The Parachute Social Life

How can someone create a social life from scratch after parachuting into a new city?

If we move somewhere new we have two choices:

1) Stick in the expat bubble. Stay in the linguistic and cultural comfort zone. Start to feel its peculiarities. Eventually become alienated from one’s host country and start to look for the exits.

2) Have a thriving social life with locals and expats. Feel comfortable within a couple of months. Cherish the place and its idiosyncrasies.

So if we want the second, how to do it? It really depends if we build…social capital.

Without giving an annoying to-do list, investing in social capital has helped me succeed in cities as diverse as Jakarta, Bogota, Islamabad, Surabaya, Brooklyn, Tokyo, and Fukuoka.

Sharing these social capital generation tactics, we give each other confidence to become friends with “foreigners.” I write that in parenthesis since after using parachute social life tactics, we stop to see others’ nationality and instead see them for their personality. Not for which words are in their passport.

Having the social capital mindset helps others see us as givers, not takers. The worst way to come across to new people is to be a self-absorbed taker who asks what’s in it for him. We want a network that’s eager to…