Everything that is worth it, is difficult

But remember that the reverse is not true!

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This article is for people with a dream, who have tried to achieve that dream, but who so far have failed. The message, in short, is this: Keep at it! Non-trivial dreams are hard to achieve. On top of that, even in failure, lots of exciting and interesting things will happen.

Here’s my story…

Ever since I was in college, I wanted to live and work abroad. Not in a "bartender in Spain" kind of way (not that there's anything wrong with that), but as an information technology professional with a career in an interesting international setting.

I started to have this dream in the late 80s. It’s long ago and it was another world. For one thing, the world was definitely not the global village it is today.  Sure it was possible to move abroad, but it was uncommon. People who did move abroad usually did so as an expat for a large company, with their employers taking care of the details. Another option was entering an emigration program to destinations like Australia or New Zealand. This was before the Internet as we know it today existed and information on how to do something, anything, was not widely available.

Some of the professional computer magazines that I was reading at the time had job ads in them for positions in Saudi Arabia , Kuwait, or the United Arab Emirates. That sounded like a jet-setting-globe-trotting thing to do and I was interested. However, it sounded more like something that a single guy would do, and at the time I had a steady girlfriend who was still in school. Maybe I should have left her and pursued this opportunity, but I didn’t do so at the time.

Years later I was working for a large Dutch bank as a mainframe systems programmer. These were highly sought after professionals and the bank always had hiring problems. In my group there were a few international contractors doing what I wanted to do: Living and working abroad. I talked to them to figure out how they had arranged this. They told a fascinating story. These guys worked through an international agency located in England that found short-term jobs and contracts for them.  They worked the contract and when that ended the agency found them another contract in some other country and they moved.

Financially, they seemed to be doing well and I wondered about that too. They told me that their agency charged the customer for their hours, took a cut and paid them a pittance. The rest of their earnings was deposited tax free in a bank account in some tax haven. The contractor would pay a small amount of income tax and social insurance premiums on the very small income they got in the country where they temporarily lived and worked . Then, when the contract ended, they would de-register, settle their tax affairs, leave the country, and take a vacation in some sunny spot. During that vacation they would withdraw all the money that had accumulated in the tax haven. At that point in time they no longer lived in the country they just left and they did not yet live in the country of their next contract. Because of that limbo status, they were not taxed anywhere on the majority of their income.

I was interested!

I contacted that agency and they flew me out to their offices in England where I met their executives and a few account managers. They were probably wondering who this kid who was still wet behind his ears, but I knew my tech stuff so we agreed that they would represent me in finding contract work. Part of their deal was that if you were not working you were not paid and they gave no guarantees on what timeframe they would be able to find you a job. But if they found a job, you had to be available! I talked it over with my wife, we bit the bullet, and I resigned.

It was super exciting. I was unemployed but hopeful and was anxiously waiting for a phone call. It was 1992 and the moment I resigned, an economic crisis started.

This is a bit of a theme, more on this later.

The phone call never came. Looking back, I really had no clue what I was doing and had no plan beyond working with this agency in England. It was difficult to explain to my friends and family what I was up to, because I was trying to do something that nobody they knew was doing and that they had never heard of. Most of them probably thought I was crazy and taking crazy risks.

After a few months of sitting at home the money started to run out and it was obvious that something had to happen. I hadn't given up on the dream of living and working abroad, so I didn't want to get back into a regular job. Instead, I started talking to agencies in the Netherlands to see if there was anything interesting and financially rewarding to do.

I came into contact with a Dutch agency that was looking for people to teach Unix courses at Hewlett-Packard’s education center. At the time I knew next to nothing about Unix, but I do understand how computers work and I am very good at staying one chapter ahead of the crowd. I interviewed and got the gig. The money was decent and I thought it could get me established as a contractor, which would enable me to get that international opportunity if and when it came.

So I started teaching courses on Unix and sending invoices to the agency. Unfortunately, they were a bit slow in paying those invoices and after a couple of months I was starting to get worried. Then, on a sad Tuesday night, I got a call from an administrator to say that the agency had been declared bankrupt.

To this day I don’t know what really happened but there must have been some foul play involved. The agency business comes down to taking a cut of any work you contract out. As long as you keep your cost structure under control, the business model really can't fail because most of your outgoing cash is a percentage of the incoming cash. A day after the fateful call I got a call from a former employee of the agency who told me they were planning a restart with new financiers but implored me not to get into business with them again.

Since this was a Tuesday, I was in the middle of a five-day “Unix Fundamentals” course. Next morning I rocked up at the HP education center where I ran into another contractor who was also working through that same agency. He spoke the legendary words: "We need to talk." :-)

We became, and still are, best friends.

During the break, we walked up to the head of the education center, who was obviously somewhat worried about continuity, and we discussed the situation. He was super pragmatic and so were we, and not only that, we were also free of the non-compete clause we had with the agency. That same afternoon we cut a deal with the education center to work for them directly. It also turned out that the agency had fleeced us completely on the hourly rate and we split the difference with the education center. Everybody was happy.

We also got word from the administrator of the agency that it was not likely there would be any money in the agency’s assets to pay our outstanding invoices. However, with the better rates we were now earning, we quickly made good on the bankruptcy-related losses. After a few months my contractor buddy and I decided to go into business together and we formed a company that, I am happy to report, is still going strong.

But what about the dream?

The dream, I am sad to say, got parked as life was happening. My daughter was born, the business was growing, we made money, made some foolish investments, made some more money to make up for those, and everything was cruising along. The dream never went away completely though. It kept nagging at the back of my head and while on vacation I entertained interesting daydreams about how I was going to make it happen.

Then, in the late 90s, the Internet started happening and dotcom exploded onto the scene. We were contacted by a very well funded startup in Silicon Valley that wanted to expand into Europe. We liked them, they liked us, and long story short, they wanted to acquire us to become their bridgehead in Europe. I saw my chance and cut a deal to move to Silicon Valley and work for the parent company. Life was looking up! We would be dotcom millionaires and I would finally make it abroad. To Silicon Valley no less!

But, as the title of this article says, everything that is worth it is difficult, so as you probably guessed by now, this is not what happened. Instead, there was a large plop-like sound as the startup imploded spectacularly in a whirl of stunning incompetence, mismanagement, sexual harassment, and some outright fraud. We barely managed to escape with our own company intact.

An interesting book has still to be written about that period, but I will leave it to one of the founders of that company to do so. Hey Art, if you are reading this, get in touch! We have things to discuss!

Fortunately, the dotcom boom was still, well, booming, and its hunger for anyone with a pulse who knew something, anything, about TCP/IP and Linux was still very much upsetting stomachs all around. I had smelled the dream again and got in touch with recruiters to find a job, any job, in Silicon Valley. Being a foreigner in need of immigration support didn't make that easy, but there were still many companies that were interested. I got, and signed, a couple of job offers, but for various reasons that went nowhere. 

Then the dotcom bubble was suddenly over and the old economy reasserted itself. It turned out that profit was actually still a thing and developing open source software for knitting machines was not a profitable business model.

I had gotten so close, but had failed again.

Unfortunately, like the dotcom bubble, my life imploded as well. I was burnt out, got divorced, and my mother passed away. I spiraled into depression.  It was not a great time in my life. I needed a break

In the late 90s my parents had sold their business and moved to Spain (the Florida of Europe). In the meantime the European Union had happened and with that came the right to live and work in any country of the Union, making intra-European migration almost trivial. I put all of these things together and took a sabbatical, rented an apartment in the village my parents lived in, became a volunteer at the local cat shelter, and flew my kite on the mediterranean beaches. Finally I was abroad...

I had managed the RE bit of the FIRE movement, but had forgotten about the FI part, so eventually, as my savings ran dry, I had to get back into the economy. I was still at my Dutch company and through them I made a deal with a customer that I would work on their project in hybrid mode: One week from home (in Spain, but they didn't know that) and one week in the office. It was a grand old time. When I was in Spain I got up early, coded, took a long lunch with a bottle of rosé, and then wrote documentation in the afternoon (don’t drink and code, kids!) In the evening I had sex on the beach, flew my kite, and generally had an amazing time.

In the early 2000s Internet dating had become a thing and I partook in that trend wholeheartedly. I had had quite a good time going out on dates, but after I had decided to make my profile reflect that fact that I didn't want to have any more children, the response rate dropped to zero. One evening though, while on a skiing trip in the Alps, I got an email from a lovely young woman and, fast forwarding a bit, I moved back to Holland and we moved in together.

So there I was, back in Holland, after having lived in Spain. It was depressing. Everything was going well, except for the part where I didn't live abroad. Not that the Netherlands is a bad country to live in, quite to the contrary really, but the issue is: I know it already!

At this point I was about to give up. I so desperately wanted to live abroad but it just never seemed to work out for me. As the Dutch writer Willem Elsschot wrote: “Between dream and deed are laws and practical objections." I talked to my girlfriend about buying a house and settling down in Holland.

Then, like a flash of lightning, I got an email from a Google recruiter who asked me to apply for an SRE position in either Dublin or Zürich. I applied, interviewed, and got the job. We moved to Switzerland and on 21 August 2006, I finally realized my dream of living and working abroad in the way I imagined it when I got out of college. Since then I moved on, and at the time of writing I live in Boston (USA; not the one in Lincolnshire). Still abroad.

With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see what I did wrong and why I didn't succeed before. But that's the thing you see, that's how you learn, because you are ambitious and try to do things that you don't know how to do, and that frankly, nobody around you knows how to do.  So you try and try and fail and learn and try again. Failure isn't about falling down, failure is staying down.

It might be hard to imagine this in 2023, but back when I started on this dream in the late eighties, pretty much nobody was moving abroad. There were no years abroad in college, English wasn't as widely spoken, and information wasn't available. I tried to do something without knowing really what it was or how to do it, and I knew nobody who had done it. That made it all extremely difficult and I failed frequently. But even in these failures there were amazing experiences. So much of what I have experienced in my life came about because of what I tried to do. Everything you do leads up to everything that you are going to do, and if you try to do interesting things you will learn interesting things that will enable you to do even more interesting things.

So if you have a dream, prepare for the hard times ahead. If you want to start a company, move to America, retire early, buy a boat, travel the world, or build your own airplane, just do it. Don’t do crazy things, don’t risk everything, but do it. It will be difficult, but don’t let that stop you, because everything that is worth it, is difficult.