![]() ![]() We wanted to spend time mastering Latin dance, beyond occasional one-hour Salsa classes. We both became enamoured with the idea of learning an African language, Swahili, as a gateway to East African culture. We thought about the kinds of things we wanted to learn. With the same pattern week-to-week of rushing through the work week to live on the weekend, the weeks blurred into one another. More recently, time seemed to be speeding up. Like when living abroad in a foreign environment, learning a difficult language like Chinese, or trying to overcome a fear like that of public speaking. The times we were forced to learn and adapt. We looked back at our lives and thought about our most vivid memories: they were all when we had struggled. ![]() But as we advanced towards this goal, we found ourselves less and less interested in it. Now, we had the backgrounds for this, with advanced degrees and years of management experience. We made this decision after going away for a weekend and re-assessing what was important to us in our lives. However, I'd still have been building someone else's dream, when it was time for me to follow my own.Įarlier in 2018, I had promised myself and my partner Jo that we would start our own businesses and go travelling. They specifically did not want to manage me. Perhaps that's why I'd have been good at this job. I wanted something quite different.Īs I said in my goodbye letter to Lyft earlier in 2018, I'm not a great employee. The problem was, my dreams had changed, and I no longer wanted a job. In part, I turned it down for these views: The Supermoon setting over Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea, as viewed from the Sinai Peninsula of Egyptīut not really. Why'd I turn it down? Am I an idiot? Maybe. It was to run operations for a transport tech company across a huge geography, spanning what would eventually be over a hundred cities, and with a total pay-check of a million dollars in a year - with upside that might lead to "screw you" money in a few years.Īlso, it was working with a great friend of mine, someone I trusted completely and with whom I knew I could have fun. The job was, on paper, what my whole career (across multiple companies, countries and languages) had been leading up to. It was also one of the easiest decisions I had ever made in my life. On September 27, 2018, I made the difficult decision to turn down my dream job, to run operations as COO of EMEA for Wind, a Chinese scooter-sharing company. ![]()
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