Patrick McKenzie: preference

Transcript context

…How is it that your ambitions grow steadily in this environment? You weren’t beaten down, you weren’t discouraged, you didn’t just fly home either, but you kept on setting your sights on something higher. What was that like inside you? Interestingly, from having the perspective of being around people who are incredibly ambitious the last couple of years, and whose ambitions had positive social purpose, one of the great regrets of my life is that, in my twenties, I had so little ambition and was so beaten down, and didn’t take more aggressive actions to exit out of the situation I found myself in. I remember, after I quit the salaryman job — which, by the way, salaryman is a full-time employee of a Japanese company. The company owns you body and soul. In return, it incredibly promises, at least historically, to insulate you from all risk. I worked at jobs that are described by that for about six years, burned out terribly, made a socially appropriate excuse to quit, which is the one thing that you, as a salaryman, are not allowed to do. I remember April 1, 2010, thinking I could get on a plane right now with nothing but the clothes on my back, close the Japanese chapter of my life entirely, and walk into Jeff Lawson’s office in San Francisco, who is the CEO of Twilio. He doesn’t know me, but I think after walking into his office, I can beg, borrow, or steal a job there and do something much more impactful, important, personally fulfilling, et cetera, over the next couple of years, doesn’t seem that I’ve been doing the last couple of years. But I’m not willing to call it quits on this Japan adventure yet. I do enjoy living here. Working here is terrible. I will try to carve out some semblance of living from my tiny internet software publishing operation that I was running at the time and see what happens. Then indeed, the thing that happened three months later is that I met the young lady who eventually became my wife, and so we were off to the races. Wasn’t it efficient, in some regard, that you had so many years out there in the wilderness, so to speak? Because you learned so many things. You’re still young, right?…

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