255: Reinventing Yourself (Again) with Richard Farkas

Hello. It is 7:00 am in New York, 1:00 pm in Johannesburg, and 6:00 pm in Bangkok. Welcome to the Expat Happy Hour. This is Sundae Schneider-Bean from www.sundaebean.com. I am a solution-orientated coach and intercultural strategist for individuals and organizations. I am on a mission to help you adapt and succeed when living abroad and get you through any life transition.

 

When you think of a successful CEO what comes to mind?

• Great grades at Uni? 
• Ruthlessly climbing the corporate ladder?
• Achievement at the expense of his or her health?

 

You might change your mind after today’s episode. I have invited a special guest to help shed light on how taking a winding path on your own terms, can be as successful (or more) than following some prescribed approach force fed to us by society. Our guest allows us a glimpse of his personal and professional journey – and is sure to inspire you to give yourself permission to follow your own path. Have a listen.

Sundae: Richard Farkas is a founder of Argonaut and today is responsible for the overall customer experience as well as business development in the CEO role. Richard personally manages some of the most innovative projects I’ve seen coming out of the Intercultural space including a podcast for interculturalist, like me, which delights me. I’ve watched him level up an assessment called Culture Connector over the years to a state to where it’s now capturing attention in the intercultural space for it’s ease, usability, and design appeal. So it is my heartfelt welcome to have you on Expat Happy Hour today,  Richard. 

 

Richard: Well, thank you very much, Sundae Schneider-Bean and I hope you gave the time check for the people in Finland. I know you like to go around the world with your time checks. Your fan base here is going to be very disoriented if we haven’t heard what the time is in Helsinki. 

 

Sundae: *laughter*

 

Richard: I could tell you, it’s half past two, 

 

Sundae: They’re a bunch of wild fans in Finland, those wild and crazy Fins.

 

Richard: True, meetings will be missed and trains will miss their stations, if we don’t get it right today. Yeah, greetings from Helsinki, 

 

Sundae: So Richard, I’m so happy to have you and I was actually thinking about this before we started today, I believe and you tell me where I’m wrong, I believe we got introduced to each other in 2000, maybe 14 years back when I was living in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. 

 

Richard: I think that’s when I first became aware of you, Sundae, yeah and I remember our first conversation, I was walking along the old railway tracks in Helsinki on a dark evening. I think it was late 2015 when I’d just taken over the reins at Argonaut and I was kind of exploring who’s in the network, what are they doing. And I really was impressed by what I heard from you and it was some– you kind of inherit technology when you start working with software, but the thing that really gives the company value and an organization its momentum is the people that are involved. So I was very excited to have that conversation with you some dark night, yeah, about 6 years ago. 

 

Sundae: It was a dark and stormy night. Well, I’m glad that we had that conversation. And since then I have watched what you’ve done with your organization and with the tool and people who know me best know that I am kind of nerdy when it comes to cultural things. I want them to be backed by research. I want it to be really applicable to people’s lived experience. And this is one thing I really love about Culture Connector, and that’s why I’ve stayed a fan this whole time. But that’s actually not why I wanted you to come on Expat Happy Hour today. I wanted to talk to you because this is an example of what many people struggle with when they see someone.Y you have a fancy title, you’re CEO, this wonderful product that you bring out globally, and as we’ve talked about before you’re living a good life, right? But I know that that doesn’t happen overnight and that I’m guessing your life hasn’t been a direct line from let’s say, business school to the CEO role. So I thought it would be fun today to explore a little bit about your story so those who are listening have hope. Because I know my story wasn’t a direct line and I’m sure yours wasn’t. So can you start off by telling me a little bit about strawberries in the Arctic? 

 

Richard: Oh, okay. Yes, strawberries in the Arctic, yes. I was a strawberry farmer in the Arctic. Okay. It was for only one springtime. But yeah, I had a gap year. That was a gap year thing. And I thought that I was going to be a marketing person. That was my choice when I was 18 years old and I was kind of surprised by how well I did in my school leaving exams. So I thought actually these results were really not what I expected, but they gave me all kinds of new opportunities. I could do kind of anything with these. I must have flipped it. So I took a year out to work out what should be the next move and I was always very attracted to the marketing because of its words and its officials. You have to really have a deep understanding of Psychology and so forth, but maybe there’s something else for me in the world too. 

 

So I took a gap year with no plan and I just followed whatever opportunity fell into my lap and one of those I was working as a ski bum in the Alps and I got a call from my mum because at those times, that was the way to connect with people at home. You had to have coins and go to a public phone box and make a call and that’s what I did. And she said she’d found this book that had ideas on what to do on your gap year. It had this opportunity to go and live with the people in Norway, in a rural community and kind of explore the culture of the countryside in Norway. It was a cultural program, but it was real work. So I was really up for that. So I went to Norway knowing nothing about the country and I had kind of fallen in love with it by the time the ship arrived in Bergen. And I bought this Berlitz, phrase book, and I’d learnt German by that time, so switching into Norwegian was really easy. 

 

So, I found it was a kind of play version of German without all of these terrible cases, which you probably struggled with too. You’ve sweated the hard stuff with the German language. So Norwegian after that was so easy. And I just fell in love with that country. And yet here I am still in the same part of the world, so many decades later, but one of my assignments on that trip was to tend the strawberries far above the Arctic Circle. So, if you’re ever bothered by the lights being on at night, one solution is to work yourself stupidly tired on a farm because even though the sun is shining 24 hours a day and it shines through the paper thin, curtains in your bedroom in an Arctic Farm in Norway, you’ll sleep. So yeah, I was an Arctic farmer at the age of 19.

 

Sundae: So a strong scholar to ski bum, to strawberry farmer in the Arctic. I didn’t even know there were strawberries in the Arctic. So you say you didn’t have a plan? What was the next step after that? Because for me, how do you not have a plan? If you get strong grades, lots of opportunities, didn’t you feel pressure to have a plan? 

 

Richard: No, I didn’t not at all. I still don’t. One of my mantras is, “Enjoy the journey.” That’s my purpose. I know you talked a lot about purpose and I think there are lots of ways to think about purpose. But I get up everyday thinking, “Wow. I have the opportunity to lift this whole day. And if I’m lucky I’ll make it to the end of the day.” Now, I’m not suffering from anything terminal that I’m expecting to pass during the day, but I just have a lot of gratitude for every day presents itself with a new opportunity. So I do have a kind of vision for how I would like things to go, but it’s not a fixed point and as opportunities come by, I’ll take them. I think I’m on my fifth career now and it’s difficult to talk about — to kind of define, what is a career switch because sometimes just slightly out of the box move is not a whole new career. But there has been a thread which connects the various roles I’ve had. But the CEO role of Argonaut which creates Culture Connect to the thing that connected us is probably the fifth career I’ve had. So there wasn’t a plan, there still isn’t a plan. I love what I do. I’m sticking with it. And this is the thing that culture is the thread that I think connects it all. So I don’t see myself switching away anytime soon, but you never know. 

 

Sundae: Uh-huh. So, what I’m noticing in my body, when I hear you say that is my shoulders are gripping tight because I’m like the strategist who wants to have a plan. And I’m thinking about the level of grace and trust you must hold every day to actually get up and enjoy the journey. Everybody wants to enjoy the journey. But not everybody is actually doing that. 

 

Richard: Yeah.

 

Sundae: So I’m really curious. Is this just who you are or have you had life experiences I’ve taught you that?

 

Richard: I think we’re all engaged in a status game and it’s not a game that I really enjoy playing. I studied political science and sociology at university so I am a keen observer of the status game, but I’m not a very enthusiastic participant. So I don’t mind where I fall in the hierarchy. So when you switch careers, you take it several steps back and you’re a junior again. And now I’m in my sixth decade, it pains me to say, actually, it doesn’t. But anyway, I’m 51 now, and I’m very junior in some of the activities I’m involved with, and that, for me, is a wonderful thing. I enjoy that feeling of exploring a whole new area, and I’m not afraid to show naivety.

 

One of the things I do, we’re kind of moving back after the pandemic to something like normal. Now, I’m really looking forward to getting together for face-to-face meetups. I run a small community of ed tech professionals and entrepreneurs. We get together every now, and again, have a speaker and hang out and share perspectives. And I see my role as kind of the joker at the front who can ask the naive questions to get conversation flowing because in this part of the world, especially in Finland, people are very tacit, they don’t like to show ignorance in a public forum, everyone’s an expert. And I’m happy that my expertise, if anything it’s in being a generalist. I really enjoy having a small bit of insight into many things and this CEO role, it makes that a kind of obligation that you need to understand every part of the business to some extent. Although, there’s always someone who understands it’s better than you. And the same with culture, when your job as mine is, is to bring together insights about different cultures, that’s an endless pursuit. You’ll never master them all. You’re doing very well if you master one. So it’s a passport to following your curiosity. So I think this is one way that I have found myself in this role and very happily so.

 

Sundae: Well, there’s so much that you’ve said I think that’s valuable to our listeners. It’s easier said than done, right? You’re living something, I think can be really challenging for people to live. This willingness to be a junior. I work with a lot of people who may be their partner’s been retrenched, or maybe they’ve lost their job or maybe they’ve changed countries and are trying to find a new job. And that’s it feels like a loss when you have to go to a more junior position, and what I’m hearing you say is being willing to do that and lead with your curiosity, actually has served you really well. 

 

Richard: There’s something that it feels really hard and when you switch particularly, if you’re being tested by a new situation and others are doing better than you because they have been working in that culture or in that domain longer than you have, that feels hard. That struggle. But actually struggle is a kind of pathway to deep learning and the evidence is there that people who specialize early and stay within one discipline, are actually less able in their own discipline and someone who’s arrived with a late start. So this is kind of the myth of the head start, people who start early and have devoted themselves to a specialism, outperform those who are kind of late arrivals. That’s not true. Of course, there are many pathways to really having high impact and being excellent at your profession and we need specialists, people who know that domain intimately. But we work in a very volatile, complex, changing situation now and people that can domain switch are very much needed in the modern economy. And also people are not great judges of their own learning. When you find something difficult, if you find something difficult, you may think, “It’s because I’m not good at this,” and in fact, that’s what learners think. But I like to think that this is why we do exams. It’s not because we don’t trust people to prove how good they are. We could just ask them, “How well do you know that subject? Ah, you know it very well. Okay, you’re top of the class.” We don’t do that because actually learners don’t know how much they have learned and how much of that learning is going to be retained. So–

 

Sundae: I see so much of that in my coaching practice. 

 

Richard: I believe it. 

 

Sundae: Yeah, about people, the learning, that there’s two things that are going up for me. One, I just want to pause about the struggle when things are hard, that’s where the deep learning is and it took me 40 years to appreciate that. Maybe I’m slow but I think that’s wisdom that you’re sharing right now and it’s usually hard earned. So that idea, I just wanted to pause on that because that’s really important, that when you’re struggling to trust that in that struggle, there’s deep learning. And we want things that are easy, right? The other thing I wanted, I wanted to share a story about when things are difficult and this is in case it’s relevant for other people who are in similar situations. I do boxing on Saturdays and our coach has zero mercy, like zero mercy. And he would come as a beginner, he would come and we would work for an hour, hour and a half and he really pushed me to my limit. Next time he would come, I would work for an hour and a half, push me to my limit. And as a dancer, former dancer when it’s hard in the beginning, and it gets easier, right? So it’s super hard in the beginning, clunky and then it gets smooth and elegant, and lighter, and easier, and that’s performance. But what I didn’t realize with boxing, is that every time I showed up and he showed up, he would push me harder and add more. And every time after boxing, I’d be like, “I suck at boxing. This is hard. I’m not getting better.” That was a story that was going on in my head that I was telling myself and all of a sudden, he and I were talking and I’m like, “I’m just not, I’m not good at this. I’m not getting better.” And he said, “Sundae, every time I add something to the program, it’s because you’re ready for it. So if it’s getting harder every time it’s because you’re getting better.” And that was just a moment for me where I realized that I can’t judge progress learning or the quality of my experience based on how I feel.

 

Richard: Absolutely not. Yeah. It’s very true. And I think those stories that we tell ourselves, they’re very powerful and we need to review those often because people change sometimes quite quickly, but certainly, as the years pass, you absolutely have to update those ideas you have about yourself. I remember, talking of sports, when I was at school, I used to hate running. We had this thing called the cross-country run. We used to run through these muddy fields in England, and I just appalled this thing. It was always raining. It was always gray and I never never got into the spirit of that cross-country runner, even though it’s beautiful English countryside. And I understood myself not to be a runner, and I’ve had this idea for so long. And there was one strange incident when I was a young man or student, we were on a trip to the Netherlands and having great fun, clinking glasses, they drink out of small beer glasses so you have lots and lots of rounds and it was all wonderful. And it was time for our boat to go back to England. And I didn’t want to leave because the party was just getting started. So I was with a bunch of Dutch people who said, “Well, you can stay at our place tonight, but you have to run in this race. We’re one person down in our team.” And I was pretty drunk by this time. So I said, “Yes.” And the next morning I was out. I think it was called the *Dutch race* and I did okay to my enormous surprise.

 

Sundae: *laughter* Especially after all those beer!

 

Richard: I was a bit hungover. I was probably still drunk, in fact, and I did okay. It was 10 kilometers and then I think it was an 11 kilometer bike ride after that. You run alongside someone else on your team or cycle alongside someone else on your team and I just discounted this. I’m not a runner. So this was just an aberration. “This is not for me. It was something weird that happened when I was on a trip.” And then six years ago, when I became the boss of this company, I started working from home and I lost my commute to work, which was always on bike, I’ve always biked to work. So that wasn’t a very healthy situation. So I went out and started to run against all of my expectations and my identity. I started with this 4.2 kilometer run and it has mushroomed into something completely crazy now and I am a full-on runner. This has just come from nowhere and I have to say it’s something I’m pretty good at. I can say that because I don’t take any credit for it. Something that was just in me or had grown in me without my knowledge, without my effort, but I just discovered it in myself and I look back and I wonder at what point did that story become a barrier to discovering this. And I don’t know. 

 

But what I learned from that is that you can discover the new you in so many unexpected places. And this is one of those things that I’m exploring now. So, I think most of us consider the early part of our life to be a kind of sampling period. You find out where your mates are, you find your partner in life, you find your career, you find the place you want to be and then once you’ve found those, that’s kind of it. But I like the idea that we continue to evolve and to develop and we can continue to discover this and things which were true earlier may not be true anymore. And that’s especially the case if you’re living overseas, your whole context has changed. And so very likely that’s changed something in you. So I think being punched in the face by your boxing instructor, it’s actually quite a good wake-up call that, “I need to get good at this.” You give yourself a chance to learn. And even though it’s hard, the hardness may be a signal that some real learning is happening. So give it time and you may discover that you’re going to be a black belt one day. 

 

Sundae: *laughter* We’ll have a look. The other thing I think about is giving ourselves permission to struggle and what I’ve noticed and this is just me, right? When I do things that I’m not competent at, in the beginning, you have conscious incompetence. No one likes being incompetent, or maybe they do, but that is an uncomfortable place to be. But what I’ve noticed in my own journey is when you’re sitting in that space, you call it curiosity being the junior. I’m going to call it conscious incompetence, that all of me comes forward. And I’m talking, the good, the bad and the ugly. When I’m in that space, anything I still need to work through as a person, I call myself a recovering perfectionist. I’ve done massive, massive growth in that area. However, when I am now, in a new zone, those inklings of old ghosts, things I thought I’ve completely worked through will rear their head again and it will invite me to say, “Really, Sundae. Did you think you’re through that?” Or, “You got some more ego on that one?” Right? And it will invite me to do the work again. And I think that is what is actually really beautiful, because I’m in the space of self-development, self-help. And I’m also known from 20 years ago, I would just read books on self-help, but I wouldn’t do any of the activities or exercises. I wouldn’t apply it into my actual life. I would just read the book. That’s not self-help. That’s like snacking on self-help. And, now again, I feel like this is maybe what comes with age but now I feel like really getting in there, getting through the sweat, blood and tears. Getting in, in a deep way, is where you are really able to grow. Does that make sense? 

 

Richard: Yeah. How satisfying is it to take the easy path? Compare that with the satisfaction you get from having achieved something that really challenged you. 

 

Sundae: Yeah. 

 

Richard: Struggle is absolutely a pathway to learning and When you, you talked about conscious incompetence, I think what you’re talking about is, incompetency in a specific domain, which is how we think about our ability to, for example, being a team that you are the specialist in x and here’s a specialist in y, and together, we the xy team. But those that can domain switch, those who can analogize to bring in examples from other domains have a whole lot more to offer even if their domain knowledge is at an early stage. So I would say that this is you being, not you Sundae, but we are being narrow, if we think about our competence, in only one domain, because this domain switching is key to success in almost every role these days.

 

Sundae: And what you’re seeing is actually counter to a lot of mainstream messages right now about niche, niche, niche, right? And you’re a generalist. I’m also a generalist. Cultural generalist. I have a very narrow audience that I speak to, but I’m also still a generalist. And it’s kind of not what’s in, but what I’m hearing you say is actually can be like a glue that brings in let’s say other specialists together in a way that’s richer for everybody. 

 

Richard: Yeah. Absolutely. There are multiple paths to success and productivity and living a good life, especially specialization. It’s something that I’m also interested in doing. I think I’ve got enough years in me to give myself a chance to specialize at some point and see what it’s like to really have deep domain knowledge. I’m not doing it yet. It doesn’t come naturally to me. But if I’m telling myself, I’m a generalist then it makes me want to question that, maybe this is a specialist in me whom I haven’t discovered yet. But yeah, there is a myth around this and the reason is because people tend to cram for exams and they’re put through selection tests, they’re accepted into student organizations by recruiters for what they know at that moment rather than from their ability to learn. And everyday is a kind of starting point to the next period of your life, isn’t it? So, wherever we start, we’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of people, if that’s what floats your boat. And one of the things that I mentioned, that from having seen myself as not a runner, nowadays, I run marathons. It’s interesting the way that marathons have evolved under the pandemic, because there isn’t a single starting gun for a marathon, people are electronically tagged and people leave, they cross the starting line in their own time. So when you’re running a marathon, you may pass someone, you pass them by you, get ahead of them but in fact, there are several minutes ahead of you in their own time. And this is how I see life. So people who appear to be more expert in the field that you’re working on, may actually be just ahead of you in their career or in their state of development, but you may be the person coming up from behind, even though they appear to be far ahead of you. The positions may be reversed. And so you can take inspiration from the people around you. But it’s dangerous to judge your confidence level from those that are immediately by your side. 

 

The same goes for being in another culture. One thing that I guess I get a bit of a reputation for is my father grew up in Britain, but my father wasn’t British, he was Australian, a kind of bundle of different cultures, but he was an immigrant to Australia, but I guess that was his main identity. So growing up in Britain, he always talked about Britain as if it was elsewhere. This household is something, it’s a bubble in Britain. Britain is what happens out there in the town and so forth in the country. And I still do this, having lived in Finland, a long time, I said, “Well, yeah, this works in Finland.” And I’m thinking, “But it wouldn’t work elsewhere.” And I can see people looking at me thinking, “Duh. Yeah, this is Finland. We’re here in Finland. Of course this works in Finland.” And then, if you are able to bring in experience from very different situations, it means that you can come up with much more robust solutions that won’t just work in the way that it has always worked in the way that’s familiar, in the way that it works today. 

 

But this is repeated in so many areas in investment banking, I understand that the more that the venture capitalists knows about a venture, the less accurate their predictions are of its success. Because you get so much confidence in your ability from knowing the details that you lose sight of how that is going to work when it hits the real world, and situations change and so forth. So I think that we do ourselves a disservice if we question too much how we are performing today because we’re absolutely on a journey to increasing our competence. We can have all kinds of habits. And you’ve got a coaching practice which does this and you are in coaching, at least with boxing and I’m showing many other areas of your life, you are developing and growing. So, let’s not judge ourselves by how we’re doing today because we may be at the foot of an amazing learning curve.

 

Sundae: Hmm. Oh, no. Doubt. It also makes me think about, don’t get to hotsy-totsy about where you are. If you are ahead of other people because maybe you started with a massive advantage to the person next to you, right? That’s when the ideas of equity comes in, of, I just saw a meme online that said, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” or highly successful people and it was like: “Go to private school. Have the old boys network. Private trust fund,” things like that. Some people who are what we think are what we think of as successful had a huge head start. And obviously, supported by historical bias and power dynamics. And we can’t, if we are to look at ourselves if we’re from a minority Identity, or coming from a context where it’s been systemically oppressed, you have so much inside of you that can be tapped into and it has nothing to do with what this person is doing over there. Right? Not in relationship to, if that makes sense?

 

Richard: Yeah, absolutely. I’m kind of easily inspired. I take inspiration from other people. I have a very low threshold for being impressed by people. And there’s so many people who have come through that have had the whole world against them and yet broken through and done their thing and lived a full life and it is possible. And yeah, although we talk about struggle, I don’t want to over emphasize it because absolutely here in the first world, our struggles were on a different scale to the majority of humanity who probably aren’t listening to this podcast, but on the other hand, the struggles which we experience in our context are real. People really do face challenges and experience trauma and all kinds of setbacks and I don’t want to diminish those at all. But yeah, we take gratitude for the luck that life throws us. 

 

Sundae: Absolutely. No, your values definitely shine through from our conversations that we’ve had. I’m just looking at the time and I know that we’re going to have to wrap up soon, which I don’t want to but I’m left with this question. We’ve talked about, you live a life full of challenges that are inherent in being human and in relationship with others and raising family and all of those things and yet you describe yourself as having a relatively happy life. And have chosen this really interesting path of shifting careers, six times and being in that place of not knowing and curiosity. What is something that you hold inside of your body that you know so deeply but you wish that more people would let in? 

 

Richard: I think building on what you’ve said. It’s an empathy for other people’s situations. So I feel so privileged to be where I am. Born in Britain and I spent most of my adult life in the Nordic region and you don’t get much luckier than that in life’s lottery but most of humanity hasn’t had what I’ve had, that is through history and still today. So just being grateful, whatever challenges I have, they’re not on the same level as what some people are going through today. 

 

Sundae: Healthy perspective taking, it’s good to keep things in focus. Thank you so much. There’s so many gems here that I personally am going to go back and visit for me and I’m sure the listeners will do the same. It’s been really, really, really lovely, Richard. Thank you so much for joining me. It means the world to me. 

 

Richard: Well, Sundae, I’m a huge fan. I love listening to you and it’s an honor to be on the show. So thanks for inviting me on. 

 

Sundae: Thank you. You did say, you have a low threshold for inspiration, so I don’t know if that is a compliment. *laughter*

 

Richard: You way over shoot your mark, Sundae. You’re way, way beyond. 

 

Sundae: That’s great. Thank you Richard. I’m just teasing as you know, so if you want to find Richard, you can check him out on LinkedIn. I’ll have the link in the show notes. He is also the big boss over there behind Culture Connector and the podcast host of Intercultural Toolbox. So, thank you so much and you can check out Richard in the show notes.

 

So there you have it. What a pleasure to have Richard join us. It is so refreshing to see an example of success that doesn’t tout the “overnight success” dogma, or success-at-all-costs but rather emphasizes that our lives are a unpredictable winding path and full of starts and restarts, and it makes transparent that most things worthwhile are worth investing our patience and hard earned energy in – over time. Finally he reminds us to have some fun along the way.

You’ve been listening to Expat Happy Hour with Sundae Bean. Thank you for listening. I will leave you with the words of Marshall Sylver who reminds us to: “Enjoy the journey as much as the destination.”