Igor arrives in Europe and meets people. Very different people. What connects them all with each other, and what do they teach us? Igor describes his unusual experiences and learns a huge lesson. This episode was recorded on March 06, 2023.
Transcript
Frank Okay, changing careers, part three with Igor, we visited you in California with Becky, then we went to Alberta in Canada and after seven months you had an epiphany and you said this is not going to work and then you decided pretty much on the spot to book a ticket and head to Europe. And this is where our story continues. So Igor, welcome back to episode three of the story and tell us about Europe from a Brazilian perspective. Why did you go to Europe? What were you expecting? What did you want to do here? You could have gone to any other beautiful place in the Western hemisphere, not necessarily back home to Brazil, but you chose Europe. What happened?
Igor Going back when I was between 17 and 21 years old, I was very into parkour, which we don’t like to call it a sport, we call it more like a culture of movement, where the goal is always to deal with physical obstacles and our goal is to pass through them. So we train to scale walls, to climb walls, to jump leaps from buildings to buildings and things like that. If you search parkour on Google, you’re going to realize very quickly what it is. So I had this phase in my life, which I was very fanatic about parkour and there is a place in the suburbs of Paris, which is called Lissis, that we consider the Mecca of parkour. That’s the place where parkour was born, specifically in a place called the La Dame du Lac, which is a climbing wall, which still exists, but are prohibited to enter because it’s quite dangerous. Actually, when you see it, you don’t understand how would someone allow this kind of thing to be built in the first place, but it still exists. And this place is where all the parkour founders in the beginning of the 90s started to train and everything happened from there. So it’s the Mecca, everyone wants to go to Lissis and it was one of my dreams, like my dreams and all of my parkour friends’ dreams wanted to go to Lissis. That’s why I chose Paris. Initially, I wanted to go there to Paris, stay in a hotel when placed and go to Lissis, tell everyone I went to Lissis, take pictures, and I didn’t have many more expectations besides that. But things went very differently and way, way better than I thought.
Frank Okay, so before we go into details, parkour, I have seen videos, not my thing. Is it considered an extreme sport?
Igor Well, yes and no. Like one thing people misinterpret about parkour, people who don’t practice it, it’s because when you search parkour on Google, on YouTube, you’re going to see the highlights. So you’re going to see people doing very absurd movements, people jumping from buildings, doing crazy flips over rails, like very crazy YouTube things you’re going to see. But in the daily life of someone who trains parkour, everything is very safe because you are training like in the curb, in the street, on very low rails, you are training in very low walls, in parks of your city. It’s very safe environment and you will never do something crazy because you don’t want to show off.
You usually want to show off when you are very young. We do a few notes on YouTube videos of people doing crazy things, everyone is very young. When someone is filming. in your daily training, no one is filming. The training tends to be very safe. That’s the first reason. I don’t consider it extreme sport, would be like, well, we could do analogy with yoga. You can practice yoga with very light breathing, light movements, and when you won’t show off, you can do a handstand with one hand and hit your head on the ground. It would be the same thing with parkour. We don’t like to call sports. There are the old school guys, which I’m included in the new school. The old school guys, we don’t like to call sport because when we tell that something is a sport, we are basically telling that there are a set of rules and there is some kind of regulation, which is not the case for parkour.
We don’t have rules on parkour. Our goal is to deal with obstacles, but you can do whatever you want, the way you think it’s better, the way you think it’s more efficient. And there is no institution to tell that parkour is this, parkour is that. So, it’s a very, very new sport and very unregulated.
We have a few people trying to regulate parkour, but never worked, really. So I don’t consider sport and I don’t consider extreme. I consider it more like a movement practice.
Frank Okay, so what attracted you to this?
Igor Well, the short story is that I was in high school, like before high school, I think we call elementary school. And one friend which moved from São Paulo, the biggest city in Latin America, he moved to my city, which was a very small town in my state of Minas Gerais here in Brazil. And we started talking and he told me that there is this new kind of thing in São Paulo where everyone do flips.
It’s very cool. And he started to show me videos. YouTube was in the very beginning, at least in Brazil, 2008, 2009. And we fell in love with it. So I and me and this friend started to train by ourselves in this town. And a lot of other young people started to gather. And we built a community, which is how Parkour worked in the beginning. Like we had very small communities all across the world. And those communities would gather regularly to meet each other. Their YouTube wasn’t very strong as it is today. So we would learn and we would talk about Parkour in those gatherings. And it became a cycle because I was doing something. I like it. I was getting fit, and I was making friends.
All my friends, even today, like my closest friends that I have today are the ones that are the ones that I made in the Parkour community. So that’s why I started and how I started. And like in the end, before I went to the United States, because I really stopped to train Parkour as fanatic as I was when I went to United States. Before going to United States, my life was basically Parkour. But a few months before there, I was teaching Parkour in my town. And when I went to United States, things just cooled down a little bit.
Frank OK, OK. There’s three things that you mentioned. And I’m wondering, maybe I’m seeing too much into this or reading too much into this. But you started with Parkour is not a sport. But the people who do this like to define it as a culture of movement. The objective of Parkour is to deal with obstacles. And when you were introduced to this with through a friend of yours, both of you then started to build a community.
Igor Yes.
Frank Is there something is there a red line or a line that connects these three things that upon hindsight and I come back to this hindsight and career changing and things that build up to Culture of movement, obstacles and community. Is there something that connects these three words such that that you can think of?
Igor I think. Well, something that’s surely connect though, the three points are proactiveness. Because a lot of those three things just came to life because I and this friend was very proactive in the beginning. Of course, we had a lot of free time to spend because we are just teenagers.
But I think proactiveness because most of the things we had no idea how to do, there was literally no one doing that. We were the first ones to do like parkour gatherings, many, many movements. We are the first ones to do in Brazil. So a lot of proactiveness.
Frank Okay. All right. So we keep that word in the background, proactiveness.
So you fly from Canada to France. You land in France. You have a particular goal to visit a particular place in Paris. You got there.
Igor Yeah.
Frank How does the story continue?
Igor Well, it’s a cool story because I wanted it to save money. So like I told my plan was to go to a hotel, but I started before, like, booking any hotel. I started to look on Facebook groups and there are a lot of groups that like Brazilians in Paris, Brazilians in Milan, Brazilians in anywhere in the world, they want to find a Facebook group because Brazilians are everywhere. And I found one, the Brazilians in Paris, and I posted it there.
So I posted something like, I’m going to Paris. I want to spend about one or two weeks, and I need a bed to sleep. So a girl, a woman, I would say, at the time she offered me a place to sleep in her apartment in exchange for, I think it was 50 euros. It was very cheap, like for one or two weeks. Then I accepted and we talked just on the internet. But when I arrived there, she lived with a female friend as well. And they were cool people, I think. Like I didn’t get to know them very deeply, but they were very party people, you know? So, they would go throughout the night doing a lot of noise, drinking a lot. They would go to pubs and get drunk in the house and do a lot of noise. It wasn’t very quiet, and I wasn’t feeling very confident, very safe because like I had my things, I had my laptop and I was thinking, something sounds weird, you know? And I think the third day that I was with those girls, I told her that I wanted to sleep because I was training in the morning, and she didn’t like the way I asked her. And we had a very small argument, nothing very big, but a very like a small argument about sleeping hours. And then she said, oh, if you want, she said a little bit arrogant, like if you want, so if you don’t want to stay like that, I give your money back and you can go away. And I said, okay, so give my money back and I go away. So, at that night, I wasn’t planning for that. I got my money, and I went to the streets and my plan was, okay, I’m going to, I didn’t have a smartphone at the time, so I’m going to use the wifi of somewhere. I’m going to look for hostels. But it was a Saturday night and there wasn’t any hostels available in Paris at a Saturday night of a summer. Then I said, okay, I guess I don’t have somewhere to go. At the time I had no money, and it even didn’t cross my mind to go to a fancy hotel and I think I wouldn’t find as well. So, I just decided to spend my night in somewhere safe. So, like initially I found somewhere in the streets, a kind of a park where I slept a little bit, but I wasn’t feeling asleep and I was very excited with everything that happened, a lot of adrenaline running in my blood. So, I said, okay, I must do something. So I went to a McDonald’s that worked 24 hours and had a good wifi and I started to send a message to everyone I knew here in Brazil. And one of the persons I sent a message was a parkour guy that I didn’t know personally, but I knew he had visited Europe maybe two years before me. So, I sent him a message and I asked him where he stayed, what tips he had for me. And he like told me that he had stayed in a hostel, but he had planned way before the time he went to Europe. And I explained my situation to him, and he said, I have a friend. So, okay, this is complicated. So follow up. He had a friend, which he had a friend, which the girlfriend of his friend had a sister, which lived in Paris.
Frank Okay. That’s about four. That’s four. What is the law? The six degrees of
Igor Yeah. I almost got to the limit of six degrees.
Frank Okay. So you got to the fourth. Okay. So someone who knew somebody who knew somebody who had a girlfriend, who had a room.
Igor Yes. And it was like life changing this moment because I at that time I had met like nice people as I met Becky and we talked about, we talked about her, but it was like very unbelievable in this case because, okay, this guy, which lived in the north of Brazil and I had no idea who was, who was, he trained in parkour, but I never met him in gatherings. He was dating this girl, uh, who had a sister who lived in Paris. Okay. So like throughout messages, uh, every, I don’t remember exactly how it happens, but like I got a message from someone say, okay, be at the address at 6am. Because the, the girl would walk in the morning. So I would have to get very early and she will host you. Right. But I didn’t know anything about the, this person. So I went to the address. Uh, she, she didn’t speak English very well. I, I neither. So we, we started to like, to know each other, but like we had a very instant connection somehow. I don’t know how to think, but we felt very comfortable with each other. And from this day, uh, I spent two, about two months in this girl’s place. So, we had a very good relationship in terms of like a friendship, right? Not like a romantic relationship, like a friendship. And it, I got like two big surprises. Like the first one that she, she was so hospitable. I don’t know if it is worth existing. And she, she, she trusted that it was very surprising to me. And the other biggest surprise, which changed my whole experience in Europe and with parkour is that she trained parkour and I had no idea she trained parkour and she trained with the founders of parkour. So, and it is funny because the parkour founders, they are now even today for being very, very closed people. So, they don’t have the social media profile. They don’t do YouTube videos. They, they don’t speak English. They are very closed people, right? So, I would never be able to meet those people. That’s the truth. And she trained with them. So, I started to go to the training sessions, and I started to develop a friendship with some of the founders. And one week, one week after knowing this girl, her name is Kit Kat. No, his name is Catherine, but his nickname, her nickname is Kit Kat. I was like going to dinner with those guys. We, we went climbing with those guys. It was, and we spent, I spent the rest of my time in Paris, this initial time training with the parkour founders. So, this, this is the second surprise and something very life changing. Even today, I like almost cannot believe that I spent so much time with those guys, because before going to France, I would watch them and read about them and read stories about those guys. And I was, Oh my God, they are Gods and I will not ever be able to meet them. And they are all nice people, and they train very hard. So that’s the experience.
Frank I mean, this, you’ve got to, you’ve got to really, really get this into your head. Yeah. So there you are. You up sticks in Alberta, hop on a flight to Paris. You meet a couple of people that you don’t feel comfortable with. You send messages to everybody on the planet, Facebook.
Igor Yes.
Frank And then you land on your feet, quite literally land on your feet in the bullseye of the dart board and hit the black spot.
Igor Yes.
Frank Is this luck or how do you, how do you, I mean, this is not even proactiveness. The obstacles are what they are. This was pure luck, wasn’t it?
Igor Yes, I think, I think there are a lot of luck involved, but not like Steve Jobs has this very popular speech where he tells, that we cannot connect the dots before we, we leave something.
So, after leaving everything, I’m able to connect the dots. And I think there are a lot of luck involved, of course. And I’m very grateful for everyone that I met because I am a really lucky guy in this sense of meeting great people. But I can see a pattern where like, even today, when I want to do something, I know myself and I know like the minimum amount of planning I need to do something. So, in Europe, for example, so I like, I had some cash, so I wouldn’t get hungry. I had some cash to eat if I wanted. I was, and I am very healthy. So, so I will not get in trouble. So, I, if I need to sleep on the streets, I can, I can sleep. If I need to run, I can run. If I need to fight, I can fight. I am healthy. And I think I’m very open to, to new experience. This open-ended experience, I think that tells a lot why I am able to, to go through those circumstances. So, in this apartment, for example, where I was living, I, the Kit Kat would receive guests and I would make friendship very quickly to everyone because she had a friend who was a painter and I went to there so the guy could paint me almost naked, not 100%, but almost naked. They would ask me to go to the supermarket with them and I would go. I was very open to everything. And of course, today I have more responsibilities, but I still feel I am this kind of person, and it helped a lot. I have met people throughout those experiences who wasn’t so open, and they didn’t quite live an amazing experience as I lived because they are not so open, you know?
Frank So in this whole journey of career changing careers, etc, planning is not so critical, is it? Because if you plan too much, you might actually miss something that could be much more valuable, and you don’t know how it is. And since we don’t know the future, how can we plan for the future when we don’t know what it is? It’s a philosophical question almost, yeah? So should we plan?
Igor I don’t think so. Like as a project manager, it’s counterintuitive, but I don’t think we need planning to deal with career change because most of the things we have no idea about how to do. So, let’s say you want to be an engineer.
Like the truth is you have no idea what exactly details you need to do. So planning, over planning can be dangerous because it will block your actions. And even if you act upon those planning, you can act wrongly. So, I think more important than planning, over planning, of course, a small amount of planning can be welcomed. But instead of over planning, I really think of being prepared to deal with what might come on your way. So, in my case, for example, I can tell that considering my situation now. So, I did the career change. So, from having a company to deal with now being an employee and I’m getting into product management, which I’m very excited about, I don’t plan everything because I know that I’m very skilful to learn new things fast. So, I’m not planning what I need to know next month because when it comes the time to learn something, I have a framework, a guiding framework to learn. In this case, I do quick research. I try to see what the patterns of this area of knowledge are. So, what everyone talks about, what are the main challenges, where are the sources of good content about that. I create routines to study daily about the most important topics on these areas of knowledge. So, this is just one example. I can give you another simple one. So in terms of health. So I don’t know what I’m going to do in terms of health in two months, but I know that I am healthy enough to do anything I want. So, if I want to run a marathon, I know I’m able to. If I want to compete on jiu-jitsu, I know I’m able to because I have this guiding framework of being healthy. That’s how I like to see it.
Frank And maintaining this framework is where the discipline lies because it does require a certain amount of discipline to move forward. We come back to this culture of movement and obstacles, which is the sort of in these three dots that we are, you have to be disciplined. So you have to be not over planning. So, you have to have the right amount of planning and have a discipline within a framework to sustain the planning and to be open for anything that is a surprise.
Igor Yes. Discipline is a very important point of this equation. And honestly, I think it’s a very intriguing word because it seems very subjective and abstract when you tell discipline. If you ask me, I don’t consider myself disciplined, but I consider myself organized and consistent. I think those words are more palpable because if I am organized, it means that I use calendar, so I know what I have to do tomorrow. When I tell I’m consistent, I know that I have a routine to do what I need to do. So, I’m more actionable about stuff. Discipline, it always seems to me very abstract just to make this parenthesis.
Frank Okay. I was going to link the word discipline and sport because being competitive in doing any sport on a competitive level does require the discipline as well as the organization and the planning, et cetera. Okay. So getting back to this story, you hit the jackpot in Paris and you spent the next couple of weeks touring Paris, not as a tourist does, but jumping around, doing parkour and sort of looking at Paris from a different angle. What happens next?
Igor So like after two months in Paris, Catherine, which was the main girl who was hosting me, she walked. So, we got to a time that I was, she had a friend that I would talk about this friend later on on the story, but her name is Chloé and she was living with Catherine as well. And we developed even more closer friendship because she was with free time as I was, and we used to train, we used to go to Metro together, we would jump there. How was the thing that you go through when you go to Metro? You pay and go through the other,
Frank the turnstiles, the turnstiles or the barriers? Yeah,
Igor the barriers. So we would go jump through that. It was a very adventurous moment of my life. So, but two months after arriving in Paris, Chloé went to another place. I think she went back to Canada where she lived. And I was a little bit, not completely, but I was a little bit annoyed with the fact that I was living with Kit Kat and like using her apartment, but we wouldn’t have time to hang out very much. She was very busy and very dealing with her work. And I felt very like, I felt I was annoying her. I’m sure she didn’t feel like that, but that’s what I was feeling. And I thought, okay, I need to find another thing to do because it’s very good, but like, I want to be able, like she wants to become my mother, right? I have to do something else. Then I started to look on the internet, what I would do. And I came across a concept that I used many times in my life since then, which is volunteering. And I found a volunteer opportunity in the South of France, in a very small town called, I think it’s Montmeyran, something like that. I think it’s Montmeyran. It’s close to Valence.
And I went there, it’s another funny character that appeared in my life because, okay, I exchanged messages with this guy and he told, okay, we have a farm here and we have a lot of volunteers, and we plant fruits and we live in a very open environment. We love nature and et cetera, et cetera. And when I got there, so I got there by bus in Montmeyran. I can remember, it’s very vivid in my memory because it was a very cloudy day. The bus went to Paris to Montmeyran and Montmeyran was a stop in a way to another big city. I think it was Lyon. And I was alone in the bus. I got off the bus. It was a very, very tiny town, like very tiny town, like in the middle of nowhere of France. And it was very cloudy. And it was a Sunday, and it was completely alone in this park, like the main square of a town where you have the church, the school. I was in this place, completely alone. And the guy got late like one hour. So, I was late. Oh my God, I’m going to get killed or something like that. It is a scam. Then one taxi from Luxembourg stopped in front of me. Like the guy drove a taxi from Luxembourg.
So, I got, okay, so now I’m sure I’m going to get killed. But this very friendly guy and old guy, I would say 72, maybe 75 years old. He got off the car very friendly and told us, sorry Igor, I’m late, but let’s go to the place. We have a lot of food. And I believed him somehow.
So, I went to the car, and he was very funny because he was a quite old guy. He was very smart. So, he spoke five languages. He wasn’t French. He was German. He used to speak five languages. And we went to the place, and it was awesome again. So, he had a girlfriend, a French girlfriend who didn’t speak English. So, we could be very gentle with each other, me and this woman, but we wouldn’t be able to communicate because I had no idea what she was talking. She had no idea what I was talking, but I ate a lot. And then I started working in this place. It was very welcoming. The work was fine. And at some point, I think three weeks after I arrived in this place, I was working, and I was feeling a lot in my home. I was running every day and walking and having fun.
He invited me to go to Germany to help to reform his mother’s house in Germany.
Frank To restore or to renovate? To restore.
Igor Yes, to restore. The floor of the house, only the floor. Okay. So we got in the car and we drove, I think, 10 or 12 hours to this town in Germany. I think, I’m quite sure the name of the town is Marburg. When we got to this town, it was a very small town as well. We got to his mother’s house and everything for that floor was very weird.
So first, the house was totally empty, and the door was open. It seemed like it was an abandoned house. That’s the first thing. The second thing, he told me to sleep in the house because there was a bed upstairs and he would sleep in the car. That’s the second very weird thing. And the third weird thing is that we didn’t have anywhere to go. So, we would stay four days in this town and we didn’t have place to take shower, place to sleep. So, we would go to the supermarket, eat anything, and then go to work.
And one day, I think in the second night, I was sleeping in this house. So, I was sleeping in this house by myself, and he was sleeping in the car. I didn’t know where, but he was sleeping in the car. Somewhere, somewhere around 7 a.m., someone knocked on the door, which was open. So, then the guy politely knocked on the door. He could just get in. He was a German guy. I went down the stairs very carefully, thinking, oh, if I have to run. I was thinking my escape route in my head. And the guy was a very polite guy with suits, a middle-aged man. He didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak German, so we couldn’t understand each other. But I could feel he was some kind of flower, someone representing the state. So, he seemed a very serious guy. So, he gave me a card number and he told him something like, give your boss, something like that. So, I got the number. And when this German guy, his name is Horst, which I met in France, when he came, I told him, oh, this guy came, and he made a lot of questions. I didn’t understand anything, but he told me to give you this. It was a card number. And the Horst, which was a German guy, he told me, oh, he was a lawyer because my mother, she passed away two years ago and she didn’t pay taxes. And now they want me to pay the taxes. And then I understood why he was leaving the car, because he wanted to reform the house, but he was running from the government.
Frank He was running from the authorities. Yeah.
Igor And then I understood why he drove a taxi from Luxembourg, because probably he had to get a car very cheap and run away from Germany.
Frank Fair enough.
Igor So we finished this job, which was fine. We met a very cool man who was from somewhere in Africa, who was
Frank a refugee from Africa.
Igor And it was funny this day as well, because the day we met this guy, we were very tired. It was the last day and we wanted to take a shower. We wanted to eat some meal. And we said, okay, there is this place, because we could see the sign, that was a refugee house. There is a big house, which the government would pay for the refugees to stay there. And we just went in the refugee house, and we cooked, we took a shower. And we talked with those guys. And it was another funny moment. It was the last day. Then we went back to Europe. And I spent, I think, one more month there. It was very chilly, and everything went very fine. And just to finish the chapter of this guy, of Horst, that I’m not sure if his name is Horst, by the way, because he was a very good liar.
Frank Probably not.
Igor Probably not. He was a very good liar.
Frank Let’s put it to Horst. If you’re listening to this, could you please contact us?
Igor Yeah. Well, so that’s how I want to finish the chapter. So, okay, maybe it will be said, okay? So if you want to put a sad music on the background, that’s the moment on the editing.
Frank Okay. We’ll keep it as it is.
Igor So in the last week of working with Host, I was very stressed with what I would do next. And I was very young. So I remember I’d been a little bit rude with him, right? So nothing very, very… How can I say that? I wasn’t very rude, but I would say, you know, like teenagers that don’t answer properly, and we don’t like to talk to others. I was in this phase. So, he would ask me to do something, and I would do like, but saying, oh, I don’t want to do that, but I will do because blah, blah, blah. I wasn’t in a good mood in the last week. Then I left and I think four years later, I found his email again. I was looking for some documents. I found his email and I said, oh, I’m going to contact him four years later. Then I sent him an email, say, oh, I mean, Igor, I don’t know if you remember me. We had a good time, and I would like to say sorry because the last week I was a pain in the ass, and I wrote something like that. He’s very cute. He wrote, oh, of course I remember Igor, but I don’t remember this Igor you are talking about, which was rude. So very cute, right?
We exchanged a few emails and he told me that he was with a lung cancer. It was four years later, so 2019, right? Yes, 2019. He told me that he was with a lung cancer, and he was taken care of himself and et cetera. Then in 2021, I sent him a follow-up email and he never answered back. So, I don’t know, but probably he passed it away.
Frank Putting it mildly, Igor, it’s a bit of an unbelievable story for the well-situated middle-class person who is thinking of changing his life. This is extreme. But I know where this is because I’ve been doing this job now for 30 years, but before that, I spent 13 years working in hotels. If you want to meet weird people in weird situations and have really strange stories to tell, then you have to go into the hotel business. You meet humanity in its entire spectrum. The problem with these kind of stories from the hotel industry is that nobody will believe you unless they have worked in the hotel industry because it’s such a weird place to be.
You left Europe with a whole bag of other adventures and a whole bag of other experiences. We have three stepping-stones. We have the family-orientated door opening supporting Becky. We have the Canadian interlude, short as it was, but it was where you started to run and to focus on physical fitness. I saw the article about you getting your 100K. It’s on the bottom of the link.
Then you come to Europe, and you paint a picture of Europe that is totally unusual. We’re not like this over here. You come to all three stepping-stones. There is a continuous line in all of this and it’s the people. People that you meet, people that you learn to trust, even if they are on first impressions, well, do I really need to trust this person? We have you as a framework person with a rough plan, but if it fits the framework, then we can live with that. You’re open to obstacles. You are constantly on the move. There is proactiveness in the sense that well, I’m going to take this opportunity and see what happens. High risk. I mean, there were some instances that it could have gone really the other way and we may not actually be speaking with each other anymore.
If you take all of this whole story as it stands now and you project this into the future of what we’re going to be talking about in the next few episodes, how did all of this prepare you for the future? And would you do it again?
Igor Yes, I think, to answer the second question, I would do that again. I think I still do, of course, in a different way, because it’s not that I am not adventurous anymore, but I think I reflect more on what I want to do. Because back at the time, I was just moving with everything. Of course, I wanted to do everything I did, but a big part of what I did, that I didn’t reflect that much. So, I wanted to do volunteering, but I didn’t care what I would do. I would accept anything because I just didn’t care. And now I think I have more my goals and my principles more aligned and more clear in my head. So, I kind of choose more aligned with those things. But I still, I feel I am still adventurous in the sense of being open and proactive to do things. They’re like the fact that I’m moving to LA, it’s an example. So, I’m just going. And what everything taught me about that, and it’s very deep in my personality today, is that if you are prepared and you trust yourself, everything will be fine.
Because I’m not sure if I agree that there are things that are high risk. Because what’s the worst that could happen? I would maybe have to go back to Paris. I would maybe don’t have lunch for one day. Maybe I would get cold, but it’s not. I think people put their weight more than it should weight until some kind of experience. And of course, just to be clear, I don’t have kids, I’m not married. So I understand that not everyone has this privilege that I am. But for those who has this privilege of not having anyone depending on you, of being healthy, of being intellectually competent to deal with kind of situations, I don’t see very risk. I don’t see that much risk. So today, the way I think about that, and maybe to change when I have children, of course, but the way I think today, if I was tele-transported to the countryside of Japan, right now in this minute, I trust myself that everything would be fine. So, it’s a very deep level of self-confidence that I achieved throughout those experiences. And I agree with you. And that’s something that really changed my life after I realized that. And I just realized the importance of people many years later, I would say three years later.
So everything happened in 2015. I just realized the importance of people in 2020. That’s what we meant when connecting the dots like before. Everything is about people. I’m writing an article about loneliness, which is part of our experience, and you are mentoring me. And the question, I will probably finish the article, is this one. So thinking now the good experience you had in your life, probably you had people around you. It’s very rare. I can tell for myself with certainty. I cannot tell for everyone that for me, all the best experience I have in my life, there are people around. I was never alone when I had a really good experience.
Frank And I was talking to somebody else earlier today about whether people are good or people are bad. And the conclusion of that conversation wasn’t as favourable as the conclusion of this conversation. You ran into people who were willing to help you, who were willing to support you in their own way. They didn’t know you. They didn’t know you from Adam. And as we progress into the future, there is this question of are we learning to trust each other and can we trust the other person?
I personally find that we are moving into a society where the presumption of innocence is being slowly eroded. You actually have to prove your innocence before you are convicted. You are automatically seen as guilty, and you have to prove your innocence. I find this a sad development. There is a story on my side that a couple of years ago, my wife and I, we would traditionally spend New Year’s Eve in England in Canterbury and we stayed in a hotel. We were known in a hotel. We were regular guests. They knew us and we would always sort of ask for a late checkout and then drive to somebody else.
And on this one particular instance, I asked the receptionist, I said, look, do you mind if we leave the car in the hotel foreground car park until four o’clock before we would go? And she said, no, because of security reasons, we can’t permit you to do that. And I mean, they knew who they knew who we were. And I asked this receptionist, do you actually realize what you are just saying at the moment? What security risk is there?
Igor Yes.
And she couldn’t answer that. So, we went around to the to the entrance where the with another person was sitting and I asked him, look, we’re parked over there. We want to leave at four o’clock. Is it okay? Yeah, no problem. Don’t worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s these kind of attitudes that that form us. And, and I think we’re losing a lot in, in trust in humanity, trust in other people and just sharing the experience.
Igor Yeah. Yes. I agree. And I think it’s very sad. And I think it’s like a big show, maybe not in my generation, but like, if we keep like that in future generations, they are, they are screwed, you know, because like, if you think in practical sense, like everything, like society only works because there’s trust. Like that, that’s the only reason because society just works because of that. Right. There is no other reason. So if you think about simple stuff, like when you are walking on the sideways, and you are on the sidewalk of our street, you are trusting that the car won’t just turn the wheel. And like, when you are in a bus, you trust that bus driver will, will not do something crazy when you are on the flight. So everything is trust, right? Everything. And when we stop trusting each other, things will start to get very inefficient. So imagine if you don’t trust the flight pilot. So, like how, how, how people are going to fly, you know? So yeah, that’s very sad. And I agree. I think for us is I was doing, I was doing, I think, right in December when I started to show, explore Clear Thinking, they have, uh, we have, uh, a model called, uh, Uncover Your Guidance Principles. We have these exercise there and I was doing this exercise, which is very thoughtful. And one of my guiding principles that I didn’t think about that is like trust, trusting people by default. And I thought it was genius because it’s exactly what I did throughout everything that we shared in the story, right? I just trusted by default, right? Um, and everything went fine. So of course, I don’t want their responsibility to tell everyone to trust everyone, but for me, it works very well, trusting people by default, you know, if they don’t do it, if they don’t give me a sign that we shouldn’t, I shouldn’t trust the, I would trust by default, you know,
Frank That, that, I think that that’s the good closing message, um, uh, added to which is use your common sense. And, um, if you trust by default, I mean, whose default are you going upon you, you have your life experiences, you have your worldview, you have your, your pictures and your experiences, and those will guide you to trust or not trust or deal with the situation as does, uh, somebody else, as do I, yeah, we, we are all very, very different. Um, and we have our own experiences. So, uh, trust by default, but use your, but use your common sense in, um, in the process. And if it becomes too risky, and again, that is also a personal, uh, evaluation. Yeah. If, if you find yourself uncomfortable or too in a situation, which you feel you can no longer control, then that pulled the rip cord and escape. Yeah. Get out, uh, as you did when you were in Marburg,you didn’t know the person at the bottom. So you were planning your escape route.
Yeah. Because you just didn’t know what to expect. Fascinating story. Um, the conclusion of which is then you left Europe and went back to Brazil. Is that the case?
Igor Yes. Yes. So like going back to the principles of not over planning, when I like, after seven months traveling Europe, I was feeling really lonely. Like loneliness is a big part of my life. And that’s why I’m writing about that. So, I was feeling like extremely lonely in Europe because I was meeting great people, but those people are living their lives and all they are like making friends, like focus on their careers. And I was like, I lost something into the universe of a lot of people. So, I decided to go back to Brazil, and I had no idea what to do, but I had a friend who owns a marketing agency in Curitiba, which is the city I live in right now. And that’s why I live here because I moved because I had this friend. And I had no idea about anything. I just went because he told me, oh, if you come here, maybe I can lend you a job on content writing because I know you like to write. And then I came, and everything happens. That’s something that to make stronger my argument that you shouldn’t over plan. You just need to be and to feel prepared to deal with will come across you. But over planning, for me at least, never helped anything. And northing worked by the way, nothing that I planned.
Frank Well, it reminds me of an ex-girlfriend of mine who she was, she still is American. She lived in Germany for a while. And she now lives back in California near San Francisco. And she said something really, really good. She said a lot of good things, but probably the best thing that she said was that we should plan or prepare to be spontaneous. And I think that provides the framework. So, you have the framework, but you just don’t know what’s going to happen in this framework. And that’s the beauty of it. Igor, fascinating story this evening. Thank you very, very much for it. And we will continue then with the part of the story where then you actually started getting into marketing. You built your own company. There’s probably a lot of stories in that. And then probably at the best time you threw it all in and sold it and took a completely different turn and of course more turns to come. So, Igor, thank you very much for this very, very illuminating story. Lots of lessons learned. I don’t quite know what they are.
And when it comes to the planning, I’m going to admit this freely. I had the framework, but I had no idea how this story was going to unfold. I just saw in Europe, I knew one or two little details from previous conversations, but it was a very spontaneous meeting this evening.
Igor Yes. Yes. I really liked the quote of your ex-girlfriend. Like you should be prepared to be spontaneous. I really liked that. I write that down because it really sums up everything.
Frank She’s on LinkedIn. I’ll send you the link. Okay. Igor, thanks very much. See you next time.
Igor Thank you.
Links, mentioned in this podcast
| The town of Montemeyran | Click Here |
| Clearer Thinking | Click Here |
| Clearer Thinking: Uncover your guiding principles | Click Here |