In Chapter 8 of 20 in his 2012 interview, branding and design strategist Ross Floate answers "What Have You Found Most Rewarding About Traveling to New Places?" Floate finds traveling to distant places helps remind him about what is good about his home, Melbourne, Australia. He grounds this in a concept from Sigmund Freud called the narcissism of small differences. Travel experience teaches Floate to determine the amount of time he needs to travel to be successful in business. Ross Floate is a principal at Melbourne, Australia-based Floate Design Partners. Experienced in branding, design and both online and offline publishing, Floate and his team provide marketing services to clients seeking to better communicate business and culture goals via image, messaging, and story. He is a graduate of RMIT University.
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Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: What have you found most rewarding about traveling to new places?
Ross Floate: I travel to understand home. So traveling abroad which I do a bit now, like 2 or 3 times a year I try and get abroad if I’m lucky. And it teaches me about the place that I come from. You know, there’s this idea of the narcissism of small differences, I think going overseas reminds me of what’s good about where I come from. And having conversations with people about the differences I think helps an enormous amount. I think that’s the real reason that I continue to do it, it’s not for the 15 hours on a plane because that’s not great. It’s the learning things at the end.
Erik Michielsen: What have you learned about what makes Melbourne great?
Ross Floate: It’s walk-able, which I think is a really important thing. I think that there’s a fundamental part of work-life balance, and, you know, if you wanna use that phrase. That is about how much time you have to spend traveling to be able to work. I’m quite fortunate because I make a reasonable amount of money, but I’m able to rent an apartment that is a 25-minute walk from my office. You can’t do that in a lot of other cities no more, and certainly not a lot of other cities with like 4 or 5 million people. And I think that that’s one of the things that I’ve learned. I think that I’ve been surprised by the size of my city, by traveling abroad. I think growing up, I always thought that Melbourne, which is a long way from anywhere, you know? It’s a long way away. I always thought it was a really tiny city, until I went to other cities, and realized that actually, no, it’s 4 and a half million people-whatever it is. It’s quite big. It’s quite sizeable and we don’t do a bad job of it, you know? There’s a good thriving art scene there, it’s a very, very strong design community, I think better than—definitely better than the other cities in Australia and better than most places that I’ve been to. And I wouldn’t have discovered that unless I, you know, traveled as much as I did.
