Cultures of Earth—Greatest Hits

à la Piotr Zbrojkiewicz,nomadic traveller extraordinaire.

Get your daily dose of travel and culture inspiration 🤙🏼

Your soul is much older than your culture. Therefore, you are not your culture.

- Piotr

You have been "cultured" to be a certain way but if you really ask yourself: "How does it feel to be the way of my current culture?" ... does it agree with you? And are you sure?

The world is a menu of cultures to taste and I—Piotr Zbrojkiewicz—have had the pleasure of visiting the many cultures of 35 different countries. (They have more than one culture each). I’ve lived separate lives in 4 different languages—English, Polish, Spanish, and French—allowing myself to be someone new each time, in France, Poland, and Colombia. Right now I'm in Canada.

For the moment.

Oh, and while we're on the topic of who I am and where I came from, I’ve had a few different careers: Civil Engineer, Dating Coach, Nomadic Freelance Copywriter (what Don Draper in Mad Men does—word genius—just without his level of notoriety for the time-being). I've been lucky enough to write for tech giants like Logitech, Lyft, Rackspace and also business titan Jay Abraham, for a while earning as much as $400 USD per hour.

I also do marketing for ambitious creatives, I build and design websites and branding, play guitar and sing, I host jam nights, I'm a cooking enthusiast & foodie, yada yada yada…

Anyway, when you start speaking a new language, you discover parts of yourself that you hadn’t met before. It’s a fun present-moment experience. Life-changing, really. It occurs in part due to the differences in rhythm and tonality between languages. Thus, each new language can coax out new parts of your personality. Each new language can change you for good. For instance…

It becomes easier to be assertive when speaking French.

It becomes easier to be playful when speaking Spanish.

It becomes easier to be a dry-humoured smart ass when speaking Polish, or Australian for that matter ;)

And so you get to try on all these new behaviours. You get to taste the rainbow. You get to decide if you want to keep playing your old character or play a new, enhanced version. A more comprehensive and holistic version. One whom has found what one was missing without knowing quite what was missing.

I've savoured the menu, man. I've tasted each culture I stumbled onto the hearth of and I've adored the variety. There’s so much variety.

What I’ve seen is that there isn’t just one way to be. There aren't just 35 either. Right now on this planet there are over 8.1 billion ways to be (👀 as of Feb, 2024).

One thing I’d like to point out here is that I've noticed some cultures are physically and emotionally warmer than others. Their people maintain a closer physical and emotional proximity to each other than the people of other cultures. And it serves to warm them up, inside and out. In other words, they more readily and effortlessly show love.

That doesn't necessarily make them perfect. Any culture can learn and benefit from another, and there is a lot of beauty to be discovered in learning those lessons.

That’s essentially what this newsletter is about. I take the best of what I've seen across cultures and explain what I've seen—the behaviours that made and continue to make me feel warmest inside. These will be for you to add to your arsenal of behaviours as you please. I will also point out the behaviours that I didn't find to be as dope as the dopest ones, and explain how they had to be weeded out of my arsenal because they were getting in the way of the objectively better behaviours.

I will share stories from the intellectually interesting to the emotionally compelling, and from the spiritually inspiring to the non-sensical... perhaps peppered with a written song or two if the spirit moves me. It never has before. I’m not sure why it would. But it might. Let's not rule it out.

Welcome to Cultures of Earth—Greatest Hits à la Piotr Zbrojkiewicz, nomadic traveller extraordinaire & culture enthusiast.

And yes, by the way, my whole name is essentially unpronouncable. I used to not like it because almost no one could pronounce it, but I'm starting to like it. It was strange growing up and having most people's reaction to your name be *screws up face as if not sure if choking.*

It’s pronounced PYOTR, ya muppets. Very short “o” and yes the "tr" sound is basically impossible unless you’re Polish which I happen to be and even I can barely say it.

Yeah you got it, I hear you sounding it out.

So, I grew up in Australia though. I'm also a New Zealand citizen. Oh yeah and I was born in Germany.

And the last name, we’ll get to that another time.

I don’t think I’m a spy. At least not to my knowledge. Maybe I just haven’t been activated yet.

Anyway, one more story I want to share here. So, when I lived in Poland for bit, around age 24-25 in Kraków—beautiful city—it was the first time in my life that I booked a dental appointment and just said my name without the usual “Oh my gosh, how do I pronounce that and where is it from” kerfufle.

I just said it, once. Curtly. And she got it. Crazy, man. You guys are freepin lucky. You’d better be counting your stars over there. You and your pronouncable names.

Alright, that's the intro. Now, roll up, roll up for the greatest one-man show you’ve ever read.

If you'd like to buy a ticket...