We literally poop and pee in the river 🐠
That may have been the biggest culture shock of my week in the Surinamese Amazon.
After this trip, I said: “I want to record a podcast. On the plane.”
Not wait until I got home. The stories were still fresh. The emotions still pure.
So I recorded it during the flight back to the Netherlands.
In the podcast, I take you with me into the Surinamese jungle. Into the Amazon. Into the life of the Saramaccan people and the special lessons I learned there.
The full podcast is now online 👇
And this is already a little sneak peek.
The river is everything here.
You bathe in it. You wash your clothes in it. You cool down in it. You travel across it. Life revolves entirely around the water.
That definitely took some getting used to.
But after a few days, something interesting happened.
I didn’t need soap anymore. My skin felt cleaner than after many showers in the Netherlands.
That got me thinking.
As entrepreneurs, we often want to control everything. We build processes, dashboards and control mechanisms.
But the strongest organizations are more like a healthy ecosystem.
The Saramaccan people have been living this way for centuries. Incredibly powerful.
Their society. Their nature. Their ecosystem. Their politics. Their way of life.
Everything is connected.
Maybe that is the biggest entrepreneurial lesson I took from the jungle.
Not everything is about control.
The art is to build an ecosystem that keeps strengthening itself.
I’m curious what you think 🎙️
Watch the full video here.
