Our Next Few Months in Europe & Japan, and Growing up Professionally with a Baby
A quick note on my next few months:
Elina and I are travelling during maternity / paternity leave with our now almost 5 month old daughter Ami.
We’re spending Jan to mid-Feb based in Barcelona and then traveling Italy till mid-March with trips to Paris and beyond in the works.
Drop a line if you’re in Western or Southern Europe.
March to April will be Japan.
We’re also renting our place in Toronto for the next few months. More deets here:
and here.
Ami-Chan Insights
I left LinkedIn 6 months ago, had a baby 5 months ago and, unsurprisingly, I am still growing up.
I thought I’d be writing more about lessons from the birth of my child. Ami has, as expected, changed me more than anyone else. More of my learnings have been about who I want to be than who I want her to be. And they’ve overlapped more with my attempt to redefine myself professionally than I expected.
Much of my career has been about hope, ambition for positive systemic social change, and disillusionment at my inability to create sufficient sustainable impact. This is how I’d characterize my work in international criminal law and access to medicines and more recently higher education and workforce development.
But like my dog Gio, Ami has taught me love. A feeling instead of a mindset, something that grows as a result of giving rather than receiving, and something completely intimate: a 1-1 relationship. Raising Ami isn’t about systems change, it’s about intimate generosity.
How Ami has changed my perspective on life and work:
Most importantly, and as expected, my world-view and prioritization have changed as much if not more than it did when I fell in love with our dog Gio. Here’s a few changes I’ve noticed:
never has it been harder to focus on work or really anything other than Ami: whenever I’m not looking at her I want to be. This has created the largest shift in my priorities and how I want to spend my time: instead of theoretically wanting my family to be my top priority it now feels that way
I thought I’d be more motivated by money but I’m now more focused on those projects which I care most about. This is a more narrow subset of the areas where I can create the greatest impact than I’d originally imagined (see more in an upcoming post on my 2025 ambitions and my first post on Ami).
I feel more comfortable as an adult, more confident in relying on wisdom and experience rather than youthful energy and curiosity, like I’m finally turning my Pan complex into an asset instead of a liability. I feel more confident in turning down work that will just make money and no longer want to rely only on my charisma and persuasion. Instead I’m exploring more openly who I want to be in the future (though I still feel too much of the need for social reinforcement and other dopamine hits)
finally, and this is where I’m really still processing, I’m discovering a new kind of meaning and fulfillment I didn’t know I wanted or needed. Friends recently threw an event to connect people to “an emerging Toronto scene” and particularly to expand the web or circle of their networks to include new people, ideas and communities that in turn would expand who each of us were. I’ve been unconsciously engaging in a similar exercise for decades and as [I’ve said before], I am more interested in strengthening a small number of connections than building new ones these days. Ami is facilitating more exploration of this new part of my inner web (or neural network): she is completing the inner circle that represents who I am in ways I could not have imagined.
I’ve been working on my next post for some time as it is all about my projects for 2025 (spoiler: they involve digital public infrastructure and public AI) but will leave you with one last pick of Ami:
How lovely it is to hear reflections on the way our perceptions get turned around by the love of a baby. Love on!