An Ever Shrinking World...

This may not surprise many of you but the world is shrinking. Obviously I don't mean that the world is physically shrinking but that it is becoming increasingly easier to communicate, travel, and do business with all corners of the globe. This notion of a shrinking world has hit me a couple times in the past week or two and I thought it important to mention.

Some of you, my readers, may not be aware of this but this blog in its self is an international tool of communication. I don't simply write for my fellow countrymen but for an international audience. This blog has readers from 26 different countries and of those, Spain and the United Kingdom are at the top of my hits lists. So I'd like to take this opportunity to say hello to the international audience that this blog receives. Welcome, Hola, Bienvenue, Willkommen.

Another eye opening experience to fact that this world is in a constant state of shrinking is that the company that I work for just had it's yearly corporate meeting. It lasted a week and we had people flown in from over fifteen different countries. There was so much culture and difference present. Yet we were all here for the same reason speaking the same language with relative ease. Also with this company, every time we take a design to press it has to go through translation; getting translated into the basic five international languages: French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Chinese. It is an interesting feeling to know that your designs are being seen all over the world. I don't think that this feeling is as rare as it may have been twenty years ago which is even more evidence that this world is getting smaller and smaller.

I'd like to throw a piece of advice at you and you can take it with a grain of salt but here it goes. Realize that your culture is not the only one on this planet. Everyone has their own beliefs, practices, traditions, and ways of life and to be intolerant is career suicide. In this fast paced world, being a mono-lingual individual places a glass ceiling over your head in the professional world but having the ability to communicate on an international level opens countless doors and opportunities. Personally I have taken five years of French and can only ask your name and sing the national anthem, I know enough german to ask where the bathroom is, and I think I can order a drink in spanish (an obvious necessity while in Spain). Needless to say that I am not the international person that I should be although I plan to remedy that soon enough. I think that we need to start to realize that the vast distance that our grandparents understood as a reason for remaining mono-lingual is vanishing if it has not already disappeared. Soon the only way to survive will be to communicate effortlessly in multiple languages. It would be smart to anticipate this change and prepare yourself for the inevitable.

So with that I leave you. Au revoir, Auf Wiedersehen, Arrivederci, Adiós, and Goodbye. (Thanks to Babel fish for the translations!)