I spent years in the European market assuming I understood how business worked. Then I moved to the GCC and realised I understood how business worked in Europe.
Not the same thing.
What caught me out wasn’t any single difference. It was discovering that instincts I’d treated as universal were just local. How you read a room. What a long silence means. When “we’ll see” is a yes and when it’s a polite no. How much of the real conversation happens before anyone mentions the deal. I’d built all of it without noticing — because I’d never been anywhere it didn’t apply.
Move countries and the map you trusted turns out to be a map of one place.
You don’t learn this from a market-entry deck. You learn it by being slightly wrong, repeatedly, until it redraws itself.
Best professional education I’ve had. None of it was on a slide.