I was ambling around Mongolia in the fall of 2003. I had gone there from Japan, where I’d been living for three years, because I needed to change from a work visa to a tourist one, and Mongolia checked a series of mostly practical boxes: not too far away, inexpensive, good weather, and holy-shit-it-is-Mongolia.
During a month-long sojourn by van around the country with a wonderful Australian guy, two Belgian brothers, (very briefly) a San Diegan, and our local Mongolian driver/guide, I had endured days of being bogged down in real bogs, ridden surly camels, yaks, and horses, survived torrential rains and countless freezing nights sleeping outside, and persevered through one mechanical breakdown after another, the variety of which one learns to find rather charming about old Soviet Uvaz vans. Near the end of the trip, as we were returning to Ulaanbaatar, my companions and I stopped a couple hours south of the city for a little climb up a rocky escarpment for what looked like a scenic view across the steppe.
The climb wasn’t especially daunting but, perhaps as residue of all that we’d endured to that point, I suddenly grew quite fearful. I stood there for a few moments, staring up at the rocks and obsessing about the risk of falling. I was, in a word, afraid. There was a local shepherd nearby who had watched our plume of dust as the van drove up to the rocks, and he joined us at the base while we scoped out the best route up. He looked at my face and, judging my plight accurately, said something about fear I will never forget:
“If you’re afraid to do something, don’t do it.
If you have decided to do something, why be afraid?”
…
When I used to think about what I’d do with my life after leaving the government, I dreamt it would be some creative pursuit. This desire wasn’t the product of some flattering self-assessment of my creative skill—quite in spite of it. Rather I recognized that my professional life in the foreign service had furnished me more than a career, but also a great sense of purpose. The challenge of creating something might offer the same sense of meaning, or so I’ve long speculated.
The yearning to make a living by creating can be satisfied through many forms. Entrepreneurs may be the ultimate creators. Building and growing a business or, better yet, blowing up a whole industry through new products or technology, depends as much creative energy as on innate business acumen. That I dreamt the second chapter of my professional life would be primarily an artistic pursuit is no implication of some intrinsic talent, it just speaks to my inability to think organically of commercial objectives.
To be frank, I have long dreamt of writing. (Or, more frankly, of being a writer.) I felt that stepping away from the national security mission, which had guided every decision I made for almost two decades, would leave an enormous void in my life which could best be filled by the singular pursuit of a craft. And no craft has felt more accessible than writing. Pragmatically, I imagined being quite satisfied freely exploring the world, meeting all kinds of new people, and writing about topics that interested me. It isn’t terribly unlike what I did in government. I worked in a global service, met some of the world’s most fascinating people, and then shared what their stories might mean to my audience. As a diplomat, that audience was the U.S. government. As the writer I dreamt of becoming, it would be you.
There are many practicalities that this dream may have ignored—what kind of writing would I focus on, where would I call home, and oh god would I be able to feed my family?—but the biggest obstacle to realizing the dream has been a basic fear of beginning. I’m not fearful of the act of writing—I’ve been writing all my life, both for myself and professionally—but fearful to write for you lot, the public. The judging public. The fear has been as powerful as it is probably not novel: fear of failing, fear of having nothing interesting to say, fear that this dream may be best left at just that. The fear even took on an identity of its own, as I’d try to convince myself, almost with a sense of destiny, that maybe I’m just not meant to do this?
Of course, such fears are poppycock.
So what changed? How is it that I wrote something here and began this relationship with you today? It’s not that I overcame fear so much as I learned to recognize this fear is not the point. My anxiety still remains about how you’ll judge me, and I worry whether this endeavor will prove a massive flop. But I awoke to the realization that the fear of failure is nothing compared to the fear of not trying. That revelation—which is what it was to me, anyway, but perhaps is obvious to many of you—came largely through a change of environment.
In the world I came from, success was typically the result of a skillful response to an identifiable problem. This is the part of government where you did well by, say, helping thwart a coup, or negotiating a settlement to a decades-old border dispute. Sure, you could succeed by creating new systems or building new opportunities. There is space for innovation in this world, but that innovation cannot come at the expense of your ability to solve problems or handle crises. It was probably overly simplistic of me, but my devotion to mastering those skills and instincts at problem solving always trumped extracurricular ideas of creating or building something new. More personally, it led me to be skeptical of such impulses, and to even grow fearful of them as potentially dangerous distractions. While I would be teasing out the beginnings of a novel, surely I’d be also be taking my eye off a key geopolitical development in a country where I was sent to maintain a critical alliance.
I never even had to rationalize this potential trade-off though—I felt it before I could think it, so focused I became on the tasks before me. I was convinced being a master at one thing must come at the expense of creating others. When I look back on those years, it sometimes feels like I was living in a cave. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of the world outside, of course, it’s just that there was so much work—so much meaningful, tough, rewarding work—to do inside my cave. I feared that if I wandered outside a bit, to see something new or to gather materials to try building something, I would lose my focus on the critical work inside.
For every way that part of government may have been cave-like, a startup is like the vast, limitless universe. At the space company I joined in San Francisco, creation and innovation are the lifeblood of the company. These are the principle that have come to define “Silicon Valley” much more so than any geographic reference. This is an environment that counters one’s personal doubts by saying, “That thing you’re thinking of trying to build? That is no distraction—that is the point.” Of course, one must produce. But there’s a recognition here that the whole system depends on individual creation, and whatever one’s particular professional role, the company and the system itself are strengthened by greater participation in creative pursuits. For me, entrance to this world allowed my ambitions, and fears, to be quickly and rather naturally recalibrated.
So is this change just a ephemeral product of a new environment, or is it a signal of a deeper shift in values? I don’t know yet, and I’m not sure whether what lies under the change even matters. What I do know is that what I long called a “dream” was actually a decision I had made long ago—the decision to write. I made this decision, so what the heck was there to be afraid of?
