I’ve lived in Turkey for 20 years. And since my first days here, I’ve heard the “Turkey is in a chaotic part of the world” note played more times than I can count.

I did back then, and still do, think that that note is played a little too often, and is often used to explain away responses that produce sub-optimal results. But there’s a grain of truth to this note. It’s not false. It rests on a pretty solid foundation. After a while, in fact, you begin to see how it shapes the institutions and the people. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

And yet it blinds the people raised here. What does it blind them to? It blinds them to something large parts of their customer base are experiencing. What is that? The trauma one undergoes when chaos is introduced into a system more used to stability.

You see, Turks, like all humans, tend to overestimate the universality of the world in front of them. They are like fish, swimming in the water of instability all their lives, so they tend to underestimate the trauma of being recently thrown in.

Over the past 15 years, and especially over the past 5, the people in the West have been thrown into the water, and they are experiencing trauma because of it. This is a huge opportunity for Turks, because there are 350 million people in America alone who need someone to remind them that humans can, in fact, swim.