Wow, I can’t believe I’m back in the US writing this. I’m happy to be home, but honestly a little sad too. My last week at Provencelia was full of goodbyes, one dinner after another with the friends I made, the kind where everyone kept ordering one more thing because no one wanted to be the person who said it was time to go. Nobody said out loud that it was the last time, but everyone knew, so we all just stayed a little longer.
The thing I keep coming back to is my last morning taking the tram to work. I’d done that same ride all summer without thinking about it, the same stops, the same turn where the river comes into view, the same walk from the tram to the office. None of it was ever anything special; it was just my morning, and that’s exactly why it got to me on the way in. I spent the whole ride looking out the window trying to hold onto a view I’d barely looked at for two months because I always assumed I’d see it again the next day. Now I won’t, at least not for a while, and it’s those small ordinary things I miss more than the big ones.
Prague stopped feeling like a place I was visiting somewhere in the middle of the summer and started feeling like somewhere I knew how to live, which is what made leaving hard. The main thing I built while I was there, the daily financial report that pulls together revenue, costs, and fees across all six of our sales channels and seven markets into a single view of net profit by country and channel, was finished before I left. What I cared about most in those last few days was leaving it in a state where someone could run it after I was gone without me sitting next to them, which turned out to be harder than building the report itself.
Handing something off like that made me think about what I was leaving behind and whether the work was any good. It made me ask what “doing well” even looked like at a company like that one.
The honest answer is that success there came down to something pretty simple: whether the work you made was something your managers actually wanted and would use. You could pour hours into something, but if it wasn’t what they needed or it didn’t make their jobs easier, it didn’t really count. The report I built mattered because they rely on it now and it saves them the time they used to spend pulling the same numbers by hand.
So being effective there wasn’t about doing the most or looking the busiest. It was about paying attention to what my managers were actually asking for and building toward that, rather than what I personally found interesting. I learned that early on, when I put a few things together the way I thought made sense and then realized my managers wanted them laid out differently. Once I started building around how they were actually going to use the report, instead of how I would have wanted to read it, the work landed a lot better. The people who did well there were the ones whose work got picked up and used, the ones who made someone else’s job easier.
As for how a successful employee acts differently there than back home, the honest answer is that not much felt different to me. I expected working abroad to feel like a bigger shift than it did. Once I was actually doing the work, being good at my job meant the same things it would have meant in the US: understanding what the person you’re working for needs, and giving them something they can actually use.
I think the reason it didn’t feel as different as I assumed is that the team was a mix of people from all over and we sold across Europe, so it ran more like an international company than a local one. There wasn’t one strong local work culture for me to bump up against. So the biggest thing I actually learned about success abroad is that where the company is matters less than I thought it would, and what the company is matters more.
What I brought home is a clearer picture of the kind of work I want to do. I liked building something people actually needed and then watching them use it, and that’s the part that made the work feel worth it. It’s a simple thing, but it’s the closest I’ve come to knowing what I actually want out of a job. I left the report in their hands, and they’re still running it and thinking about that last tram ride now; that’s the part I’m proudest of. You spend a summer somewhere and then you go, and what you keep is what you learned about yourself and the people who made it hard to leave.
