Worldly Adventures and Language Passion. Passion on Purpose podcast guest Richard Blank Costa Ric...

Well, I grew up with a very comfortable family. And so during spring breaks, we would go to Mexico. So I've been to Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta. And as a little boy, besides enjoying the beach and the Mexican flair, I probably brought back about 30 vocabulary words. And it was either food or the stores that I saw or just anything. And so there was a positive reinforcement step. it just wasn't passe. It wasn't a past time. It was something that I knew that I could build upon and all the world's a stage. And so anytime I found a person that was bilingual, I would speak Spanish and it was cute. I could do it for five minutes, maybe ten. I wanted more. And the only way to do it was to dive into that deep end and live it. And so my junior year, I spent the entire year, 10 months in Europe, two months traveling over Christmas break. I didn't come home. And that was the best time of my life, Steve. You want to talk about shedding skin? You're 21 years old. You're in Europe in the winter of 93 and 94 with a two-month Eurorail and some Pashto Seen youth hospitals. And I traveled as far east as Prague, as far south as Corfu, the Pink Palace in Greece. Went to Amsterdam, of course, and I went to Tangier. And imagine going to all those museums, seeing the ruins, reading those books and 105-minute conversations a day with people from all over the world. And so where I grew up in Philadelphia and then going to Europe and becoming something new, I was born again. The essence of where I grew up really didn't matter. It was really about the pure Richard Blank. And that's what I was trying to develop at that stage. And that's when my Spanish really went through the roof.