I had everything a child could ask for - two loving parents, a stable home, encouragement at every turn - and it took me years to realize that kind of foundation created a blind spot - Silicon Canals

I had everything a child could ask for - two loving parents, a stable home, encouragement at every turn - and it took me years to realize that kind of foundation created a blind spot - Silicon Canals

Briefly

"For most of my life, I moved through the world with a baseline assumption I didn't even know I had: that the world was, on balance, glad I existed. My parents loved me well. That isn't a complicated thing to say. They were married. They stayed married. They came to the school plays and clapped at the right moments. They told me I could do anything, and they meant it. My father worked, my mother worked, and the house was warm and reasonably loud and full of brothers."

"The first thing it gave me was a kind of casual confidence that I assumed was just a feature of being a person. Walk into a room. Apply for a job. Ask a girl out. Pitch an idea. Disagree with someone older than you. None of these things felt to me like they required any special courage. They felt like ordinary moves. The cost of failure, in my body, was small. If it didn't work, I tried again somewhere else. There was a baseline assumption running underneath it all that the world was, on balance, glad I existed."

"My wife's family lived through a war. Then they lived through what came after the war, which in some ways was harder. My mother-in-law grew up hungry. My father-in-law spent years doing work that was beneath him because the alternative was no work. They built a life out of caution and frugality and a refusal to assume that good things would last."

"When I first met them I read their carefulness as a personality trait. I thought they were nervous people, or modest people, or particularly Vietnamese people. It took me a long time to"