The same instinct that makes you want to understand a new place tends to make you want to understand a new regulatory framework, or a new manufacturing process. It has rarely felt like two different impulses.
Curiosity is the starting point. It's what leads into a field in the first place — a market, a process, a place, a way people do things differently somewhere else. What comes after curiosity is less glamorous and more useful: staying with the subject long enough that the early, obvious questions give way to the ones that actually matter.
That pattern has repeated across very different fields over more than two decades — industries that share almost nothing in terms of subject matter, but a great deal in terms of how they reward depth. None of them are easy to walk into casually. All of them are easier to compete in once you've put in the years.
Born in the Soviet Union and relocated to the Netherlands at an early age, the past thirty-odd years have been spent there — long enough for it to be home in every practical sense, while the habit of paying close attention to how a new place actually works has never really gone away.
Interest tends to come before strategy. The depth follows because the subject deserved it, not because a plan called for it.
Growth has never been the point on its own. Understanding a field well enough to move confidently within it has mattered more than the size of any single venture.
Regulated, technical, and specialised fields are harder to enter — which is exactly why depth in them tends to last.
Not every detail needs to be public for the work to be real. Privacy has been treated as a default, not an afterthought.
Family travel across a wide and deliberately varied range of countries — less about destinations ticked off, more about noticing how differently the same basic problems get solved from one place to the next.
An RYA Yachtmaster Offshore qualification and many years spent around yacht travel to remote and less obvious destinations — the same curiosity applied to the sea, with the added discipline that comes from being responsible for a crew.
A wide, international set of relationships built up gradually over decades of working and travelling across different countries — less a network in the deliberate sense, more a natural result of staying curious about people for a long time.