In second grade I had my first Spanish class and I continued studying Spanish until sophomore year in high school.  I hated it, barely passed, and stopped studying as soon as I could.  In Israel, students need to study English the same way, sometimes starting study as early as kindergarten.  Now, today I can barely put together a coherent sentence in Spanish whereas most people in Israel are almost always fluent in English.

I was attending a startup event in a small city outside of Tel Aviv – it was a good crowd, maybe 50 people.  I arrived early to meet the event organizer and learn a bit more about the event, the community, etc.  He realized that I didn’t speak any Hebrew.  The organizer told me that they were originally planning to hold the event in Hebrew but because I didn’t speak Hebrew he was going to ask all the speakers to do their talks in English.  Think about that – for just one person out of 50, they changed the entire format of the event.

Even more impressive to, however, was how easy it was to do that.  In the United States if we had just one Spanish person in the audience who didn’t speak English, would we change the entire event language?  If we did, would the speaker feel comfortable with it?  That was one of the biggest things on my mind – whenever someone is going to speak at an event, they usually spend a decent amount of time preparing their content (even people who speak regularly at events).  They need to be comfortable with the content they’re presenting.  Now I’ve seen curve balls thrown at speakers with computers not working so they have to present without slides, or no one showing up to an event so they need to change the event format… but I’ve never seen a speaker need to change the entire language of their speech.

An easy thing to derive from this is that Israelis are smarter (you can say more adaptable if that’s easier to admit).  Now the question is why?  Well Israel is a melting pot of hundreds of different nationalities and Israelis not only welcome immigrants but their entire history relies on them.  Moreover, Israeli business people understand that doing business just in Israel isn’t possible – startups and large corporations need to think global from day 1.  They need to implement multiple language support and other features to adapt to other nations as their companies grow and they need to be adaptable.

Key take aways:

• Be adaptable – Make yourself flexible and adaptable to make those around you comfortable.  It may not be changing the language of a speech but going to a vegan restaurant instead of a steakhouse.  It’s not only a way to show that you’re supportive of differences but it increases the amount of respect that others have for you.
• Think globally – This is something Americans need to learn from the rest of the world.  How many US companies buy their Google Ad words in other languages?  How many US companies even support muli-language experiences in their products?  America is not the only country out there and of the 7 billion people in the world, less then 1 billion speak English.