Entrepreneur.com
This article was written by Patty Vogan of Entrepreneur.com. Patty is Entrepreneur.com's "Leadership" columnist and owner of Victory Coaching, an executive coaching company for business and personal success, and a chairman for the largest CEO organization in the world, TEC International.
Last month, I introduced a series about lessons I learned while starting and running a dive shop in Tonga. The lesson from the first column was that your entrepreneurial dreams are possible, even if they mean moving to a third-world country you know very little about. I also mentioned that research and perseverance must accompany your passion, a lesson that I would like to expand upon this month.
I didn't do enough research on the country itself before moving to the Kingdom of Tonga, which means I learned this particular lesson the hard way. Before moving, I had no idea that Tonga doesn't allow guns in the country. Police officers don't even carry them. As I mentioned last month, I grew up in a family of hunters and peace officers who taught their little sister to shoot. So I naturally took my gun to Tonga.
Now if you were the king of a country that didn't allow guns and someone new arrived with such a weapon, what would you do? Let's look at that question from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Say you hired someone from a different country or culture and it was their custom to always take a nap at noon. How would you handle the situation?
Well, in Tonga, they tend to go with the no-tolerance approach. After my gun was discovered in my 20x20 container and I was facing being sent to jail, the owner of a local boat-building company -- an Australian man whom I bought my first boat from -- wanted to help me. He advised me that I needed to learn how to cry on demand -- and learn quickly.
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