Get Out and Find Out What Normal Really Looks Like
One of the best things I ever did was spend enough time outside Britain to realise what a fucking terrible deal Britain can be. I don't mean going to Tenerife for two weeks, drinking lager beside a swimming pool and coming home with a tan that makes you look like a partially cooked sausage. That's a holiday. You haven't experienced another country because you've eaten an English breakfast somewhere with palm trees. I'm talking about leaving for long enough that another country becomes normal. Work there, pay bills there, rent somewhere, deal with banks, buy groceries, get annoyed with the bureaucracy, find a dentist, sit in traffic, have boring Tuesdays and stay long enough for the novelty to wear off. Give it a year. Then turn around and look at Britain again. That's when things start getting uncomfortable.
This is why Anton Kreil's fourth secret to financial success makes so much sense to me. He calls it go travelling, get perspective, get your dream life. He's much more savage about this stuff than most people in finance because he's not really talking about taking more holidays. He's talking about getting far enough outside the environment that created your assumptions to realise that they are assumptions. That's the important bit. Perspective doesn't come from standing on a beach in Thailand for ten days taking photographs of your feet. It comes from living somewhere else long enough that you have another functioning version of life to compare with the one you were handed.
I've had twenty years to make that comparison and Britain doesn't come out of it particularly well. Start with the fucking weather. Britain spends a large part of the year looking like somebody has stretched a wet grey dishcloth across the sky. You wake up in darkness, go to work in darkness and come home in darkness. Somewhere around lunchtime the sky turns the colour of old porridge for forty minutes and this is apparently daylight. Then people spend six months saying they can't wait for summer, summer arrives on a Wednesday afternoon in July, and by Thursday somebody from the water company is warning about a hosepipe ban.
You don't realise how ridiculous this is until you've lived somewhere with light. Not visited, lived. Once you've spent years in places where going outside doesn't require checking three weather applications and packing clothing for four seasons, you begin to understand how much of British life is organised around enduring the climate. People rush from house to car, car to office, office to pub, pub back to house, then spend Sunday afternoon watching television while rain runs down the window like the opening scene of a murder investigation. Do that for decades and it becomes normal. Leave for long enough and come back in November and you start wondering why the entire population hasn't eaten the curtains.
Then there's the financial deal, which gets even more interesting. Britain is very good at taking a successful person, hanging him upside down by the ankles and shaking him until the loose change falls out. The tax burden doesn't arrive as one clean bill either. That would be too honest. It comes at you like a pack of hungry dogs. Income tax, National Insurance, corporation tax, VAT, council tax, stamp duty, fuel duty and a collection of other little hands disappearing into your pockets while somebody explains that you're fortunate to contribute.
Running a business makes this relationship particularly clear because the government develops an extraordinary enthusiasm for sharing your success despite showing remarkably little interest in sharing the risk. You find the customers, put your capital at risk, solve the problems, deal with the staff, survive the bad months and lie awake when something goes wrong. Then when you've made some money, the government appears at the door like a relative you've never met who has somehow heard about the inheritance. Apparently you've been partners all along.
This is one of the things I like about Kreil's fourth secret because perspective isn't some spiritual exercise. It has economic consequences. Live in enough places and you start comparing what governments take, what things cost, what businesses have to deal with and what you actually receive in return. You stop accepting the local price simply because it's the only price you've ever seen. Britain can tax income heavily, make employing people expensive, make housing painfully expensive, make energy expensive, make transport expensive and then somehow convince people earning salaries that would've sounded enormous twenty years ago that they're doing well because they've managed to pay everything and have £300 left at the end of the month.
That's a shit deal.
The clever part is that it doesn't feel like a shit deal when everybody around you has the same one. If every house in the street has a leaking roof, eventually people stop discussing roofs and start putting buckets in the hallway. That's what living overseas changes. You visit another street and discover that some people don't own buckets.
I've lived in enough countries to know that none of them is paradise. Saudi Arabia has its own peculiarities. Japan has its own. South Korea has its own. Vietnam has its own. Every country eventually introduces you to a government form designed by somebody who appears to have a personal grievance against you. That's fine. I'm not looking for paradise. I'm looking at the deal.
That's the perspective Kreil is talking about, at least as I understand it. Stop looking at the world from one postcode. Compare systems. Compare costs. Compare opportunities. Compare what people consider normal. Compare what your money buys and how much of your life you have to exchange to get it. Once you've lived abroad rather than holidayed abroad, you discover that a lot of what you thought was reality was just local custom wearing a suit.
The dream life part follows from that. I used to think the phrase dream life sounded like the sort of thing written underneath a photograph of a Lamborghini by somebody whose main source of income was explaining how to afford a Lamborghini. But stripped of all that bullshit, the idea is simple. I get to decide what a good life looks like for me because I've seen enough alternatives to know there isn't one approved version.
That's probably the greatest financial advantage travel has given me and it has nothing to do with finding somewhere cheap to live. Cheap isn't the objective. I could probably live very cheaply in plenty of places where I'd rather chew my own foot off than spend twelve months. The advantage is knowing that I have choices. I can compare countries like I compare anything else I'm spending my time and money on. Climate, taxation, cost, business environment, quality of life, food, transport, culture, convenience, freedom, proximity to people I care about. It's a package, and I don't have to buy the first package somebody put in my hand because I happened to be born there.
That's why the travelling part of Kreil's fourth secret matters. It breaks the monopoly your home country has over your imagination. Before you've lived elsewhere, Britain gets to define expensive, normal, successful, safe, risky, good weather, bad weather, high tax, low tax and what a normal working life looks like. After a few years outside, Britain loses that privilege. It becomes another offer on the table.
And for me, it's not a particularly attractive offer.
I can still love people there. I can still enjoy going back. I can still appreciate British humour, pubs, countryside, history and all the other things that don't require me to hand over my entire fucking life to HM Revenue and Customs. Loving parts of a country doesn't mean I have to buy the full package. I like bacon as well. I don't want to live in a pig.
That's the perspective I didn't have when I was younger. I thought countries were destinations. Now I think they're arrangements. Some arrangements work for certain stages of life and some don't. Some are brilliant for business, some are brilliant for living, some are brilliant for earning, some are brilliant for spending time in, and some appear to have been designed by a committee determined to make electricity, housing and train tickets as expensive as humanly possible.
Anton calls the fourth secret go travelling, get perspective, get your dream life. After twenty years overseas, I'd put the emphasis squarely on perspective. The travelling is what cracks the door open. Perspective is what walks through it. The dream life is what becomes possible once you stop assuming the room you were born in is the entire fucking building.
A two week holiday won't do that.
Stay somewhere until you've had to buy toothpaste, argue with a bank and complain about the local government. Stay until the palm trees become furniture and Tuesday becomes Tuesday again. Then you've got something useful to compare.
And when you look back at Britain from there, through actual experience rather than a holiday brochure, you might discover that the deal you've been told is normal isn't normal at all.
It's just the deal Britain is selling.
I've seen the alternatives.
I'll keep my receipt.