Your greatest expat achievement.

Feeling at home in most places I went.

Learning my home culture and way of life isn't the only way to live.
Accepting and understanding others is something we all need to do.

beppi wrote:

Feeling at home in most places I went.

Me too. I regard my nationality as "expat"; I feel no loyalty to any community besides "expats", wherever they come from or live today.

To my mind the previous responses are more in the sense of 'successful adaption' as opposed to something that was brought about as an intended result.
An 'achiever' is someone who 'seeks to meet his goals' in what he is doing, not merely someone who is successful.
What did I in particular want to do with my life? Right now, I can't think of a good answer. I think I have tended to choose from the available options that were presented and try to make the best of things as I went along. I suppose I never had a preset plan in my mind that must be followed.

El_Jost wrote:

I have tended to choose from the available options that were presented and try to make the best of things as I went along. I suppose I never had a preset plan in my mind that must be followed.

Same for me:, and I made up a "preset plan" around it afterwards (because people and especially employers want to hear that), which now makes a pretty compeeling story out of what in fact were sometimes random moves and sometimes pragmatic choices of the lesser evil.
I did, however, actively look for more adventurous, uncertain and often more risky paths in life - otherwise I would probably still sit where I was born.

El_Jost wrote:

To my mind the previous responses are more in the sense of 'successful adaption' as opposed to something that was brought about as an intended result.
An 'achiever' is someone who 'seeks to meet his goals' in what he is doing, not merely someone who is successful.

Well, maybe. But by that measurement, an unambitious person (such as I am) can never achieve anything; and I don't think that's right. I don't think a goal has to be too specific.

I have yet to do anything remotely interesting, as an expat.  We travel a lot, and I'm raising exceptional kids, and I've successfully adapted to a foreign culture, and I work, but that's all just normal. 

I guess what I'm seeing as potential answers might be about organizing a unique group of some kind that somehow relates to being a foreigner, or changing other's perceptions in some way based on the exposure, but I'm just living out my life.  I write a pretty cool blog about tea, and that overlaps with being in Asia instead of the US, but that's not about being proud of something I've written, or making some difference in people's lives, just a hobby.

I have no one specific expat achievement.
I have lived and worked around the world for many years and I think my achievement would be my ability to fit in and get along with the many diverse cultures I have come across in my travels.

stumpy wrote:

I have no one specific expat achievement.
I have lived and worked around the world for many years and I think my achievement would be my ability to fit in and get along with the many diverse cultures I have come across in my travels.

Me too, Stumpy. I speak no foreign languages, but have always gotten by with goodwill. A willingness to speak a few words of the local language, and full respect for the natives and their culture, and plenty of uninhibited hand signals - those have stood me in good stead ever since I left my homeland fifty-odd years ago. Once, in Santa Ana, El Salvador, in 1968, I had to explain in a local pharmacy by means of a grotesque pantomime performance that my wife was seriously constipated, in bed and in pain in a cheapo hotel. My little dictionary's word for constipation(constipacion) was not the one they used in that place. When my desperate charade eventually (!) led the pharmacist to discover the right word (aha! constrenuenso!), the fascinated audience of twenty or thirty lookers-on burst into cheerful applause. My dictionary translated constrenuenso as a blockage of the nose, which I reckoned was probably close enough...

You can probably match that story, Stumpy, but I'll bet you never felt as embarrassed as i did.