The Most Useful Thing I Did For My Career Had Nothing to Do With My Career
I'm American. I've been living in London for years.
I didn't move for career reasons. Life brought me here. But living between two cultures has turned out to be one of the most shaping experiences of my professional life. Not because of the jobs I found here... because of what it did to how I think.
Fredrik Haren describes himself as "The Creativity Explorer." He's spent over 20 years traveling the world, interviewing creative people in 75 countries, studying what makes human creativity work. He's given over 2,000 keynotes on six continents.
One of his most direct pieces of advice: marry someone from a different culture. Or at least follow them on Facebook.
It sounds flippant. It isn't.
The Assumptions You Don't Know You Have
When you live inside a single culture long enough, you stop seeing it.
The assumptions become invisible. The defaults feel obvious. You stop asking why things are done a certain way because everyone around you accepts this is simply how things are done.
I noticed this when I arrived in London.
In America, you tell a new colleague everything about yourself... your career, your ambitions, your weekend plans, where you grew up. Openness is normal. Warmth is immediate. In London, you earn those conversations over months. The same behavior reads as friendly in one place and exhausting in the other.
The first time I walked into a British meeting expecting American-style brainstorming and got polite, careful silence instead, I thought something was wrong. No one was engaging. No one was pushing back on my ideas. I assumed they were unimpressed, disinterested, or afraid.
Three months in, I learned: they were thinking. And they'd assumed I was done talking when I asked for input. The silence wasn't empty. It was where British meetings go to work.
Feedback works differently too. An American manager gives feedback directly, in the moment, and considers it respectful to be straight. A British manager often wraps the same message in so much politeness the actual feedback disappears. Neither knows they're doing it. Both feel they're being professional.
Career ambition shows up differently. Humility means something different. The person who says "I suppose I've had a reasonable amount of success" in London might be describing the same career as the person in New York who says "I've done pretty well for myself." Read those signals wrong and you'll mismanage people.
Once I saw this, I never saw it the same way again. I started noticing all the other defaults I'd been carrying around without knowing it. Assumptions about hierarchy. About who gets to speak in a meeting. About what counts as appropriate feedback. About what hour the workday ends.
Every one of those moments forced me to update my mental model. To hold two different ways of doing something in my head at once and ask which one was better... or whether "better" was the wrong question entirely.
What This Has to Do With Leadership
Every team you lead is full of people who don't see the world the way you do.
Not because they're from different countries... although some of them are. Because they've lived different lives. Different family structures, different educational paths, different first jobs, different failures, different reference points for what normal looks like.
If you've only ever seen the world through one set of assumptions, you'll miss most of what your team is telling you. Not intentionally. You'll hear the words and miss the meaning.
The managers who struggle most with their people aren't the ones who lack technical skill. They're the ones who've never seriously had to update how they see the world. They've been surrounded by people who think like them for so long they assume everyone thinks the same way.
They don't. And the cost shows up in missed feedback, broken trust, and teams who stop bringing real problems to their manager.
You Don't Have to Move Countries
Fredrik's "marry someone from a different culture" line is deliberately provocative. He's not telling you to choose a partner based on their passport.
He's saying: build relationships where you're regularly exposed to a genuinely different way of seeing things. Not a surface-level different. A deep different. Someone whose assumptions about how the world works don't match yours.
Most of us don't do this. We naturally gravitate toward people who think like us, who have the same professional background, who read the same publications, who went to similar schools. Social media feeds become echo chambers by design. Professional networks become monocultures.
And then we wonder why our thinking feels stale. Why we keep arriving at the same solutions to the same problems.
The Low-Barrier Version
Not everyone wants to move to a different country. Fair enough.
Fredrik's practical suggestion: if you won't marry someone from a different culture, at least follow them on social media. Actively seek out voices from different countries, different industries, different life experiences.
This isn't about being open-minded in a vague, virtue-signalling way. It's a deliberate practice.
Who did you read last week? Who challenged something you assumed was obvious? When did you last walk away from a conversation seeing something differently?
If you're drawing a blank, worth paying attention to.
When Worlds Collide, Ideas Multiply
When I look back at the work I'm proudest of, it almost always came from unexpected connections. Ideas from one domain landing in a completely different context.
The US Army's approach to mission briefing... structured, precise, with no ambiguity about who owns what decision... ended up shaping how I run engineering post-mortems. The British instinct toward understatement taught me to listen harder for what isn't being said. Working in consumer fintech and then HR tech showed me how radically different the same conversation looks from different sides of the table.
The same thing happens across professional cultures. When I moved from writing software to leading teams, I had to completely rebuild how I thought about accountability. When I moved into HR tech after years in fintech, I had to rebuild how I thought about the customer. When I started speaking at conferences, I had to learn to think about ideas the way communicators do, not engineers.
Each time, the transition was uncomfortable. Each time, I came out with a wider set of tools than I went in with.
None of those connections were planned. They happened because I'd been exposed to genuinely different ways of doing things.
Fredrik calls this "making the pie bigger." The more perspectives you've genuinely absorbed, the bigger your creative repertoire. You're not drawing on your own experience alone. You're drawing on a much wider pool of human problem-solving.
This is not about consuming diversity as a box-ticking exercise. It's about genuinely engaging with people who see things differently, being curious enough to understand their perspective on its own terms, and letting it change how you think.
The Check-In Worth Doing
Look at your information diet for the past month. Not your intentions. What you've read, watched, listened to, and discussed.
How many of those sources come from people who share your nationality? Your industry? Your professional background? Your political leanings?
If the answer is "most of them," you've built a narrow world. Narrow worlds produce narrow thinking.
You don't have to do anything dramatic. Follow three people this week who see the world differently than you do. Not to argue with them. To understand them.
Read someone from a country you've never visited. Listen to a podcast from an industry you know nothing about. Have a real conversation with someone whose career looks nothing like yours.
Your thinking will get sharper for it. Your leadership will improve. And you might start to notice the assumptions you've been carrying around without knowing it... the ones doing your thinking for you.
