Personal · Travel
What being somewhere else teaches.
I’m less interested in travel as a checklist of places than in what a different context does to your assumptions. The best souvenir is a changed mind.
Marketing is applied culture, and the fastest way to see your own culture clearly is to leave it for a while. The most useful thing travel has given me isn’t a set of stories — it’s the habit of noticing that what feels universal is usually just local.
Living in London
Studying and living in London through my early twenties — a BA and an MA — was the formative version of this. Being an outsider in a different market taught me more about how culture shapes what works in marketing than any classroom did.
What travel does to assumptions
Every unfamiliar place resets your sense of what’s normal — how people queue, what they trust, how they buy. For someone whose job is understanding behaviour, that reset is the whole point. I come back from anywhere new with my defaults usefully disturbed.
The London years in context: the full story · how culture shapes marketing: on behaviour.