Of Origins, Destinations, and Rising Tides 📍🗺️
As I continue my 40 lessons learned by age 40, here are some thoughts on geographical and cultural identity, and the importance of being in the right place at the right time.
Happy Sunday!
Where are you from? It’s a question that’s easy to answer for most people, but throughout my whole life I’ve always had to pause and think, before giving an answer that fit the context of where I am and who I’m talking to.
I was born in the Soviet Union, and lived in Moscow during the first eight years of my life. Then my parents moved to the US, because of my dad’s work, and we lived there for several years, mostly in Puerto Rico, which is a very specific kind of America. After that, we moved to the Netherlands, where I grew up and spent most of my time until I decided to move to Bulgaria twelve years ago.
Throughout the years, my where-I’m-from took different shapes and forms. At home, we spoke Russian, but I grew up with a very clear understanding that we left that country for a reason and will never be going back to live there. Coming of age in the Netherlands, Dutch became my primary identity and proficient language, and it remains so to this day. Having spent two years in Puerto Rico and Boston as a kid, followed by an academic exchange year in Madison, Wisconsin during my studies, together with almost two years in aggregate in California over the past decade, has led to a home feeling about the US as well. And finally, ever since I met Ellie, and then relocated to Bulgaria a few years later, the country I today call home has very much become a place I identify with.
Today, I can simply say that there are three countries that feel like home: Netherlands, US, and Bulgaria. It’s where I know how things work, where I can speak jargon, where I get all the cultural references. Where, if you put me in the middle of a street, or in a group of people, I’d know how to navigate without anyone thinking I’m not from here.
But if you ask me in any given situation where I’m from, the answer will depend on the context. When I’m with Dutch people, or with Bulgarians, I’ll usually say the corresponding city that I’m from in that country. In the US, it usually depends on the specific context: if I’m over on business from Europe, it’ll be Bulgaria, if people ask about my roots, it will be Netherlands. And if I’m outside the Bay Area in a casual chat at a coffee counter, I’ll just say I’m from San Francisco.
A lot of stuff has been said and written about the phenomenon of not being from just one place only. There’s a great TED talk on multi-local identities. There’s the theory of the third-culture kids. I personally like to think about it as swappable masks that you put on. Much like when you attend a business gathering on behalf of different organizations. You have two stacks of business cards, and depending on the person you’re talking to, you give them one or the other. Or like in my case, when you’re traveling between two countries in which you hold citizenship. You show one passport when you leave one country, and another when you enter the other.
Recently, when I was thinking about this whole multi-local identity of mine, I realized one pretty important thing that I never thought about before. All of the places where I have lived in my life were experiencing positive social and economic dynamics when I was there.
The Soviet Union went through unprecedented liberalization, optimism, and convergence with the civilized world during the Perestroika. Clinton’s America in the 1990s is probably when the US peaked in terms of everybody having a good time and not hating each other. The Netherlands in the 1990s and 2000s entered the top-5 of the world’s best places to live, and luckily remains there to this day. And Bulgaria, since it joined the EU in 2007, has witnessed the fastest growth and accumulation of wealth ever in its near-1,350-year history as a country.
There is a popular metaphor we use often in the startup and venture world: “a rising tide raises all the boats”. It alludes to the idea that the best place to build an innovative solution is in an industry or vertical that is already on the rise. Looking back at my life through the prism of the progress, I guess I was very lucky to have always ended up in places that were going up on the tide of history. Today, I think this very much defined my personality, my general optimism about life, and the assurance that tomorrow will always be better than today, no matter how good today was. My personal boat has been raised well by the tides of history in the past 40 years.
On the downside, it makes you think about what happens in the opposite scenario. Will I stay in Bulgaria if the country stops developing? Will I have the energy and mental prowess to embed myself in yet another society, if the need appears? Do I want to keep moving like I did, in the next and more mature decades of my life?
I don’t have answers to these questions. What I do know is that I’ve firmly come to believe that our capabilities and achievements are at least as much the result of our surroundings as they are the result of our efforts. The Canadian ice hockey champion Wayne Gretzky famously quipped that to score in hockey, you shouldn’t skate to where the puck is, but to where it’s going. I hope I’ll be able to continue skating to where my puck is going, in the years and decades ahead.