Embracing Passionate Generalism and Cultivating Curiosity Across Cultures - Nancy Napier : 152

Nancy Napier, a professor at Boise State University and the author of several books on organizational creativity and innovation, shares how her multidisciplinary approach has shaped her career. Inspired by her father's shift from military service to academia, she combines her languages, political science, and international business interests to enrich her teaching and research. Her story emphasizes the importance of having a wide-ranging knowledge and the diverse viewpoints it brings.
She highlights how her curiosity brought together leaders from law enforcement, software, and sports, fostering an exchange of ideas that led to her book, "Wise Beyond Your Field." This collaboration illustrates how diverse groups can offer unique insights to tackle leadership challenges.
This episode emphasizes how curiosity and embracing diverse opportunities can inspire greater understanding and compassion.
Let's enjoy her story!

To connect with Nancy https://www.nancyknapier.com/

Chapters

• 7:30 Building Innovative Cross-Disciplinary Degrees
• 22:28 Nurturing Multilingual and Culturally Diverse Children
• 30:10 Exploring Writing, Learning, and Curiosity
• 39:59 Fostering Curiosity and Compassion

Transcript

DanielaSM: 0:00

Welcome, Nancy, to the show. I'm very happy that you're here.

Nancy Napier: 0:03

I'm delighted to be with you, thanks for asking me.

DanielaSM: 0:06

Yes, I know that you have a story to share, so why do you want to share your story?

Nancy Napier: 0:11

I may be, I hope, like some other people who never had a clear sense of one path to follow. And I think part of that started when I was very young. My family, my parents, we would sit around the dinner table and argue about different topics almost as a sport, and so we might argue something about science or Stonehenge or continental drift theory. My parents argued a lot about politics and what was going on. So I saw this wide variety of ideas to start learning about.

Nancy Napier: 0:46

When I went to college and then I've got a master's degree and a PhD, the same thing happened. I could never pick one small thing to stay interested in and become the expert in house flies or wasps or whatever that might be. So instead, in all of those degrees I put together multiple areas, so multiple disciplines, from German language and history and political science to combining international business with labor, economics and so forth. So I've always tried to blend different fields and also felt the need to learn about different areas, whether it's science or art or literature or politics or history. So I guess that was. The background of my story is that I am a generalist, I'd like to say a multidisciplinary person, and have just tried to draw from different fields and different ideas as I make my way through life, and that has played out in much of what I've done in my career and now trying to learn how to write fiction as a new career.

DanielaSM: 1:56

Yeah, that's wonderful that you said actually, because there is a lot of people that are generalists. I like that word. I remember talking to a young guy and he said, oh, that is so bad because you're supposed to be a specialist. And I said, no, it's actually good to know a little bit of everything. It gives you a well-rounded way of being and you know, my dad was like that, my grandfather was like that, my husband is like that, and sometimes we feel like, oh, that's wrong, because you hear these people being experts on something. But it is so. I'm glad that you're bringing that story so. So you think your story starts when you were younger, on the dinner table or somewhere else.

Nancy Napier: 2:33

I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did. My my father was in the army for 20 years and he taught at West Point, which is the military academy for the army, and he fell in love with teaching. So he retired and got a PhD and became a professor. So I watched him learn a new field, learn how to become somebody in a university versus a military officer. And even when he was focusing on learning more about he taught in the business world. So he taught strategy and business.

Nancy Napier: 3:06

He still had these wide variety of interests in archeology and in history and sometimes in astronomy. So it was this constant learning here's his career. But he never gave up on learning about other fields Opera he got interested in later in life, and so I think that's where it was that I saw what a rich life my parents could have by knowing, understanding and talking about so many different areas. Want to do if you can. If you can do it, go for it. We're not going to tell you what to study, what kind of a career to have. It's your decision, and so that also, I think, was a big part of it that I just thought, oh well, I'll check out all kinds of areas and see what's interesting and pursue them.

DanielaSM: 3:56

Yes, this is good and bad sometimes for me, that I am very interested and then I learn and then I drop it and then go to the next one. So it's a bit like a, like a, b I guess, but then I don't know. You see that sometimes you learn and you go and you drop it. Is that a good thing? I don't know that.

Nancy Napier: 4:16

I put it in good or bad, I would say it builds a mosaic of who you are, so that you have you have different stones of what you've learned and gone into depth on, and then you can move to another area and that's still part of you. Often you can pull something from it. I've been a university professor for 35 years and my research has normally in about five to seven year increments. I've studied really different topics, from strategy and human resource management to mergers and acquisitions, to professional women who work abroad, to creativity, to transitional economies.

Nancy Napier: 4:58

I worked in Vietnam a long time and so each of those I could shift about every seven years, learn a new topic, write about it and then I could move on to something else. And I learned that my approach to research is much more kind of a startup entrepreneurial topics that people really weren't studying, and I could get into that, learn about it, write about it and then move on to something else. By the time the field was catching up and everybody was becoming specialists and I knew I couldn't compete as a specialist. So I don't think there's anything wrong with building these mosaics, stones of who you are. That just makes you a richer person. I would hope.

DanielaSM: 5:42

Yes, Jack of all trades are that just makes you a richer person? I would hope yes, jack of all trades. Oh yeah, yeah Right. However, you have gotten a bit more intense. People usually just learn one thing painting three things and they go. So you've done a little more, so maybe you're.

Nancy Napier: 5:59

Yeah, if you're serious about it, you'd take a couple three, four, five, six, seven years. Okay, yeah, that.

DanielaSM: 6:04

Yeah, okay. So what happened? So you went to school and you couldn't decide, and so were you in university for a long time then.

Nancy Napier: 6:13

Oh no, I did decide and I put three areas together, which was harder because I had to have more professors involved along the way. But they saw that it made sense to put these different fields together. And then I was lucky enough to work for an organization that did research for business firms all around the world, and I did that for about five years. And that was kind of a good education from a standpoint of working on a project for three to six months in some topic and then moving to another topic in the business world, in the research world. But I learned how to change. So once again I was jumping from one question to another question. I got a PhD and began life as a university professor.

DanielaSM: 7:01

So you make your own degree kind of thing, because you took three things and so that's not very usual.

Nancy Napier: 7:08

No, no. I went to Ohio State University as a PhD and they have a program called one of a kind degree. So you put together fields that you want to study. Instead of having, I think, two or three advisor professors, I had to have four. It took a long time to create the documents, to say this is why I want to do this.

Nancy Napier: 7:30

I agreed that it made sense for me and if I can even remember the three areas so international business, labor, economics and industrial relations, I think I had to have professors from those three different fields, four different fields. I did my exams in a different way and dissertation in a little different way. I guess I was pretty good at convincing them that this was something that was worth doing. So instead of just majoring in marketing or just majoring in finance, if I could slam these things together, it was unique and it was hard to do, but for me it worked.

Nancy Napier: 8:05

I have a bachelor's degree and I did the same thing there. I put together German language, history and political science, those three together, and then I have a master's degree in international business, politics and language. Again, that was from a master's program called Thunderbird which was designed that way, so that one put three areas together. You had to prove language proficiency, you had to take social science classes in economics and politics, and then you had to take business classes and then the PhD. I said, well, shoot, I'm going to do the same thing. So put three fields together, get people to sign off on it, and then got the degree.

DanielaSM: 8:47

And at the meantime were you working, when you were studying?

Nancy Napier: 8:50

Not for my bachelor's and master's. When I was doing the PhD, I was working at this research institute called Battelle, very large contract research firm, worked with businesses and also a lot of government contracts. They now do a lot of energy-related research, run a national laboratory in the United States, two of them one in the state of Washington and actually one in the state of Idaho where I live. It was a fabulous education and then I became teaching and had to get a little bit more specialized.

DanielaSM: 9:22

I'm happy that you got guidance to invent these degrees, because I don't think that usually people know that this can happen.

Nancy Napier: 9:30

I hope that it's more available now. The university where I work right now has a similar kind of program and I think it may be called it's an interdisciplinary major, but again, it requires the student to drive it. So the student has to figure out what fields to put together, has to convince the professors to be on an advisory committee and may have different kinds of requirements. So it's definitely that's the way, frankly, environmental science got started. People were interested in the science part, but they were interested in the public policy, so students started putting that together. Now it's become a more common degree and available across universities, but so many of these startup combination degrees started because people couldn't find a single one that they really wanted to pursue.

DanielaSM: 10:18

Interesting. Okay, so you study a lot, you got a job in research, and then what happened?

Nancy Napier: 10:25

I started teaching was at the University of Washington in Seattle for a few years and then had an opportunity to come to Boise State University for a year. There was a man doing research. He was the only other person in the country who was doing the same research I was. I wrote him a fan letter, only one I've ever written. He worked at Pennsylvania State but he was in Boise, idaho, for some time. I came down to work with him and then my husband, who was a banker, came down to Boise and we fell in love with the place because of the lifestyle. Frankly, it's easy to live here. My commute to work is about eight minutes when the traffic is heavy. I mean it was amazing. We were looking, hoping to have children and we thought we can't do that as easily in Seattle. On balance, two careers. So Boise was an easy place to do that. We ended up staying. This was a university that really was unknown and I learned I'm an academic entrepreneur, I like to build things, whether it's research streams or programs, and so when I moved here, the dean of the College of Business said would you be interested in starting an international business program for students? And I said sure and put that together and ran it for a long time, then had an opportunity to work in Hanoi, vietnam, did a project there for nine years. It was an $8 million project to help create the country's first business school, and I never would have been able to do that in my big university of Ohio State or Washington. This school allowed me to be an entrepreneur, allowed us to go and do this project and that was a huge life changer for me.

Nancy Napier: 12:11

I've been involved in Vietnam for 30 years, almost one way or another, and it's been major. So you lived there for eight years, ran the project for nine years. So I lived there full-time part of the time, but mostly I commuted back and forth, so I'd be there six weeks, home two weeks, or the reverse. My two sons lived with me for a semester when they were in third and fourth grades, so eight and nine went to the international school there and loved it. That was a major turning point for me. But I tell people, when I went to Vietnam I had brown hair and now I have white hair.

Nancy Napier: 12:49

It was stressful. So when I finished I said that's it. I never want to go back there. What was stressful? I explained it as a new venture startup and you've talked to people who have started companies and how difficult that can be. It was the same idea because we created the academic side, the administrative side, the financial piece, the IT part, and we were doing it in a country where I was in a university with 10,000 students and our office had the only flush toilet. At the time there was one international phone line in our office. Power went out, a lot Water went out. It was from a physical standpoint. It was just very difficult to get things done. And then, of course, vietnam is a communist country and so there are lots and lots of regulations for getting things done and a little bit stressful in terms of how open we could be and what we could talk about and that sort of thing.

Nancy Napier: 13:45

So I was ready to stay home when I finished that, which was the early 2000s, and looked around for research topics and ended up starting to study creativity and organizations. At the time there was loads of research on creativity in individuals, from artists to mathematicians, creativity in individuals from artists to mathematicians, but not so much about organizations, and I had gotten interested in again diverse different disciplines. So I ended up studying a software company, county Jail. The football team at my university is one of the top ones in the country. It's famous, started because it has a blue football field. But the coach at the time was brilliant, didn't realize he was creative until I worked with him for a while, but anyway.

Nancy Napier: 14:32

So I had law enforcement, software, jail, a Shakespeare theater, a dance organization, healthcare marketing company and I put these seven, eight different organizations together, studied each of them to find out how they were similar or different on creativity.

Nancy Napier: 14:52

And then I used to bring those leaders together on a regular basis so they could talk to people who were at their level, top of the organization, but in completely different fields. And so to hear them say and I wrote a book, we all wrote a book about that experience so we would say what can a police officer learn from a football coach and what can those people learn from a dancer or an actor and what can they learn from a healthcare person? The leaders of those organizations. The big takeaway was when they got together they talked about leadership issues they faced and the number one was how do you build a good culture in your organization? I wrote a very simple to read book about leadership ideas from those people and about culture how do you build it using those diverse organizations that we called the gang, so kind of a scary name, but it was a has been a wonderful experience.

DanielaSM: 15:52

That sounds super interesting. So then, did these meetings helped for each of them to go back and create a better culture?

Nancy Napier: 16:01

Mm-hmm. So the book that we did called it Wise, beyond your Field had some principles. It makes me think of Robert Greene's 48 Laws. Well, these were maybe a dozen key principles that they had learned and used in different organizations. So one person would talk about a process they used to come up with ideas. Another organization would take that and use it. Or the idea in sports and football, which I know nothing about. You have coaches that focus on certain positions that the players are in. The software company took that concept and applied it in its organization to develop really strong position coaches. So they learned from each other and I think we met maybe for five, six years, seven years that they met on a regular basis. These are top level people.

Nancy Napier: 16:58

What I discovered and then sought out, these were organizations that were known as highly creative. They were trying new things but they were seen as high performers in their fields. However, that was measured. So for the Shakespeare Theater, there was a case study that Yale University Drama School wrote about them. The New York Times wrote about them. For the football program, it was rated in the top whatever 10 in the country. So whatever measure said, you're a high-performing organization and you're creative.

Nancy Napier: 17:34

I wanted them here, and I realized I live in a very remote part of the US and so these people really didn't have equivalent leaders to go to. The software person said if I lived in Silicon Valley, I could walk across the street and talk to somebody about my problems. I don't have anybody here other than a football coach, a sheriff of a jail, so that again, that goes back, I think, to what we started with building bridges across different disciplines and fields, and so this was another way to do it to what we started with building bridges across different disciplines and fields, and so this was another way to do it.

Nancy Napier: 18:13

How do you thought about putting all these people together? I got interested in organizational creativity and I stumbled onto the football program and the software company. And what was the third one? The law enforcement, the jail company. And what was the third one? The law enforcement, the jail. And so one summer I went and interviewed them and wrote case studies about these organizations and they were so interested in what I was finding they said, well, can we meet? I thought, well, sure, that makes sense.

Nancy Napier: 18:41

So it started as a research project for me to understand creativity in organizations that were super different from each other, and then we expanded it. So I looked for organizations that were different, that were creative and that were highly performing, and grew it to seven, eight leaders, leaders, and then over time, another colleague and I created I think at one point we had six of these different multidisciplinary learning groups going. So different types of organizations, but it was always high level people from very different organizations. So we had the basketball coach and a newspaper, the top newspaper here, the leader of that, together with several other people. So it was. These gangs were really great because people, it was completely confidential, they were all at the same level. They could talk and nobody had an agenda. So I could put an idea out and the other person could take it or not, and no one felt like they had to push it or there was no competition it was wonderful.

DanielaSM: 19:53

So we have established already that you are a bit of a genius and very clever woman. No, but how these ideas come to you Like you're taking a shower, wake up in the morning and suddenly, oh what if I did this research? How is the process here, Nancy?

Nancy Napier: 20:10

Exactly what you were talking about when we first started, that we are both very curious, we both sounds like. We both read that you want to go into different fields and try things out and you study and you learn, and that's what happens. I've learned that I can see areas of gaps where, at least in research when I was doing much more of it that it just hadn't been studied. For the creativity one, that happened over time. I saw dots information around and I finally went to my CEO friend and I said I'm seeing articles that say creativity in the United States is dropping compared to China and countries in Europe. Our research is just steady and they're speeding up. I'm seeing one or two university presidents making comments about how our engineering schools are not as strong as they were. They need to get stronger. So there were three or four points dots and I went to him and he said, oh, that's easy, so I give him credit for that research. He said we've seen ourselves as creative and innovative in the United States. We're doing what we've always been doing. Other countries are realizing they want to get better at creativity and innovation and they're doing it intentionally. And so I said, oh my gosh, I need to start doing teaching this stuff in my classes and I also need to learn more about it myself. So that's how that one came about.

Nancy Napier: 21:45

But it took me a couple of years to find that topic to really get my teeth into. I looked at other topics that were big at the time and this one made sense and now it's much more common. So lots of people talk about creativity and innovation in organizations. So I don't know what I would look for now. I haven't really thought about it but as a traditional research stream. But really it's curiosity. It's seeing these different dots and thinking, gosh, can I pull those together, like I did for the fields in my degrees and bringing these different people together from leadership positions and very diverse organizations. So, as a child, how?

DanielaSM: 22:30

was your curiosity.

Nancy Napier: 22:33

Well, I credit my parents for that in terms of they exposed us and and I did a little bit of that with my own son so I was always doing some kind of an artwork class, but also something in science, and so when our kids were little, they wanted to do a lot of sports. I said, great, but you also have to do some art course after school. So one of them did they both did tennis as a sport. One of them picked piano and stayed with it for 10 years. The other one did tap dancing and playing a saxophone and theater and drawing, and he's become an actor. But I want you to have both sides of your brain working here, and my folks did that a lot too, just exposing us to. As I said, my dad was interested in archeology a little bit, and so I used to. I read a little bit about it and he collected as a child. Were you different? I was, yeah, I was smart, and in those days, girls couldn't show that they were smart.

Nancy Napier: 23:39

When my father finished his PhD, we went as a family. When he was an army officer. We never took vacations. So the first vacation we took as a family was when he was an army officer, we never took vacations. So the first vacation we took as a family was to go to Europe for a month, and that was the first time where I felt like, ah, I can see that there are people who live on this line and you step over and they speak a different language and it's more fluid and more. It was just fascinating to me. So that did it.

Nancy Napier: 24:04

So I went to college and made my way to Europe a number of times, studied for a year in Munich, germany, learned how to speak German there and it just felt better. I was in high school in a very it was a university town, but small in the South in Arkansas in the US, and I never, never, never fit. I couldn't wait to leave. So I think that sense of being able to see and be part of different cultures, that was just became water. I needed it. And now, working in Vietnam, that's my second home. It's very comfortable for me now, lots of friends there, and I've watched the place change over the years dramatically. Did you also learn?

DanielaSM: 24:48

Vietnamese.

Nancy Napier: 24:50

I tried when I was working there fuller time I tried. It's a tonal language so it's just super hard. But everybody in the project I was running wanted to speak English, needed to learn English. So they insisted we speak English. So I did. I, you know, I know a little bit of tax evis.

DanielaSM: 25:08

And that university is still amazing.

Nancy Napier: 25:11

Oh yeah, it's one of the top ones in the country and so that we helped build this business school within the university. Our university continues to have a good relationship and we send students back and forth. Now my teaching is all in our executive master's of business program. We take the group between 20 and 25 participants. We take them to Hanoi, vietnam, every year for a week and it's like a trade mission almost. We have a few speakers, but they are doing projects for companies, either to find new markets or to find supply sources. Because we know so many people over there, we're able to plug them into the appropriate decision makers. So, again, we have a great relationship.

Nancy Napier: 25:57

I just was part of a group that took our university president and the dean of the business college over to Vietnam and they did a fantastic job speaking at a conference and opening up avenues for us to do more work with different universities there. So I hope we'll have a long. I need to kind of pull back and let other younger folks take over on that, and they will, so I'm excited about it, that's great as a mom were you researching a lot of things too?

Nancy Napier: 26:27

I guess one of the first and a bit of a challenge when our our both of our sons are adopted from Asia. And when the first one came, he was about a year old, from Korea, and when he started talking I said to my husband you're from Germany. He's from Germany originally, still has family there. I studied German in college and speak it. I say I speak it fluently, not fluently, so they know I'm not German, but they don't know what I am. Anyway, I said let's speak to our son in German, or let's try this so he can be bilingual. So the agreement was we'd try it for three months. So for one month I spoke English, he spoke German and our son only spoke to me. I said, okay, how about? For the next two months, I speak German too. Of course, by the end of the three-month period our son was speaking German to both of us. Both sons grew up speaking German until they were 12 or 13. It wasn't cool to speak German in public, convinced if they go back in a week they'd have it. So it's a very strong part of them. One son studied German in college too. Have it. So it's a very strong part of them. One son studied German in college too.

Nancy Napier: 27:39

Yes, I had to do the research on how does bilingualism for kids work when they're young? How do you teach them the different approaches? Yeah, so that was one, and then, I guess, same thing in terms of having them come to school abroad. They were with me for a semester in Belgium early on, so they learned Flemish, and then in Vietnam, the school they went to. They came home one day and said mom, the only people who speak just one language are the Americans. Everybody else speaks more than one language. And so for the first time they were normal. They spoke two languages and that was normal. So over time, yeah, I've done research on a lot on the language part, but then just raising boys, which is I had no idea how much challenge that could be. So it's been fun.

DanielaSM: 28:23

Yes, we have also two boys and I went to German emergent school in Venezuela. If you know about Humboldt, which I know, in American they said Humboldt, oh sure, yeah, he was a naturalist in the 80s, something.

DanielaSM: 28:39

Yes, I've read about him, so he went most South America and came all the way to Canada because there's a town called Humboldt too. In every city like Lima, bogota, caracas, they all have a Humboldt Schule. Oh, there was a German section where all the people come from the embassies and everybody who was here for a while were having their kids there, and then they had the immersion. You know, like we get German once a day. Yeah, so I was in that school. My father was German. Wow, it was hard to learn because I was speaking Spanish all the time. My dad didn't want to speak to me in German because he said I want to be your friend, and German doesn't sound like that.

DanielaSM: 29:21

So I only learned it by going, since I was 11. For two months I would go to families that I didn't know in the north, close to Essen, oldenburg, and then so I spoke German, but I always had an accent. I'm not very good at losing it. I spoke German first, but then, when I learned English which it was when I was 20, I got confused because it was so similar, hoping somewhere in the back of my head.

Nancy Napier: 29:47

Well, please tell me when you come back. Tell me how that worked. Oh, and it will come back. I'm sure we go over every year or so and it's a struggle. The first few days my head hurts, but it comes back. You know there's a Humboldt in California. Now I'm wondering if he passed through there. Sure, we can do a little more research on that.

DanielaSM: 30:07

Yes, I actually should read more about him. Anyway, going back to you, so what happens? So now you are working with university and you have to create all these projects, but then you decided to be a writer, or you were a writer. Well, you have been written books already.

Nancy Napier: 30:23

Yeah, I've written nonfiction my whole life. I had to for work and academics. I retired a few years ago but continue with the executive MBA program, so I'm no longer having to sit in on meetings and teach undergraduate students. When my sons left, I thought I'm not up to date with the music and all the cultural things that younger people know, and so I thought I can't teach 20-year-olds if I don't know what's going on in their culture, so their lives. So now I teach really super smart adults and they're fantastic. But I've tried over the years to write fiction. Probably 10 years ago I took an online course and I at one point said you know, I can't do this, I'm not good at lying. And one of the other students in the course said well, it's not lying, it's using your imagination.

Nancy Napier: 31:14

And I thought well, maybe I don't have any imagination. So I stopped for a while. Pandemic arrived and I thought I'm going to try this again, so I thought this should be no problem. I've been writing my whole life and I've even some of these more recent books. I've used creative writing approaches in them to make them a little more lively, and this will be well. I am learning.

Nancy Napier: 31:37

This is one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do, so in the pandemic I just burned out three or four quote novels, one of them I was able to turn into actually I think that's the one I mentioned to you, so it's a mystery, and so that has worked. Now I'm working on one about art crime in Vietnam. One of my goals is to help people know Vietnam in a way. That's not about the American war or oh, it's got great food. There are other parts of it, and so if I can help people understand that. But the writing of this novel from a writing standpoint is incredibly difficult and hard. In fact, after we talk this afternoon, I'm going to talk to an editor who's just sent me a bunch of feedback that was very hard to get but quite accurate on things I need to do better and differently. Yeah, so I call myself a fiction writer in training. It just amazes me how complex, difficult it can be. I've sort of decided I'm just going to do it to learn about it, and I'm not going to have to send my kids to college based on what I make in writing books, which is not much, but I'm really learning it. And it uses again, uses your brain in a different way.

Nancy Napier: 32:57

At the same time, about two years ago I decided my husband, my sons, are huge tennis players and they've always said I needed to learn and I would take a lesson for two days and say, no, I'll just watch you, I'll cheer you on. I decided to try and learn. So I'm a beginning tennis player and, frankly, one of the unexpected benefits of both the writing and the tennis is that I'm forced into the role of being a beginner. And so I see tennis instructor, writing instructors. They have to say things to me so many times before. Oh, I get it and they've already said it 50 times, but I'm finally hearing it. So that has been important with my teaching.

Nancy Napier: 33:38

So I'm teaching very smart adults strategy or creativity or about organizational culture, and so all this material to me. I know it well, but they don't. So it forces me to remember to say do have them experience the concepts in multiple ways. So after they've experienced it four or five ways, they say oh, oh. And I'm thinking yes, they, finally they see it too. So being forced to be a beginner has been fabulous. Once more, it is not easy. Once more, it is not easy. It's not easy, but that's another benefit. I think you said you like to learn a lot of different things and I think of it as a mosaic. But every time you do that, you're forced back into beginner role and it keeps your mind fresh.

DanielaSM: 34:26

That invigoration that makes you feel when you actually know the subject.

Nancy Napier: 34:32

You need that too, and you have that.

DanielaSM: 34:34

So then on the other side, here you can do the learning part Absolutely didn't think anything about Vietnam actually, and then I went to Hanoi and I thought it was beautiful. To me, the most interesting part is the influence that well, the influence they have from so many countries and especially the French. It was quite fascinating, very, very With the food and the coffee and the buildings that were bizarre.

Nancy Napier: 35:10

You know I think you're right that other than Americans and as Americans get older they won't focus on it as much. But it amazes me that 50 years later there are still people maybe my age, a little bit younger, older that still talk about the war and I just make a point to just talk about other kinds of things. And this is a country that is incredibly competitive and they are growing so rapidly. We're going to have to watch out.

Nancy Napier: 35:37

The very first day I arrived in Vietnam in 1994, one of the professors at the school so these are people who had gone through all kinds of hard things and had two changes of clothing and belts that wrapped all around their waist because they were so thin. He said we conquered you in the war, we will conquer you in business. And I thought we don't even have power in this building and it goes out. If it's on, it goes off and the water is unpredictable. You're saying this to me and they're absolutely right. They have such resilience and grit, ability to work hard and they're doing it and succeeding well. Of course, as they do that, they're also facing problems that any other country is, with pollution and more traffic and all that.

DanielaSM: 36:22

In South America you live, or at least in Venezuela, with a sense of surviving, and so it's constantly that solving problems Well, exactly.

Nancy Napier: 36:31

I mean, the extreme was when I first got there. There were no cars, of course, and so there were mostly bicycles and then some motorbikes. But every man knew how to fix the motorbike because they always broke down and they could fix anything the air conditioning in the house if you had air conditioning, the electricity, the water, the phone, whatever it was, they knew how to fix it. And I remember one of them saying, as we get more reliable, fill in the blank, electricity power, all that we will lose that ability to solve problems in new ways, because somebody else will be called in to solve the problem of the printer or the computer. We won't be able to solve it ourselves.

DanielaSM: 37:15

Yeah, all right, so well, getting back to you, so you are now writing fiction books and it's a challenge, but you're doing really well.

Nancy Napier: 37:24

I work at it. I work at it. I don't think it'll ever be easy.

DanielaSM: 37:30

but that's probably the point, isn't? It Should never be easy. Yes, that and tennis. What else I mean? Is it ever going to end?

Nancy Napier: 37:35

I hope not right. There's always something new to learn. I am a I've learned over the years. We've been fortunate enough to go to Africa on several safaris and I've learned that I am a junkie when, if I ever won the lottery, I would oh I would go as often as I can.

Nancy Napier: 37:51

I fear that those animals may not be there in the next decade or two, so I want to go see as much as I can of them in the wildlife. So one thing in the back of my mind is what can I do to help that? And other than money I've thought about there actually are programs for people to go and learn about guiding. So you learn about the tracks of the animals, you learn how to see them, you learn about the flora and the fauna and the birds. So that would be something that would be really fun. In the meantime, I read a lot about nature and wildlife and, given climate change and what's going on, so that's something that's sort of on the sideline that I like to read about and learn about a little bit, and I don't know what else. We'll have to see how it goes. I'm having enough trouble trying to learn about art. That'll be on my list for a while.

DanielaSM: 38:44

Yeah, so bravo for curiosity, I guess one of the best traits that some people can have. I think so.

Nancy Napier: 38:49

I got interested in curiosity a few years ago when we had some visitors from Vietnam. One of the daughters wanted to see snow and so we drove up into the mountains here and on the way there were pockets of snow still in the high level, high elevations, and we stopped for her to go up and touch it and so forth. And I thought I said what do you know about snow? She said not much. I've read about it and I've seen pictures of it, but I wanted to touch it and feel it and all. So I looked up curiosity.

Nancy Napier: 39:16

So curiosity happens when we have a little bit of knowledge about something and then we want to have more knowledge. If we have a whole lot of it, sometimes we're not as curious anymore, right. But if we have no knowledge, we don't even know to be curious, curious. So back to. That's why I expose myself. I read lots, lots. I read a lot of different newspapers and different types of books, so that I'm always thinking about what's out there that's interesting, that might be something I want to learn more about. So to have a little bit of knowledge and then you can build that into a deeper knowledge with that curiosity.

Nancy Napier: 39:51

I think is good for everybody. Well, so he's the deep knowledge. I'm the flat. I like to know a little bit about a lot of different things, so yes, yes.

DanielaSM: 39:59

This is a perfect way of ending this story of yours, because great explanation about curiosity and how wonderful it is to be with curiosity and learn so many things over the world, I think also make us more open and more compassionate to other people to understand as well. And we're not going to be all ladies that are closed and set in their ways, right? I hope not, we don't want to. No One of my aunts she's 92, and she says I like to be complimentary, not contradictory. Oh, I like that, yes. So that's why I think it helps to be curious and be accepting to things.

Nancy Napier: 40:38

I agree. Yeah, curiosity is such a. If we can instill that in children and they keep it, what a wonderful thing.

DanielaSM: 40:45

So yes, so thank you so much, nancy, for sharing your story. It was lovely conversation as well. I really really enlightened and enthusiastic and I am so inspired, actually, actually, from listening to you.

Nancy Napier: 40:57

Well you're a great interviewer. I do a lot of that in my work and so I know how hard that can be with good questions, and you're really good at it. Thank you, thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for inviting me, thanks.