There’s a lot of negatives that come from COVID-19. But there’s some positives as well – how much will we have to travel in the future?
Video Transcript
Another question I often get asked is, do I miss travel? And will I travel as soon as I can travel again?
Wasting a lot of time and energy at an airport
I think the answer is twofold. Number one, no, I don’t miss the 1-2-3 day trips, being on a plane every few days, wasting a lot of time and energy at an airport. And I think that’s going to be one of the main benefits coming out of this crisis is that we’ve all learned how easy it is to connect through video chat and phone calls and still create over a distance, be together as a team over distance. So I totally don’t miss that. And I hope business travel, at least for me, will never go back to the same level as it has been before. There’s just so much energy and time that’s wasted in commuting that hopefully, we can avoid that going forward.
New environments that allow me to grow
On the other hand, yes, I do miss travel. What I do miss about travel is going to new places, immersing myself in new environments that challenge me, new environments that allow me to grow, that also energize me, that’s definitely the side of travel that I miss right now.
Learn a bit of Russian
And so Elena and I are already thinking about are we going to travel once the borders reopened and when and under what circumstances? And we’d really like to go somewhere this summer where I can learn a bit of Russian. Elena is fluent in Russian, I haven’t picked up a new language in more than ten years now, if anything, I’ve lost my French. So I’d really like to go somewhere and just work from a place like let’s say, Russia or Ukraine or one of the Baltic states. Just so that learning a language can be easier because I can go out and use it at a supermarket or I can just talk to the people that we meet there casually when we go out for dinner and improve my Russian, so I have a real reason to make progress.
So yeah, that’s the answer. I think there are both sides. I’m definitely not looking forward to doing 50 to 100 trips again per year, and hopefully, that will never happen again. On the other hand, yes, I do miss immersing myself in new environments.
And with that, stay curious, and I’ll talk to you soon.
