The second time was 2008, a few days after I arrived in the United States. My community was having a big party and they said, you are new, come join us.
I went for exactly the reason you would go. I had nobody here. Everybody says network, connection, you have to have network, so I thought, fine, I need to develop a network, and I showed up to build one. This was the land of opportunity and I had been in it for four days.
There was whisky and there was alcohol. People were laughing very hard at jokes that were not funny, and I remember sitting there judging it and feeling bad about judging it. Then they started introducing themselves. One man said he had been in the United States eighteen years. I asked what he did. He delivered pizza. The next had been here twelve years. Pizza. The next, eight years. Pizza.
Three men, eighteen years, twelve years and eight years in the country, all delivering pizza. What did I decide in that moment?
Not that they were lazy, and not that the work was beneath anybody, because it is not. What landed was the math of time, and I will say it the way I said it then. In twelve years you can start a company. In twelve years you can build something in a country that hands you the chance, and if twelve years have gone by and nothing has compounded, then the room is doing something to the people in it. So I made a decisive action not to involve myself with those people, and I have been in a different place ever since. I want to be careful here, because this is the decision in the book that sounds worst out loud. I did not decide they were lesser. I decided that a room can hold a person still for twelve years while everybody in it is working hard, and that I could not afford to find out whether it would do the same to me.