"Westerners today grow up with abundant opportunities to determine their own values, identities, and roles in society. But for generations, millions who lived under Soviet rule in the USSR had these essential freedoms withheld, determined instead by a central authority that claimed the right to choose for them and enforce their compliance. Thirty years after the Soviet Union’s decisive collapse, the old communist paradigm continues to limit those who come of age in a post-Soviet world.
Everyone Is an Entrepreneur showcases the experience of an American author acclimating to life in the developing post-Soviet economy of Armenia. Along the way, he examines how the intelligent and hardworking people he lives among are stuck in a state of transition away from all-encompassing, bureaucratic control. They struggle to adjust to the responsibilities of economic self-determination because they have never learned how to see the world through entrepreneurial eyes.
Entrepreneurship is a principled way of seeing the world, a paradigm that applies to people in all cultural and economic circumstances: Artists, office workers, doctors, teachers, farmers, and laborers alike. By adopting this universal outlook, anyone can produce more wealth, accomplish bigger goals, and take control of their life like never before."
"When you travel to a foreign land, do you experience this new place as your old self? Or do you become a new version of you?
From living in a van in San Diego to growing chocolate with indigenous tribes in Central America, to teaching in the Middle East and volunteering in Africa, Gregory V. Diehl has spent his entire adult life discovering the world and himself. Leaving his California home shortly after his 18th birthday, he went on to live and work in 45 countries across the globe by age 28.
By recounting the existential lessons from his journey, Diehl challenges the reader to question how their identity has been shaped by the culture and lifestyle they know. He argues, compellingly, that travel can transform your perception of yourself along with the world. By losing your comfortable sense of self, you learn to examine your life through the structure of everything it can become.
To travel solo a truly open mind is to forget who you were when you started. It is to be constantly born anew, to discover your strengths and find your path in life. Travel As Transformation will give you the wisdom, the inspiration, and the resources to conquer the limitations placed by your arbitrary past. Whether traveler or non-traveler, its lessons about approaching the uncomfortable and unfamiliar apply to everyone."
