Today it’s all about Iranian weddings.

I’ve written before about how when I came to Turkey I started a business selling evil eye bracelets.

After a couple years in that business, I saw Amazon getting into the game, and I knew their reputation for being ruthless about price, and I didn’t want to be roadkill, so I got out of that business.

But before I got out, I found a niche that was really fun, and quite profitable, too. And that was making evil eye wedding favors for Iranians getting married north of Los Angeles.

You see, everyone even close to an evil eye (nazar boncuğu) considers it their own. Turks consider it Turkish. Greeks consider it Greek. Jews consider it Jewish. Hispanics consider it Hispanic. Iranians consider it Iranian.

So at one point an Iranian bride in Los Angeles saw me doing all these evil eye things, evil eyes reminded her of her grandmother, and she (the bride, not the grandmother) asked me if I could personalize a wedding-related message from her and attach it to a little glass evil eye medallion, and she would put them at each place setting as a little wedding favor.

Of course I said yes. I learned someone was seeing these things in a way I never would on my own, and I was off to the races as “the evil eye wedding favor guy.”

I promise that we’ll switch to another theme next week. But I want to beat the “we never really know” drum one more time. When we start a project, we don’t really know what other people are getting out of it.

We know (hopefully) why we’re doing it, and we tend to think we know why others are going along for the ride, but we’re usually wrong.

All we can do is ask and hope they tell us. Only god knows what we’ll learn about the world around us.

By the way, I sure wish I had applied that “never assume you understand” principle to selling the Branch Benders (remember that container from China that I talked about some months ago, and how I wanted to sell another one to those Chileans?). If I had, I might still be in that business. The capital requirements are radically different from what I do now, but I kind of liked that business, it was quite a rush!

Anyway, my point again is this: Ask, and expect to be wrong, you probably understand the world a lot less than you think you do.