One curious observation about moving to new places

Over the last two decades, I made several major moves — across continents, countries, and states. Some were for work, some were because of personal circumstances — wanting to reset or because of our kids’ sporting careers.

While I talk with pride about my family being having been mobile, over time these moves become more and more difficult, logistically and mentally. Mentally, there is an increasing need to feel you have a home, a permanent base. Logistically, well, it’s just hard. Having four kids means that as a family you accumulate an incredible amount of things and the process of packing, moving, loading, and storing becomes an exhaustive months-long undertaking.

I do however want to talk about one positive lesson — of semi-personal, semi-professional nature — I learned from my many moves.

The best example is when we left Russia in 2013 to head to the US. While I’d always considered my background “international” thanks to my education, most of my professional and social connections had become concentrated in Moscow and London, thanks to a career with Morgan Stanley in these two cities. Our move to the US was of course a conscious decision, but I was worried about leaving behind the connections that had taken years to build. My network had become my valuable asset, part of my human capital. Now I was leaving it all behind and heading to a place thousands of miles away from where my network was practically non-existent. It wasn’t a reset; it felt like it could be a step…