then the question becomes, most people who experience a sort of traumatic event where they discriminate against, they kick out of the country and so on, they never want to go back. And in fact, They paralyze when they go back because these are the people that torment them. But that didn't happen to you. Yes. I think because one of the advantages of how my mind works, and there are many disadvantages, just as well as a very bad memory, is I always focus on the long term.

10:27And so I don't even see what happened in the past. And it's also not the same people. Those are different people. So you can't really treat someone badly because someone else within the same country treated you badly. This is how I look at it. Yes. Most people forget that adversities are learning events. They expose you to things you need to overcome. You build a skill to become a better person, a more capable person. But don't you think that most people in life, they try to avoid adversities? Yes. And I think that, of course, you need to protect yourself and your health. And adversity is not beneficial for your health.

11:02It actually takes a lot out of you. It can cause a lot of issues. So you have to be careful here. But at the same time, if you can do it in a controlled way, it can really help you be a more effective business professional. The next point I wanted to talk about is how immigrants often have to not take no for an answer because there's no other way. For example, when you immigrate, it's incredibly hard to get the first job. Often you have to go and study again. And even if you study at the top MBA school and get all A's and graduate on the dean's list, you still struggle because you're an immigrant.

11:42You don't yet have permanent residence, for example. And you have to learn. You have no choice, really. You have to not take a no for an answer. If you're from some part of the world where you were a medical doctor, a surgeon, to come back and be recertified in the West is so expensive and takes so long that most people don't even bother doing it. Yes. Because you have to provide for your family and you don't have the luxury of spending money you don't have to work when you can be working or should be working. But why do you think so many people, including immigrants, why don't they, why do they not understand, do you feel, the value of facing adversity?

12:20Because the evidence is clear. Everyone talks about it. It's not as if I've ever read a paper saying immigrants succeed because they avoid adversity. I've never read that paper. Your question is why immigrants don't understand the value of facing adversity or people in general? I think adversity, I think immigrants as well. I think people who grew up in a safe, nice life, I can understand why they want to avoid. But immigrants in particular, even when they come to the West or wherever they want to go, many of them, they focus their lives on how do I have this nice, comfortable life where everything comes to me and you don't have to work for it.

12:54Yes, I think that no one teaches us really how life works. So people end up focusing on things that don't matter and not focusing on things that do matter. And not realizing the benefits of certain challenging things in their life and what it does to them long term, the beneficial impact long term. Well, we see this with the clients that we coach on the early stages in their career. They're very heavily focused on getting an MBA, which is considered the pinnacle degree for business. But then once that learning period is over, they almost feel as if they don't have to learn anything new. They avoid it.

13:32And that is a very dangerous place to go because the moment you get to it, whether you're an immigrant or not, but I think especially if you're an immigrant because you don't have the same support system, you don't have the same connections generally, it takes a long time to develop deep roots in the country. So when you do that, you immediately start deteriorating. as a business professional your skill set is going downhill and often people start accumulating things they don't need in the house things become things become heavier they have mortgage and unnecessarily expensive car payments and other other debts and then people also often start acquiring bad habits that they could not afford before such as drinking and it can it can be a downhill from there.

14:25What you have to focus on is maintaining this long-term focus and always be treating yourself as an athlete. Be in the best shape you can be. Be alert in the middle of the night if you need to be alert in the middle of the night. Things happen. Well, my take on this is, and if you've heard me give this advice to people, I think it's worth saying again. Clients always ask me, how do you pick a career? And I always tell them the same thing. Okay, Independence Day just ended. And my favorite movie is Independence Day. And there's a famous scene in Independence Day when everyone is fleeing Washington.

14:58And you get Jeff Goldblum and his father driving to the White House. And there's no cars going in that direction. Because everyone else is fleeing the problem. I always say the way you pick and you make a career or a life decision is you go where everyone is fleeing. Because that's where the opportunities lie. Because that's where the biggest battle is going to be fought. That's where you learn the most. I remember this famous book I read about Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize. And they asked him, how do you win a Nobel Prize in economics? And he said, it's really simple. You do research when nobody else is doing research.

15:31Yes. You go to a problem that everyone's avoiding. Because then there's less competition and you are always going to be selected to be at the bleeding edge of the problem. But as humans, somehow that's beaten out of us. Although you do find people like Elon Musk, for example. They are serial entrepreneurs. They understand you have to go where the biggest problem exists. Because that's how you create value. That's how you create wealth. That's how you add value to the world. And it is incredible how easy it is to become the best expert in the world on a topic. If very few people are focusing on it.

16:06And if you stick at it. Yes. Too many people jump around. But you have to build deep subject matter expertise. And what that means is you have to be very good at figuring out how to do research. which a lot of people are not very good at. Yes. The third point I wanted us to discuss is comfort with uncertainty. Comfort with uncertainty. At least eventual comfort because humans, they adapt. Comfort with the delta. Yes. So when you are an immigrant, you have a lot of uncertainty. You don't even know if you woke up the next day. Hey, even if you're a citizen these days, you have a lot of uncertainty.

16:41Yes. Yes. We now live in a crazy time when there is already a lot of uncertainty. And actually, immigrants are much more adapted to handle this better because we have experience of living like that for years. Think about somebody from the outside. They look so successful. They are up and coming leader within a major organization, but they are constantly worried because they don't have a green card. Imagine living with that kind of uncertainty. They cannot buy a house. You would know. They cannot buy a house because they're afraid they will have to sell it and lose a lot of money if they have to live.

17:18And of course, it comes with the territory, right? You're coming to an incredible country and you have to go through the steps required to eventually, hopefully, have an opportunity to be part of this country in that way. But it does not make it any easier to go through the steps of living your life for many, many years. But I will say this. Without any certainty. Sorry, Chris. Now, can I add my bit? Yeah, of course. I will say this, and it's going to be a bit. It may sound a bit harsh to some people when I say this, but it's the truth. Because we've worked with many clients all over the world.

17:50Even people who are not directly clients, we do advise them, we do talk to them. And people spend an enormous amount of their energy to get the right to live in another country. Immigrants, residency, green cards, and so on. The thing that I find quite astonishing is that when they don't have residency and a green card, they make it sound like it's their biggest obstacle. all. And if they just had it, they could do so much. But the majority, not all of them, once they do get their green card, nothing really changes. Well, another thing happens when people do get green card, not to everyone, but sometimes people get to this point where they feel, okay, I was working to get to this point.

18:28And what is now? Oh, now I can do whatever I want. It's usually a vacation they take. Yes. When I ask people, now that you have your green card, what are you going to do? It's not that I'm going to launch a startup. I'm going to leave and follow my passion. I'm going to go to Sequoia Capital and tell them that this is what I'm doing. No, Michael, I want to take a three-month or three-week vacation that I couldn't take before. So you're telling me the green card was actually an obstacle to a vacation? Basically putting life on pause in a way and finally enjoying your life, which also, of course, has a place to be.

19:00But it depends on what you want out of life because if you want to be exceptional, if you want to be in constant pursuit of mastery, if you step away, you later may regret it because it's very hard to get back. You will regret it. Let me give you an example of this. My response in my head when people say, I need a vacation. I always thought, you do realize you can take a vacation within the 50 states of the United States. You don't have to leave immediately. Yes. You don't need a three-month vacation. You don't need a sabbatical. Your green card, or whatever the equivalent is in your own country is your entry ticket to the next level.

19:36When you get your entry ticket to the next level, you don't ask for a break. Because there's so much competition, you're stepping away from it. I'm not saying don't take vacation. Yeah, definitely. You must do what you feel is right. But in a green time cannot be, I got it, the biggest thing I'm going to pursue is vacation. The reason we speak about vacation is because vacation is not the end of that story. It's how you start walking towards the gray line and you stop being an exceptional performer because you feel, I don't need to do that anymore. And then a year goes by, two years goes by, people realize that you're no longer as good as you used to be.

20:13They don't really give you important projects anymore. You damage your reputation. And then you look back and you think, oh, what happened to my career? What happened to my reputation? That is true. The thing about the world is it's very competitive. You cannot deny that and you cannot change that. Every company, every business in the world, every investor in the world, every person you interact with is always asking themselves, if I partner with you in some way, is it going to be better for me? And unfortunately, or fortunately, you always have to be upskilling, upgrading, becoming a better, more capable person to move ahead.

20:48And most people feel that at a certain point, they can just step back from things. And this is only if you want exceptional results. We all have our own life to live, And we have options. For somebody, it can be the pinnacle and the best possible life you can imagine. And you should live with them where you have the American dream. You have a house. I mean, American dream in some people's understanding. Other people have an expanded version of it. Where you have a house, you have a good, comfortable, quiet life. You have a lot of fun. You have two cars, two and a half kids. Two and a half kids.

21:29A dog. There's going to be a lot of medical bills to take care of the other half. Yes. And it's a great thing. I think everyone must be happy. Whatever you feel is best for you. We are talking about clients specifically who are very driven because we know what happens to them once the few years pass. And they look back and they realize they worked so hard to build a reputation and they lost some of it. And it's very hard to rebuild from there. Every client I know who pursued sort of the family life version of the American dream, Because this group that listens to us is so self-selective as ambitious people, they are never happy when they go down that route.

22:05Now, I'm not saying that you should not have a great personal life. But what I am saying is that you must not sacrifice your ambitions for that. The same way you shouldn't sacrifice your personal life for your ambitions. You need to be conscious when you're making this decision. You need to decide, okay, you know what? It's more important to me to just have a normal, so to say, life. And then enjoy it. Make the most of it And then don't worry about not getting promoted as fast and so on We cannot have everything We have to pick what is important to us I think the most important thing is you must really enjoy what you are doing Yes And I think that most people say they enjoy it But if you really dig deep down, they don't Because they're comparing what they're doing now To something they hated and left a month ago So when you ask someone, is this better?

22:50They say, yes, because I hated what I did before But if you give it enough time Most people realize they made a choice to do something just to escape something awful. When you do something to escape, an escape is not a pursuit towards joy. I still think the standard for me is if I get up and I have free time, am I going to work on the stuff that I'm being paid to do? And if the answer is yes, then yeah, I'm doing the right thing. It'll be fun, it'll be joyous for me. It mustn't be a burden on me. It'll be a natural interest for me. Because when you do things where you have a natural interest, you do amazing things.

23:23That's where you overcome problems, You innovate. You're excited doing it. No one's asking you to do it. Yes. Let's summarize with how someone who is not an immigrant can leverage those three points. Oh, very easy. The most important thing, if you're not an immigrant, is put yourself in safe but adversarial positions where you're forced to learn a new skill that is important for your future. Don't coast towards easy things. You don't build any capabilities by doing what you can always do. So that's my first most important piece of advice. 100%. Number two is if you do something you don't like just for a salary, you're basically saying at some point I'm going to exit this because you can't do it continuously.

24:10So at some point within your 30s or 40s, you're going to exit a career that you spent two decades developing a competence in and you're going to have to move to some other place where you can't leverage the skills you bought. So my next piece of advice is even if something is hard, Roughly go in a direction that makes you excited Don't go into something that you hate Or that you want to run away from Because that means you're going to have to abandon the skills you built Yes And because you will be putting yourself If you follow Michael's advice If you will be putting yourself in a carefully selected Safe but challenging conditions You will train yourself to be comfortable under uncertainty Comfortable to face uncertainty Yes, that is true And my final piece of advice is laugh off failure.

24:55This is the most important thing because we live in such a competitive world that everyone talks about how you need to win in a certain way. You have to reach a certain salary at a certain age. You have to generate a certain amount of success at a certain age. And it becomes too pressurizing. If you do something that nobody's done before, or you're doing it in your way, which will also be different, expect difficult results. Expect to fail many times. But if you go through failure with this horrible mindset that you are a failure and you don't laugh it off, you're going to struggle. It's going to become an awful experience for you.

25:28Every person that made a major impact in the world failed many times. It's normal. Yes. Failure is just, it's a part of experimentation. Every great scientist failed multiple times. Exactly. You just found another thing that doesn't work, that got you closer to what does work. yes we are going to summarize some key things to take away from this and add it to our free resource library and you guys can download it down below hope you enjoyed it i hope the brazilian norway game is very exciting tonight i hope so too do you know who's playing chris besides brazil and norway no no so you're not you don't have a favorite team or anything like that no i don't i think you have a fan saying hello to you down the road yes i do he wants to be in the next episode Yes.

26:16So as you can see, when Chris walks down the streets of some countries, you have people trying to get attention. Yes. I think they're attracted to the camera. Everyone wants their 15 seconds of fame. That is very true. Okay, guys. Hope you enjoyed it. Let us know in comments if you have any thoughts and we will see you during our next walk. Bye, everyone. As we wrap up, today's podcast is sponsored by strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies as a free download, go to firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach.

26:50And if you are looking to advance your career and need to update your resume, you can get a McKinsey and BCG winning resume template example as a free download at www.firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. you.

27:10Thanks for listening to this episode of the Strategy Skills Podcast. Stay up to date on all of our latest training by signing up for our email updates on firmsconsulting.com. We look forward to helping you develop your strategy, critical thinking, decision-making, and communication skills next time here on the Strategy Skills Podcast.

27:35Thank you.