#72 | Moving abroad

So, for ages (years?) I've been feeling on the unstable side of frantic most afternoons; and I couldn't work out the hell why. Well, I think I've discovered the cause. It was caffeine. Three or four cups of coffee each morning gave me energy beyond which the sun emits, but also — come 3 pm — a dive to the depth of the Mariana trench. I'd change tasks as fast as a roulette wheel picks numbers. It was a mess. In hindsight, it's clear that caffeine was responsible for my mania. But damn, it tastes good, and I didn't want to believe what my body (or the world) was telling me. 

Ignoring what the world tells us is one of our greatest human fallibilities. We refuse to see what is obvious either in hindsight or tragically, sometimes ever. Take, for example, our unfettered ability to procrastinate. This email is procrastination’s smoking gun: I'm writing it on Sunday morning, hours before sending it. Tim Urban (who writes here and talks here) sees procrastination as severe suffering. Tim brings to our imagination two writers, identical twins: both ambitious and good at writing. Both are keen to write, be read, and be published. One, however, is a procrastinator. The productive one writes three pages of her new book each week, the procrastinator starts writing, has coffee, takes the dog for a walk, calls a pal, then… then… then… doesn't finish a page. Over a decade, the productive writer published five books; she's happy. But the procrastinator? She's increasingly desperate to prove she can write (and she can!), yet she procrastinates her time away—it evaporates—and doesn't publish a thing. The tragedy here is the potential is equal, yet the outcomes are wildly different. Tim's new book has taken him five years to complete, not the two he planned. Three years of punishment for being a procrastinator. 

The thing is, the world tells us that too much caffeine, procrastinating, not exercising at all, or endless other things is bad. But, we're conditioned not to challenge some of the realities in our lives we've become accustomed to. And, as we get older, the roots of these 'norms' (think of the bad ones like weeds) dig deeper and deeper and deeper into the soil. They become harder to remove. What, then, is the equivalent of a weedkiller? 

I'm an advocate for two weedkillers. The first is writing, which I've talked about here. The second is moving abroad.

Moving abroad — for those who are lucky enough to be able to — is a weedkiller beyond comparison. Not only does it expose one to new cultures that have their old ways of doing things, and that are different to what we know. But travel also brings a mirror up against our weeds, roots, and norms. In often an unfavourable light, the mirror shows the flaws in our fundamentals. For me, it’s procrastinating, and changing between projects too often.

It might just be me, but when living in London, I lost myself to the busy routine of London life; it's tough to extract oneself, to just to check-in. There's always someone to do something with, and not very much time to reflect on why we're drinking four cups of coffee every morning and whether that's serving us. Thanks to Zoom et al., it's easier to move abroad and get our hands on this foreign mirror—even if it’s just for a few months. True, the mirror (like any) can be unkind, but we grow by getting to know our uncomfortable truths. And isn't that the point of everything anyway?

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My week in books

The Founders by Jimmy Soni -  It's remarkable that the founders of SpaceX, Tesla, Palantir, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yammer (and more) were all from PayPal. This book is about how PayPal started, from Confinity (run by Thiel) and X.com (by Musk). Well written, fun, and inspiring. Here's a quote: “I don’t think people know how precarious it was,” Klement offered. “If we hadn’t raised that $ 100 million round, there would be no PayPal.” Mark Woolway extended the counterfactual: “If the team hadn’t closed that one hundred million,” Woolway said, “there would be no SpaceX, no LinkedIn, and no Tesla.” LINK.

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Live well,

-Hector