Every Place I Go, There I Am

On Travel, Solitude, and the Skills We Can't Measure

I had a fascinating conversation with Liam Kelly of Culturago last week.

Liam started CulturaGo with a hypothesis – travel is the best way to develop power skills (more commonly known as soft skills). Power skills such as adaptability, resilience, communication, teamwork, and self-awareness help people feel more confident in their ability to navigate complex situations, which in fact make up the majority of the world’s most in-demand career skills.

I for one could not agree more. Six years ago, I travelled to the Western edge of China to the Tibetan Plateau, to a small village called Ritoma - and found that my experience led to broadening of self that far surpassed my expectations. What surprised me most was how much confidence could be drawn not from achievement, but from immersion in a place and culture so different from my own.

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Ritoma landed on the global map when Dechen Yeshi, the daughter of an exiled Tibetan monk who grew up in India and then attended college in America, returned to her parent’s home village to start a company with her mother that spins yak wool (khullu) into high-end clothing.

Dechen started Norlha Atelier as a response to the changing economics of nomadic Tibetan life, as well as in an effort to bring economic benefit to increasingly poverty-stricken villages. Beginning in the early to mid-2000’s, young Tibetans began discarding the nomadic lifestyle in favor of the financial and technological allure that resides in Western Chinese cities. As a result, traditional villages were crumbling and the Tibetans increasingly left out of the economic benefits of a growing country.

The company has been the subject of many major news pieces, but I wasn’t there to study fabric or to become a clothing designer.

In 2015, Dechen hired an American basketball coach from MIT to coach a semi-professional men’s basketball team operating out of the village. I first heard about the team from this Atlantic news piece published in 2018. I met with the author, Louie Lazar, for coffee in New York City and was hooked on the story.

Bill Johnson, the American coach, had slowly built a functioning team from a group of ragtag nomadic basketball players. Their story is also the subject of a 2018 documentary "Ritoma" from the Oscar-award winning filmmaker Ruby Yang.

So in the summer of 2019, I travelled to Tibet to act as a substitute for Bill. He needed to return to his native Seattle for a variety of reasons, and was looking for someone to continue training his two full-time players, Dugya Bum and Chuchyon Jyap. I was in my third year of teaching and had just finished graduate school - and for the first time since entering education felt like I had the bandwidth to use my summer for travel rather than work. I paid for my airfare, and Norlha gave me lodging and daily meals. Otherwise the position was volunteer.

During that month, I experienced what can only be described as a “dark night of the soul.” There were English speakers in the village working for Norlha and living in the guest house, but for the most part I was on my own for large chunks of the day - with little access to WiFi or the traditional trappings of modern American life.

Additionally, only Dugya Bum – of the basketball players – spoke some English, though it was scattered and broken. I endeavored to use a translation app on my phone, but quickly found out that reliable Tibetan translation wasn't available on mainstream platforms. To make matters more difficult, the rest of the players didn't speak Mandarin either – they largely lacked formal education and had never been off the Plateau.

So my basketball days were filled with wild hand gestures and flailing attempts at utilizing Tibetan vocabulary – punctuated by long silences and confused stares.

By the end of the trip, I had a notebook full of reflections, an opened mind, and a vastly increased understanding of Tibetan culture – within the context of Chinese culture.

Me and the Team after practice

The basketball story is one for another day. What stands out to me now is that I also gained a greater understanding of myself. I remember a thought I had over and over during those long days, one that I would later see perfectly captured in a line from Ozark:

“Every place I go, there I am.” (1:40)

You can’t hide from yourself, no matter how hard you try. But a deeper acceptance of this universal truth leads to a richer life and greater understanding of humanity.

From that trip, I gained confidence. If I could survive that, I thought, then I could survive anything. But my trials and tribulations were not associated with poverty or wondering where my next meal might come from – I was duly compensated with yak meat covered in yak butter with yak milk tea almost every night.

They were associated with a certain psychological test.

What do you do when you are alone? What do you do when you are cut-off from what you know? What do you do when you want to ingratiate yourself in a new culture – but also know that you are a transient outsider, one that will be largely forgotten in the ensuing months and years, no matter what you do?

Solitude is like a spotlight on one’s own desires. I had no choice but to evaluate the what, why, when, where, and how of my situation.

• What was I doing there? What were my goals?

• Why did I want to be there? Why did I have those goals?

• When was the right time to get involved? When was the right time to step back?

  (I have some highly amusing stories of sticking my nose where it didn’t belong.)

• Where did I expect to have the most impact? Where did they expect me to have an impact?

• How could I be of benefit to the team and village? How could I be of benefit to myself?

The beauty of these questions is that there is no right answer; there is simply truth. Our ability to capture this truth and make peace with it is a test of self-awareness and honesty. It’s a test of metacognition; critical thinking applied to one’s own thoughts.

From this, and out of sheer necessity, I made peace with myself.

Measuring the Impact

Liam made a fascinating point during our call. He noted that individuals don’t always travel by choice — many are displaced, or leave their home countries out of necessity. In those situations, people often have to restart from zero in a new society, regardless of their previous standing. The result, over time, is the development of immense power skills that enable them to adapt, communicate across cultures, and rebuild.

He gave the example of an Uber driver who had emigrated multiple times, learned several languages without formal study, and managed to integrate into societies far removed from their own.

The problem for this driver, Liam remarked, is that they have no way of capitalizing on these skills. They exist and they matter, but they are rarely recognized or awarded. It’s as if those people with great soft skills receive the mere reward of survival for their capacity to navigate new and complex situations - when in reality they should be lifted to the top of our collective food chain.

That's when it hit me - soft skills seem to have that name, 'soft,' because you don't notice them in the moment. If you interact with that driver and they say something that changes your day, you might only smile and appreciate it on a subconscious level. Meanwhile, that person is one who moves mountains.

We struggle to recognize it – which means we struggle to measure it. And if we can’t measure it, we can’t reward it.

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The inclusion of GenAI into our culture and society represents an immense opportunity for the acknowledgment of soft (or “power”) skills.

As a playground or test of one’s ability to navigate complex situations, an AI interaction has no peer. Even my trip to Tibet was confined to the cultural norms of that region.

But AI is a global traveler capable of mimicking nearly any personality or cultural norm one can think of – even with its inherent sycophancy and hallucinations.

That’s what I love about the multi-layered and inherently subjective nature of our interactions with AI. It presents an opportunity – for the first time in human history – to evaluate and assess soft skills like metacognition and adaptability on a static and recorded page. The chat cannot be edited, and every single one is different, even with the same opening prompt on the same system.

How a person communicates and responds in the moment is more than just a story of prompt engineering. It’s a portal into developing multi-layered humans, ones that are self-aware and capable of deep listening, should the situation call for it.

Unfortunately, the accepted norms around AI use are far from a portal into deeper consciousness. I am as guilty as anyone of falling into them. As

Stephen Fitzpatrick

and I chatted about recently, we are increasingly catching ourselves “lightly skimming” AI outputs when they are delivered. It’s not necessarily that we believe everything it has to say, but perhaps there is enough of an assumption that the system can reflect back my own goals at a high enough level that deep analysis feels unnecessary.

But these are the types of habits that define AI Literacy. It is essentially a question of metacognition; how deep are you willing to go? Critical analysis of outputs for factual veracity or “PhD-level analysis” amounts to a gross mischaracterization of AI’s – in its current iteration – potential benefit to humanity.

Ultimately, the question “what happens to our souls” (and also our minds) is surrounded by how we respond to this moment. Are we willing to demonstrate this type of introspective analysis in the process of using AI? Are we willing to look back at our own interactions and examine ourselves? Is it possible to emphasize this style of thinking in education and beyond – in an effort to shift our collective focus towards the ‘human skills’ that matter most?

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I’m on my third career change now - endeavoring to work as a consultant, a researcher, and a professional development provider for the first time in my life. The journey has been rocky, but I sense entirely new sections of brain function being developed – once again out of sheer necessity. It is, after all, the mother of invention.

But a career change is also like travelling to a new country. The norms are unfamiliar, the communication styles awkward, and the motivations of the people around you new. While immersed in this process, a person has no choice but to ask themselves the same what, why, when, where, and how questions that I asked myself in Tibet – if only for survival’s sake.

But I know that if I am going to have any life anymore, I’ve got to keep growing. And if a career change presents that opportunity, it is only an added benefit.

One day, I hope, the soft skills that build from this type of life choice will be recognized and lifted up – not out of selfish desire, but because a world full of self-aware humans is simply a better place to be. But right now we have only anecdotal recognition – an executive who is loved by their employees, a school administrator who somehow leaves all their constituents feeling seen and heard, or a teacher whose students realize years later the love and support that was offered unconditionally - and the myriad benefits that arose from it – though it may have gone unnoticed in the moment.

But their reward is simply that they get to keep their job.

Wouldn’t it be better if they got more?