Understanding human relationships is an essential part of being a successful businessman and a socially conscious individual. You need people to sustain your business and you need your business to sustain the right people. It’s cyclical and therefore, it sounds relatively easy, right? It’s not. Just as there is a myriad of ways to run a business, there is a myriad of ways to relate to people, and you can’t expect to be an expert in them all.
Yet if the world were a business (which it more or less is), I find myself trying to do just that. Everywhere I go, I am trying to be someone else. Not because I’m running, not because I’m not okay with who I am, but because I feel this desperate need to know everyone and everything. Would this make me an excellent businesswoman? Probably. But instead, I am a wandering vagabond. I don’t sleep – not because of productivity, but curiosity, a curiosity that bleeds into conversations that inevitably continue until dawn.
As an American, I have a disadvantage living the Basque Country of Spain. Just yesterday, my proud, Basque landlord explained it to me (gently) like this:
“You don’t understand what it’s like to be the little fish. My whole life I have been told that I cannot speak in my own language – the only language that I know how to think and express myself in without doubt. And why? Because there are not enough people who speak it. Because the big fish [Spain] says so. How can you tell someone they are Spanish, if they don’t feel Spanish? It is like telling someone they are a boy, when they know – they have physical proof – that they are a girl!”
She is right, too. America, with all it’s pomp and power, has never been the little fish. We have always been a shark. I will never know. Although there might be smaller parallels – I am a working-class female and not a wealthy, white male – they are nothing like what my landlord has faced. When I tell people I was born and raised in Wisconsin, they recognize that it is a state. When my landlord says she is from the Basque Country, faces scrunch up and someone will inevitably say, “Oh, you mean Spain?”
This is the plight of the little fish and there are many, many little fish in this world – underserved, unrecognized, and taken away by the powerful undercurrent. These are the people that social entrepreneurs should seek to assist. Yet we should not do so blindly, we should take careful consideration for their histories. The history of the Basque people is complex and wrought with cultural uncertainties, as are almost all movements. But we cannot deny nationality anymore than we can deny food and shelter. We can certainly find a compromise, but we should never seek to eliminate.
When people ask me what I’m doing in Basque Country, the truth is I’m part-time English teaching and vagabonding, but the truth also is, I’m studying business. Knowing how – or at least trying to – relate to people is perhaps the most powerful entrepreneurial skill you can have.
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