Episode 12: Julian Jordan
A Guide for Choosing Your Adventure and Cultural Immersion Experiences with Julian Jordan
There’s a sense of freedom and a chance of learning a new perspective when traveling between, or living in, different countries. But travel is also filled with lost-in-translation moments, not to mention imposter syndrome lingering longer than we might like… Who better to learn about this than from Julian Jordan: a polyglot, design enthusiast, and adventurer who has lived on three different continents, and who consistently explores the question, “What does it mean to be black, here?” Today, we find out about the “spidey sense” Julian feels when moving somewhere new, and how he defines what it means to be fluent in a language (so much more than simple syntax!).
He tells us how the “spidey sense” opened his eyes and broadened the lens through which he sees the world, and why he feels it’s almost a high. We find out how he first felt this high when traveling for football, and what a mentor meant when he told Julian about the Fireman Theory. Find out the importance of curiosity in life, and how Julian keeps travel and adventure exciting when the scaffolding of life starts to rise.
Julian gives us three excellent expert tips for getting to know the place you are living, and a funny anecdote of how things can get lost in translation. He also shares key insights for auditing your portfolio of friends at the end of the episode!
We look forward to you joining us on this adventure!
Episode 12: Show Notes
Key Points From This Episode:
• An introduction to Julian Jordan, design enthusiast, polyglot, and adventurer.
• Where Jeremy and Marcus met, and the benefits of being curious.
• The difference between being fluent and being competent in a language.
• Why Julian chose to live in Brazil.
• How experiencing new countries and cultures gives you a high like a spidey sense.
• What Julian means by this spidey sense, and how it’s a result of your perception shifting.
• How Julian got hooked by travel, and what he means by the Fireman theory.
• Keeping a sense of adventure when the scaffolding of life starts rising.
• Tips from Julian on how to truly experience a new place: walk aimlessly, get up and out before sunrise, and find underground jazz clubs.
• Anecdotes of when things got lost in translation.
• Reframing your view of yourself based on different histories between countries.
• The advice Julian gave to his brother: have a friend from each area of interest in life to widen your lens.
• Jeremy’s book recommendations to immerse yourself in other cultures.
Tweetables:
“Fluency is about how comfortable you are around the people that are your community at that moment in time.” — Julian Jordan [0:08:07]
“Your grandma tells you stories from her own perspective. I had a fantasy about that life. I got to Brazil, it was more about the adventure and culture. Everything was new and shiny and you can go to a new place, for me, you get this high that is free.” — Julian Jordan [0:10:36]
“The design painter mindset opened me up to a lot later in my life about how do you ask questions? How do you go big and go open and just absorb things and not make prescriptions, or have definitions?” — Julian Jordan [0:29:24]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
The Tim Ferriss Show: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3 And Much More
[EPISODE 12 TRANSCRIPT]
“JJ: I used to and haven’t like this a lot, but I used to look for underground jazz clubs. When I first moved to Rio, I did this search of underground jazz clubs, and I got free time to try to find those places and lot of those places at the time, if you go in the afternoon, you might get a one-on-one with a bartender, or the owner of the jazz club. Then it happened to be sometimes people that like to tell stories. I like talking to taxi drivers a lot and asking questions. For a while, I had this habit of trying to document a lot of them, record what was happening with people's permission. Those are some things I like to do when I travel.”
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:40] JU: Welcome to The Paint & Pipette Podcast. My name is Jeremy Utley. It's my job to illuminate the tactics of world-class performers across domains. As a day job, I teach at the Stanford d.school helping students learn what it takes to come up with ideas. I've realized, I need to stay in the classroom learning myself, and this podcast is my classroom.
[00:01:03] MH: Hey, hey. I'm Marcus Hollinger. I lead Marketing and Creative at Reach Records, an Atlanta-based independent record label. I'm also co-founder for Portrait Coffee, where we are seeking to reimagine the picture that comes to mind for folks in specialty coffee. I'm so excited to pull up my desk, alongside my good friend and fellow learner, Jeremy. I think, y'all are going to love what we have for you this season.
[00:01:34] JU: We've got some amazing stories on deck, and we can't wait to dive in and learn alongside you.
[00:01:39] MH: Grab your pipette and your paint brush, and let's make something beautiful together.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:47] MH: This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Julian Jordan, an American consultant with 3rd Corner. This week, he delighted us with his fireman test, a guide for choosing your adventure and cultural immersion experiences. He also shared with us mindsets and traits to immerse yourself in other cultures. These things work, whether you're at home or abroad. We left inspired to shift our mindset toward prioritizing adventure and embracing slight discomfort. We think you'll enjoy this conversation as much as we did.
[00:02:24] JU: What is y’all story? Marcus, do you guys go to school together, you said? Then you stayed there and you went to open up a production company, or record label and other things in Atlanta? My family's from Atlanta, not from, but in Atlanta right now.
[00:02:39] MH: Oh, nice, nice. I was very curious about where you might be from and how you became a polyglot. I was looking and I see you speak multiple languages. I tell you a little about myself. I'm working in music full-time. I also, two years ago, coming up on three, started a coffee roastery with a couple friends here in Atlanta to change the picture that, or reimagine the picture that comes to folks’ mind when they think of specialty coffee. You might appreciate this being in Brazil. Coffee grows in places where black and brown people exist. At least stateside, when you engage the culture and the retail business of coffee, you really don't see many black and brown people represent it. Those [inaudible 00:03:30] I work in hip-hop. I work in our hip-hop label Reach Records. There’s a couple of things I'm into. I met Jeremy on Stanford's campus. We came out to do a little…
[00:03:39] JU: Wait, wait, wait. No, no, no, no. Not on Stanford's campus. I met you, you took me to your favorite breakfast spot in Atlanta and you're wearing your vape’s kit. I remember clearly.
[00:03:49] MH: Oh, snap. Okay, okay. I met Jeremy, because he came to Atlanta.
[00:03:54] JU: Come on.
[00:03:55] MH: He did. He came to Atlanta to check out what we were doing and how we were doing at creativity and all that good stuff. Man, we hit it off. Me personally, I was immediately attracted to his energy and infinite curiosity. I said “I want to be as curious as Jeremy is”. He hasn't been able to shake me loose since then.
[00:04:19] JU: Man, speaking of curiosity, the thing I'm curious about now, we don't have to go into it, because it's going to be a rabbit hole. But I just listened to Tim Ferriss conversation with Chris Dixon and Neval about Web3. It's one of the first times I've had an experience in a totally unrelated way, similar to when I heard, or when I read Einstein writing about special relativity. It's like, these are all English words. I know what they originally mean, but that I have no idea what they mean together. No matter how much I think about it, I can't understand it. Anyway, that's what's been piquing my curiosity lately. I'm like, what is this thing? Anyway, which is just an example of some amount of curious — I don't think it's infinite, but there's a lot there.
[00:04:59] JJ: Oh, it’s a deep well.
[00:05:00] JU: Marcus and I definitely, we definitely hit it off. We share a lot of values, a lot of perspectives, and we just had fun together. We stayed in touch. Since my visit to Atlanta, he and Ace, who co-hosted the last conversation with me, because Marcus was out of pocket, appropriately out of pocket. He and Ace came to Stanford and joined the boot camp. So we stayed in touch for a long time. He's a great conversation partner. I would say, for me as a partner in these conversations, he brings a totally different perspective. He keys in on different things than I do, and I really value his perspective. What about you, Julian? Let's hear from you. How did you get to Brazil right now? Let's just get right into the middle of your journey.
[00:05:44] JJ: Right to where it is. I was actually going to comment before that, that happens to me a lot, when I hear things, maybe not even that complex, as theory of relativity. I remember, I’m trying to read a book. I was living in Senegal. I checked out this book from this library in Dakar, like a after school study program called The Dancing Wu Li Masters. It's supposed to explain physics and relativity. All these things with this metaphor of, I would say, ancient, I believe it was Chinese philosophy. I couldn't really understand it, but it was close.
I feel like, ever since then, I've been more aware of things that are said to me in groups of phrases and sentences in English and other languages that are reflect and be like, “Yo, I know what these words mean, but I don't understand what this person is saying.”
It's something that I was talking to a writer for them in the other day, that she lives in an alternate universe, where there's a lot of stuff that happens within the same language of different languages. We think, “I actually don't know what this person's trying to say.” I'll say that, because you just made me think of it, but also think about Brazil. Another thing related to language that is really, always I return to and breeze off of is fluency for me, became a different topic when I moved to Brazil, because I recognize that I'm pretty good at MATLAB Languages, I'm good at naturally. So, I spoke French, picked it up. When I was in the car, picked up will if enough to converse with elders. Portuguese, I took a tiny class and a language classes and then I learned on my own. Then when I was here, I did some work in Peru and Colombia. I picked up Spanish enough not to get abducted, or tricked at…
[00:07:20] JU: That's a good bar, by the way, to not get abducted.
[00:07:23] MH: Yes, yes.
[00:07:24] JJ: Not get abducted by anyone, and be able to order food and not get sick, which is important for me. What I learned with fluency is that for a while, you get used to as someone in a different space, the squint. I call it the squint. When people give you that really, almost a human involuntary reaction to, “I don't know what you're saying.” That would happen a lot to me early on in places. Brazil happened a lot and you can track that, too, for me how I feel in terms of how I'm being understood. If the squint goes away, I feel more comfortable. If the squint appears, I can feel it viscerally. I started to recognize that in the US, too, like, “Oh, this isn't only about the language I know.” This fluency is about how comfortable you are around the people that are your community at that moment in time.
For me, fluency became this thing in Brazil. I would notice, I would be fluent, like almost poetically, in Portuguese in the right space and the right people. In English, I would have phrases that stuck with um’s and likes and fillers, and I dominate that language, but I'm not fluent. Does that make sense?
[00:08:35] MH: Yeah. That makes sense. It only makes me curious, what space are you occupying there in Brazil?
[00:08:42] JJ: I came in 2013 to live. Before that I had done a project or two in Brazil. This is actually around the time I met Jeremy. I was telling Jeremy, he was one of the reasons I got into creative strategy. That same summer that I worked with AKQA and established relationships, I came to Brazil to work with a design firm down here. At first, I came to have this challenge of a new language, design strategy in this new place, where often, prior to this, at least to my knowledge, it was a place of amazing designers that were in industrial design in the Golden Age, but also in graphic and advertising.
As I hadn't seen what I saw in California and in the US with design, in Brazil, I thought, I could take that there and see if I could do some stuff. I was the only one obviously, but that's the thing that I really aspired to. I came back, and I came back the next summer to be a design manager at a furniture startup, we wanted to be sort of like an Ikea to a degree.
Then I said, “I'm just going to take the plunge”, because and this maybe gets to your point, I was in Northern California, and I said, “Where am I going to go?” I've lived in the US. I've lived in West Africa. I've lived in Europe. I don't have enough to go and make it in Asia. I don't want to be as far away as Oceania. How about Latin America? I looked and I go, “There's a lot of black people in Brazil, people who look like me”.
I had started to pick up the language already. I had done a project there, so I said, “Let me go there and see what's up, what's going on, and what I can do”. No return ticket. It was also partly, I occupied a space at adventure initially, because my family, half my family's from Jamaica, and the other half is from Memphis, Tennessee. I always had this vision of, I’m not sure of what space I was occupying at Brazil, but what space Brazil's occupying for me, which was helping me fulfill this, you want to grow up and live outside of the lines of the US and see what that life is like.
Your grandma tells you stories from her own perspective. I had a fantasy about that life. I got to Brazil, it was more about the adventure and culture. Everything was new and shiny and get this, you can go to a new place, for me you get this high that is free, which is, you get spider sense. You know what I'm saying?
[00:10:54] MH: Like culture, right?
[00:10:56] JJ: Not just cultural, culture is a…
[00:10:57] JU: What do you mean by spidey sense?
[00:10:59] JJ: Culture to the think, where it’s a spider sense in this — with the desire to express how you perceive culture, if you want to talk about culture as the way people interpret and create meaning.
[00:11:11] MH: I love that definition.
[00:11:12] JJ: How that impacts me as an observer, that didn't necessarily take the same steps to interpret and create meaning as these people. Spidey sense in that, I'm perceiving things and smells hit me differently and quicker. Colors hit me differently and quicker. Situations, I observed from a nuance that, because we grew up, I grew up in the Midwest. Jeremy, you grew up in Texas, right?
[00:11:33] JU: Yeah.
[00:11:34] JJ: Marcus, where did you grew up?
[00:11:35] MH: I’m from the Midwest as well.
[00:11:37] JJ: Midwest. You grew up and you absorb these things, they became a part of your unspoken software. When you go to Brazil, or any other place, maybe it's because you travel, you’re aware of so much more stuff. It's like, you're being overloaded, but you're so much more attuned to nuance. That’s the spidey sense for me, in terms of what people say, people's by expressions.
[00:11:57] JU: I got to ask this, because I can totally identify. I mean, I've had the fortune to live in different parts of the world at different times for weeks, two months. I'm thinking about specifically, I spent almost four months in India, and that was a transformative — I feel like, there's some amount of time required before it really, those sensory kinds of things can expand, because there's almost a shock of being in a new place, and it's just the novelty. Then there's the difference of a new place, which actually, you can have some space to appreciate. My question for you, though, is what made you want to seek that out? Or, how did you know that was something worth seeking?
[00:12:40] JJ: The high, the spidey sense?
[00:12:42] JU: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Was it just from early travels? I mean, you mentioned your grandma saying, this is what life is like outside the US. What tipped you off? Because I think, there's probably a lot of people — I mean, I don't know about you, but for me, I hadn't left the country until I was almost 20, probably. Maybe even after I turned 20, actually. It could have been 22. I don't know. It wasn't in my paradigm that that's what travel would deliver. I had no idea that travel would trigger a spidey sense, whatever. What led you to believe, or to desire to seek that pathway?
[00:13:17] JJ: I think, it was something unconscious, that I for better or worse, pretty soon became addicted to the dopamine hit, which is why I call it a high, because I was fortunate enough to first, travel through stories of relatives. Then I played soccer at a pretty decent level when I was young. I was able to travel around the US with that. Then I got to travel overseas with that. At some point, when I was taking French class and thinking about futures, I just had this fantasy from when I was younger to be someone else outside of the country, seeing things from outside.
I think, as I started to travel more, I started to realize that it really got me excited. I had to travel a lot of my own. That was my MO, was traveling alone. I think, just from that, I think, actually after grad school, I was getting to a point where I go, okay, maybe I might start dating someone, maybe early 30s. I had this thing that I call it the fireman theory, which a mentor of mine passed to me. He was trying to tell me about going to grad school, or not. He said, “If you want to be an investor, a teacher and fireman in your life, go be the fireman first. Because that's going to blow your world open. It's going to change how you see things. You probably can't jump into burning buildings when you’re 50. Then, maybe go be the investor, or the teacher.”
That idea, “I'm going to go to Brazil. This is where I'm going to go. This is going to be a big high, because now I'm this adult, and I understand different things”. That's why I went initially. Later on to that, the other reason is opportunity, the World Cup and the Olympics were coming, so there was this buzz about Brazil. When I looked around the map, like I was saying earlier, so there is a lot of people who look like me in this country. I didn't go with as much intention, as I don't want to let on to that phrase. I don’t want to let on that that phrase meant that I came with this intention to connect with Afro-Brazilian experiences, specifically. That was a determining factor for me deciding, Brazil is a place where I can go and understand some things and do some interesting stuff.
[00:15:21] JU: How long does that high last? I mean, I understand you've been there a while. I would think, if it's like a dopamine hit, at some point, there's [inaudible 00:15:31]. How do you know when it's time to move on, or when it's time to immerse in another culture? To say it differently, how do you keep Brazil fresh? How do you keep the high fresh there?
[00:15:39] JJ: It lasted for longer. I can't really say. I can speak for myself. I shouldn't be foolish and speak for a generalized experience, but for myself. I was fortunate, because I had an opportunity when I first came here to work with a startup in connecting individuals who are looking for operational jobs, or low-income workers looking for jobs. Because of that, as a foreigner, or a gringo, as they would call me here, I was given access to a world of low-income communities, people that were looking for jobs outside of Sau Paulo and Rio, that a lot of people who are coming from other countries. In this case, from the US to Brazil weren't seeing every day.
I was doing field research. I was going to communities. I was seeing that. For me, that enhanced and extended this experience of not only was I traversing cultural lines, I was traversing economic lines and lifestyles. It was part of my job to really understand that. That lasted for a longer time. For a period, it continued, I think, when things started to get a bit more adulty, I was working for a bigger consulting firm. It was about the job. It was making money, buy apartment, do you do this? Are you really making a life here in Brazil? Things started to wear off a little bit more, because I got sick at some point. Life started to happen in a way that was like, okay, got to deal with sickness, got to deal with saving, do you have an apartment? Are you going to be for how long? Got a partner in your life, you get married.
Things started to become scaffolding around the place. It was little bit lesser than — I think, it's been a journey the last four years trying to re-encounter that sense of adventure and that high discovery and seeing something new, which really talented people can do every day. I wish I was that talented.
[00:17:24] MH: It really begs this question for me. I’m like, “Man, Julian's this really — it's really interesting culture guy.” Immediately, what comes to mind for me is how. Can I learn the way almost, and I think the travel, the high? It makes me want to ask, how do you travel? If you've got these travels that you've had so far, what are some of the routines, or some of the ways that you approach immersing in a new scene? How have you learned to approach that over time?
[00:17:58] JJ: It's interesting, because now that I'm thinking about coming back to the US, I have a lot of desires to do some of these things back and the country I grew up in. My travels changed a lot, since, like I was saying, things have become a bit more scaffolding’s been built up around my life. I guess, I would refer back to earlier travels and travel I aspire to. Routines initially. Things have changed so much in the last 5, 10 years, because of so much planning. There's so much itinerary pre-cognition. There's so many destinations that people know about, that you didn't know about, so there's less to be discovered to a degree.
The routines I like to do, I used to like to do, one thing that was really fun was walk and I moved to a new place, or visit a new place. I was trying to just walk aimlessly in a new neighborhood every other week. I did that when I moved to London. Just get a sense for the vibration of the space, and what was happening in the rhythms. A practice I like to do when I go to a new place is to get up before sunrise, if I can understand safety and where I'm at and not be stupid about it. Get up before sunrise and see part of the town open up and what that's like, who's there and who's not there.
I used to, and I haven’t traveled like this in a while, but I used to look for undergrad jazz clubs. When I first moved to Rio, I did this search of undergrad jazz clubs, jazz clubs. I got free time to try to find those places. A lot of those places are, if you go in the afternoon, you might get a one-on-one with a bartender, or the owner of the jazz club. Then, happened to be, sometimes people that like to tell stories. I like talking to taxi drivers a lot and asking questions. For a while, I had this habit of trying to document a lot of it and record it, was happening in people's permission. Those are some things I like to do when I travel. That's changed a little bit, when you have people, family members, partners, it changes your style a little bit. Also, the fact that my stomach has been weaker than it used to be. Which is how I engaged with the world.
[00:20:01] MH: That makes me want to ask this question as well, whether it's language, or location, how do you — or do you think about the potential of being lost in translation? If it is something you think about, how do you process that immersing, traveling, getting a grasp on fluency, hearing as many stories as you heard, being as curious as you are? How are you synthesizing this information and deciding what stays with you as you go?
[00:20:32] JU: Maybe tell us about a time you experienced being lost in translation.
[00:20:36] JJ: I got one on deck, but I'm trying to be more original than that. I got one on deck.
[00:20:41] MH: Let’s get that on.
[00:20:42] JJ: This is actually one as in — a quick story I told, and we did this episode on Quitting, and in jest, and just the funny side of that, but I talked about quitting Brazil. Not in an aggressive way, but just, it's time to move on, and so with respect. One of the things I noticed that one moment that happened, I thought, is a breaking point was I was going to rent. We were going to rent. My now partner and I, we were dating at that point. We were going to rent an apartment together.
I saw the place and I told her, I said, “I want to call the woman who's renting this place and tell her how much we like what she did with the place, how we liked her energy, how we liked —” She was a big reason why we were saying, this is the place we want to live. I thought, this was established community in a connection early on. I called up, and I was telling her these things. I know that what I was saying was correct, grammatically. The syntax was right. Portuguese is good. I speak Portuguese well.
I also know that there's certain ways to say certain things. Maybe intonations of pauses in between the beats. I think, my wife knows that how to read, even though people don't. The way my brain processes language, how I communicate that. When I called up and I said these things, the reaction I got, I don't know to this day why. I never asked. The reaction I got was, “You're not going to work around the broker. You're not going to sweet-talk me. You're trying to get a deal. I don't understand. Why don’t you talk to the broker? This isn't me.”
It was almost like, I feel a visceral hurt of like, “Oh, what it is?” I remember handing the phone to my girlfriend at the time and saying, “Can you handle? Can you —” Do you understand what I was trying to do?
[00:22:18] JU: For completeness. Yeah.
[00:22:20] MH: How do you put this back together?
[00:22:22] JJ: You understand what I was trying to do, right? Other moments since then, before that, and maybe because I was not be the local, but I was just making it work happening. Maybe I was using my body language, whatever it was, but maybe the situations is due as I state. Since then, there has been certain moments where I think to a degree, I've become a little bit fatigued with the constant — This is not to sound aggressive, but a friend of mine said, “Man, I couldn't move to another country and live for eight years like you have, because every day you’re proving yourself. Every day is a test. Every day, you have to re-up and show, I got this language, I got this culture, I understand the situation.” She goes, “That’s tiring.” I think over time, it has worn at me a little bit, maybe slower than a lot of people.
I was lost in translation in that moment. Now when that happens, and even in conversations, in corporate situations, speaking about things, part of it comes down to the way I construct sentences. My inner monologue is different, because it's — Part of it is, I don’t understand other people's ideas, or their intentions.
[00:23:15] JU: Can you go back to this word gringo? You mentioned how, when you were selecting where you might be able to go, one thing you said was “There's a lot of folks who look like me in Brazil”. It seems like, that was a meaningful part. Then being referred to as a gringo, can you talk about identity about being a part of a place, versus being an outsider? Just what that experience has been like for you, the experience of race there in Brazil for you? Obviously, you don't have to make generalities. For you, what's been your experience?
[00:23:46] JJ: For me, it's been a trip, because I would offer that, and I'll be very willing for someone to tell me I'm wrong. This is just a thought I have. I connect dots. As the United States and Brazil are more similar than they are different. They are big land masses, an abundance of natural resources. Land masses arguably too big to try to put under one sovereign jurisdiction. Both countries are extremely commercialized and commercial consumers. There is a high level — they over index on individualism. They have a history of extractive practices, mining, things like that. They have a history of slavery.
Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery. It far outstrips the US in terms of number of slaves that were brought here. That alone, I think those things when we put it together, especially slavery, makes them very similar places. You look around the world. Then to a degree, some of the Caribbean, but there's the size. It’s very different.
That I didn't really process that as much, until I actually got here, and still processing. The Civil Rights Movement didn't happen in Brazil. There's a different perspective. The conversation’s in a different place. I remember speaking with a Brazilian who, if this person was in the US, I think he would be considered black. This is years ago. I remember hearing from him, him referring to someone else is black and him not being black. I was like, “This is crazy.” I asked a friend, and he was like, “Yeah, there’s this weird thing with racists.” There's such a spectrum in Brazil, because there was much more intermixing that you have people who — so many people say, “I have African ancestry in Brazil”. I can claim that other people don't, but other people recognize it as there. There's so much interracial fraternizing community creation that was, in some cases, loving, in many cases, not. It was a form of exploitation and control. There's a spectrum, much more fluidly than you will find in the United States.
That is one reason amongst many, that the perception of race in the lines in the conversation is a different place. This person in this particular time didn't see himself as black, because those lines hadn't been drawn as strongly as it had in the US. The race conversation and race challenges and problems are still very present. For me, there was this — is duplicity the right word? I’d say, duality of being someone knew where I was coming from. If they knew who I was, and if I open my mouth, if they had context, and say, “Oh, this is Julian. He went to good schools. He's from the United States. He's educated, this, this, this and that.” I was more of an American. Now, nice and special and things I’ve done.
If I wasn't in context, there were situations where “We see him, and this dude could be Brazilian”. My Portuguese got good enough at times where I was a Brazilian guy, or people would look and be like, because of the way I dressed sometimes. Sometimes I’m just wacky, but my Brazilian got —That was okay, too, because there is a bit of a more of a inter experience, even though segregation, discrimination, racism do exist. The inter-experiences, I would say, in many pockets is stronger than the US.
Then those experiences were yes, I've been called over to a table, because I had a white t-shirt on. I dressed bland. White t-shirt on and jeans, and someone thought I was helping, serving. I had that spectrum of experiences.
[00:27:20] MH: That's really interesting. I think, as a black person, I think that was probably one of the realities that I might have taken for granted, traveling internationally. That yo, what it means to be black where you are, means something completely different, if you start to travel outside of the US. I have similar experience in South Africa, Cape Town. Very, very similar. I want to ask this question. When you talk about the testing and that sounds like a test that may hit on pretty deep and profound level. I want to ask, if someone listens to this, and they are intrigued and inspired by the creative life that you built, what are some, let’s call them study habits, or even resources that you would recommend for someone who wants to make cultural immersion? Or really just, yeah, taking on other cultures of practice? If they're inspired by you, what are some books, podcast, resources that you'd recommend for someone to stay sharp and stay studied on how to engage other cultures?
[00:28:28] JJ: I was fortunate and lucky in a lot of ways. I would say that, I don't know what it's like for people growing up now, because I studied international relations and anthropology. That was at a time also when investment banks would say, “This guy looks like he’s smart, and can do this.” I was fortunate to maybe get lucky in that sense, where I don’t know how things work now, but if someone's a anthro major, maybe they're not getting exposed to that different life that was 180 for me, that was investment banking and investing.
That said, and with respect to those realities, I would say, read about anthropology, and just go crazy on anthropology, in the sense of how are people living? What does culture mean? What does it mean in my country? What does it mean in other country? What does it mean as a world? Gravitate to people like yourself, like Jeremy, that are asking questions and being curious, because it's a lot of the design mindset, the design-painter mindset opened me up to a lot later in my life about how do you ask questions? How do you go big and go open and just absorb things and not make prescriptions, or have definitions?
I would say, also, that travel as much as you can. I think that study abroad, if it's a possibility, is top of the list. I have maybe a problem, but I know I have a habit of putting myself in situations that are slightly uncomfortable. Not a badger way, but for whatever reason, anthropology and investment banking, to clean energy, to creative strategy to design, to data science. There's something about asking questions in different ways that I would ask and say, people should look to.
This is maybe pretty tactical, but I remember telling my brother when he went to school, and we both played soccer. He was very good. He's better than me. I was like, you run the risk of being too much in the sports world, you're so good. Make sure you've got an artistic friend, make sure you've got a really nerdy friend, make sure you've got a politically active friend, make sure you've got friends from other continents. That last part was, I always liked having friends from other countries. Because people, you can go visit and figure things out and have a lens. Sometimes this has been honest, conversations flow differently with people from other countries. Maybe they don't flow as fluidly as I was saying earlier on, but you're forced to move in different ways and learn and listen in different ways. I'm saying, trying to be friends with people from other cultures, whether it's other country.
[00:30:58] JU: I love that.
[00:30:59] MH: In your country?
[00:31:00] JJ: Yeah, outside of your country.
[00:31:01] JU: That's really good. I like framing it too, as advice to your brother. That's cool. I mean, it hits home there. One of the things that I found to be really transformative is reading literature from the place I'm traveling, wherever it is. I went to Turkey a few years ago. I read some of Orhan Pamuks work, Palmuk. I can’t remember. A great book called My Name Is Red, which has to do with really interesting controversy among Islamic artists, about the nature of art. It's immersion in that culture and in controversies about that culture.
There's another great book when I was in India, called A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, which has incredible immersion in the socio-economic issues of the day. I would say, anytime you can read really exceptional literature in an area, I mean, non-fiction is great, too. A book like Maximum City, which is an amazing expose a of Bombay's underworld, is a spectacular book, too. There's something about literature, because it's more story-driven, has a chance to grab your heart.
Anyway, we could go on and on, Julian. I don't want to keep you. Marcus and I have got to wrap this conversation. Can we just say thank you? You are such an inspiration. We're excited to get to share your story with folks whose world you need to get expanded, just like ours did when we started our journeys, too. Thanks for being a part of the story.
[00:32:28] JJ: Cool, man. I appreciate this. This is a very pleasant surprise at the end of the week, or anything.
[00:32:33] MH: Absolutely.
[END]
One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.