Internationalizing yourself....

The Intellectual Adventurer

by Fitzroy Mclean

The Intellectual Adventurer is always on expedition.   The first journey is one not of miles, kilometers, fathoms or farthings but of attitude, mentality and philosophy.  Our adventurer is one who views the world through a global lens.  His paradigm is not based on his hometown, state, province or country. It is based on his personal quest for knowledge and enlightenment – his desire to collect a personal database populated by people, places,

events and most importantly ideas.  The intellectual adventurer is a man of letters and a man of action.  He is an explorer of ideas as well as far away lands.
He is a thinker first and foremost whoexpands his horizons on a daily basis though eclectic learning of the arts, sciences, literature, languages, cultures and philosophies.   Conventional opinion is irrelevant.  Only through experience or active study can one obtain knowledge and understanding.  The sound bytes that “inform and educate” the sheeple is not sound philosophy for the intellectual adventurer.
The intellectual adventurer is a wanderer, an explorer, a traveler, a tramp and a vagabond.  He is never a tourist.  He does not tour through “foreign” lands he experiences cultures he has not yet engaged.  Travel is about meaningful experiences.  Quality not quantity.   The intellectual adventurer is never average.  He may stay at the very best boutique hotel or he may sleep under a railway bridge to stay out of the rain or snow.   Experiencing the luxurious Levantine hospitality at Hotel Albergo in Beirut is acceptable.
The Holliday Inn Express near Charles de Gaulle Airport is not.  The IA seeks out the powerful people that influence society.
He comfortably moves through the rarified circles of the global elite.  It matters not if that is a minister of finance or the local mafia chieftain.  The truly adventurous eagerly talk to the taxi driver and the shoeshine man.  He actively engages the conversation with the shopkeeper and the bartender.  He collects data and comes to his own conclusions.  He knows that he will learn more about the economy and geopolitical situation from the Madam than the head of the international branch of the Chamber of Commerce. While always polite he avoids tourists and above all else US Embassy staff.
The Intellectual Adventurer  is a gentleman.  He has refined tastes and impeccable manners. He adapts his ways to the society in which he travels.  He uses the third fork properly during a six-course meal.  Yet equally important, the international man knows that when dining with Bedouins it is only acceptable to reach into the bowl off couscous with his left hand and that when in Napal refusing to eat the sheep’s eyeball is an offence of the highest order.   And yet, he is not politically correct.  He is very comfortable being a man. He is not metrosexual. He is manly.  He enjoys manly pursuits.  He enjoys the company of women but he understands that being a man is a benefit not to be squandered by the “peoplization” of the politically correct.
While eschewing political correctness, the he is open-minded. He is never petty or vindictive.  His experiences from around the world have allowed him to understand that small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events and great minds discuss ideas.  He knows that civil discourse even through disagreement is what propels ideas and societies.   An intellectual adventurer reaches his own conclusions.  While open-minded, the intellectual adventurer knows that each individual is entitled to his own opinion and views.  He is unabashed in his personal beliefs and is unafraid to voice them. He knows a worldly gentleman would never see fit to force his ideas on another and is always willing to agree to disagree.  Tolerance of other views is not the same as agreement.   A gentleman of the world knows the difference.
Perhaps most importantly, an intellectual adventurer knows that he is merely the sum of all his yesterdays as well as today.  He has a finite number of days in which to determine who he is and who he will be.  He views every day as a chance to be better, to excel, to achieve the greatness within him.  Not all international men define greatness in the same way nor should they.  Each and every individual is entirely responsible for their own definition of success and for designing the criteria by which they judge themselves.

He recognizes that life is about choice and most people abdicate their choice in favor of acceptance and stability.  They entrust the course of their life to fate, the whims of others or the societal conventions imposed upon them.  In contrast, an intellectual adventurer creates his own reality and steadfastly refuses to accept the conventions, paths and norms thrust upon him by others.  He does not think outside the box because he does not acknowledge the box exists.  He revels in the responsibility of creating his paradigm that maximizes his potential and rewards his efforts.  He knows the only barriers are within his mind. He knows an education devoid of travel and exploration is incomplete.  While a vicarious exploration of cultures and people is far superior to what often passes for education in the modern world it is no substitute for actively engaging with the world.

Travel is within the grasp of every man of intellect and every man who passes up the opportunity to roam freely across the globe is incomplete.  In today’s world it is easier to live within the bubble of one’s comfort.  There are red states and blue states, Yankee fans and Red Sox fans, city people and rural people.  Today’s society has rapidly devolved into reductionist classifications of us and them.  An intellectual adventurer knows that while there will always be like minds and others worthy of their time and company it is rarely segregated by geography and never by nationality.  The color of one’s passport is as irrelevant as the color of the eyes. Only small minded sheeple would be concerned with such ludicrous conventions of conformity.

Ten Ways to Internationalize Yourself Today

1. Stop using the word “foreign. It only narrows your horizons and creates foreign boundries. Nationality is an abstract construction that limits rather than enhances the journey of life.  Think in terms of unexplored, undiscovered, and yet unknown.
2. Engage with the goings on in the world in a critical way.  Read the foreign press. Translate.google.com can translate entire web pages in an instant.  Although the language may seem irregular in English, reading the foreign press will instantly shift your paradigm.  An intellectual adventurer would never accept any singular source as accurate or unbiased but rather would consume as many views as possible, analyze the inherent biases and make his own decision.  Given the infotainment nature of all US media this alone will separate you from the majority of the sheeple.
3. Liberate your thoughts with another language. If the immigrant ditch digger from Vietnam or Poland can learn English in one year, a man of letters and action can do so as well.  Programs the likes of Rosetta Stone make learning the basics of a language painless. Armed with a two hundred-word vocabulary, an international man can engage with the populace in a meaningful way.  After a three-week trip his vocabulary will top one thousand.  Many Americans use less than a thousand word vocabularies throughout their lifetime.  Once started on this journey the ability to communicate opens multiple paths to progress.
4. Internalize the idea that the path to success lies directly through where others fear to tread.  An intellectual adventurer man knows that the majority- the masses of average- fail to reach their potential simply by doing nothing.  An intellectual adventurer acts.  He does not dither.  He travels, he engages, he ventures, he fails and he progresses. He goes to bed smarter than he woke up even if the days lesson resulted in a lump on the forehead or a mistake never to be repeated.  Resolve to live an extraordinary life.
5. Ready your passport and book a trip.  The destination is less important that the way you plan to travel.  Design a trip that forces you to learn by expanding your comfort zone. Don’t book a hotel, find a short term apartment for rent online.  Become part of the neighborhood for the duration of your travel. Shop for bread at the local bakery and sample the local wine while watching people in the park.  Thinking of trying to learn the guitar? Don’t do it at home, learn on a Mexican cat gut guitar in Guadalajara.  Why take one lesson a week for a year in hometown USA when you can learn three hours a day for two weeks while soaking up a culture you would otherwise never know. Use your two weeks to improve your Spanish and learn to serenade your sweetheart in a foreign tongue.  Don’t want to play guitar, take a cooking class in Montreal, kickboxing lessons in Bangkok or learn to surf in Madagascar.
6. Become a connoisseur of something new.   Become an armchair anthropologist and study the history of the peoples in a place you want to visit.  Become a fan of the soccer club Bocca Junior in Buenos Aries and follow their progress in the Argentine Press.  Learn the rules of cricket and watch the big test matches online.  Start learning about Australian wines or Scotch whiskey but save the class until you visit the vineyards or distillery.  Find an explorer and read his works.  Then follow Burton, Theisiger, MacLean or Stanley into the lands they first discovered.
7. Adopt an immigrant.  Not literally but befriend someone from another culture who has moved to where you live.  Help them with the daily struggles. If you are lucky they will be cute and single but at least you will learn about another culture you may be soon able to explore first hand armed with cultural knowledge.
8. Celebrate the fact that a culture and a society is not its government.  The average man thinks in terms of nations and Olympic teams. An intellectual adventurer man does not. Pick a country and then study the culture without concern for nationality.  You will be enlightened to learn that within one artificial border lies many societies, cultures and subcultures.  This discovery is in and of itself liberating.   The globe does not have an organizational chart and neither should you.
9. Learn economics.  Economics is the study of how people interact with each other.  You may ignore all the charts, graphs and Greek letters. That is not economics. That is academics.  What is essential is that you understand how a society functions, the degree to which the state or government restricts or dictates economic liberty and the ability of individuals to create their own life.  This will change the way you look at a society.  Read Henry Hazlit’s essential Economics in One Lesson and you will never look at any society in the same way again.  This alone will cull you from the heard of cubicle dwelling sheep and infotainment brainwashed.
10. Seek out and congregate.  Intellectual adventurers can be found in almost any local.  Fellow explorers and travelers have a way of finding each other.  Learn from each other. Share ideas and experiences.  Meet up in far-flung corners of the globe and share notes.

Plan your next exploration – geographic or philosophical together.  While the intellectual adventurer is by no means common place, he is never alone.  Through our private society or by other means cultivate the relationships that will add to your extraordinary life.
It is not hard to be an intellectual adventurer.  Many have trod where you hope to go.  Men with far greater financial and physical challenges have lived extraordinary lives with far less resources.  When presented with an obstacle or an excuse or when the sirens song of sedentary existence calls from a safe harbor remember the story of James Holman told in the inspirational book A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became the World’s Greatest Traveler.  Consider this introduction from the book;
Until the invention of the internal combustion engine, the most prolific traveler in history was also the most unlikely. Born in 1786, James Holman was in many ways the quintessential world explorer; a dashing mix of discipline, recklessness and accomplishment, a Knight of Windsor, Fellow of the Royal Society, and bestselling author.  It was easy to forget that he was intermittently crippled and permanently blind.   He journeyed alone. He entered each country not knowing a single word of the local language. He had only enough money to travel in the native fashion, in public carriages and peasant carts, on horseback and on foot.  Yet, “he traversed the great globe itself more thoroughly than any other traveler that ever existed” as on journalist of the time put it, “and surveyed its manifold parts as perfectly as if not more than, the most intelligent and clear sighted of his predecessors”.   In an era when the blind were routinely warehoused in asylums, Holman could be found studying medicine in Edinburgh, fighting the slave trade in Africa, hunting rouge elephants in Ceylon, and surviving frozen captivity in Siberia.  In The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin hailed him as the authority of the fauna of the Indian Ocean.
The modern intellectual adventurer has many advantages that those who went before him did not.  Yet the intellectual adventurer of today must actively shield himself from the bombardment of what passes for signal but is truly just noise.  The ubiquitous and the mundane do not distract him.  He seeks excellence and is eager to search for the moments and people that in sum total will create the mosaic that on his death bed will tell the story of an extraordinary life.
Editors Note:  Yes we know that women are every bit as capable of being intellectual adventurers as men are.  If you are a woman and an intellectual adventurer feel free to replace the pronouns at will but don’t expect us to bend to politically correct prose.  If you like what you see here, why not try Without Borders risk free for three months?  We guarantee you multiples of value on your money or we will give it back.