The Heart of the Sun

Observations on people, culture, and dream-chasing from my first year in America

At 8AM sharp on the 19th of August, I sent out a broadcast to my closest friends and family: "Eagle Has Landed." I had just touched down at John F. Kennedy International Airport near New York City. Shortly afterward, I was on another flight to Boston – MIT-bound, one-way.

I had long contemplated a move to America; as far back as high school I was talking about one day living here. Strangely though, I never thought to apply to any U.S. schools for my undergraduate degree. After college I worked for startups based out of Cape Town, South Africa, thinking that my career would inevitably take me across the ocean. But, I realized, your career does not by default take you anywhere. You take yourself places, and your career builds (or in my case, rebuilds) itself around that.

During the layover at JFK I put on a favorite, Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World", because it felt fitting and I was in a grandiose mood. Though hitherto unrelated, it immediately cast me back to one of the final passages of The Great Gatsby:

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Indeed, the America before me was commensurate with my capacity for wonder. You rarely get second chances, or fresh starts, so I got on that flight to Boston resolved to make my first year in America, and all the ones to follow, count.

How has America lived up to my expectations? How have I lived up to America's expectations of me? I hope the following reflections answer more than just that. I hope they can make you, the reader, ponder your own standing in life. This is not really about me, or America for that matter. It is allegory for anyone with private or suppressed dreams who suspects they are in the wrong place to chase them.

A note before I begin: my experience and lessons will not be universally useful to those seeking to move countries. Some people soak up a new country for a year or two before returning home when their visa expires. Some people escape dire circumstances for a place of relative safety; or resettle to end up with a relatively better paying job in a relatively more comfortable country. This piece is for the very ambitious. It is about putting yourself in one of the few environments where you can 1,000,000x your upside in life.

If this entices you, and you are willing to hear the good and bad news about the journey you are contemplating, read on.

Getting there is 50% of the difficulty, 5% of the work

When I decided it was time to move to America, and figured that an MBA would give me the best chance of getting into a top school, the application felt demanding: good grades from a known university, some years of experience in a meaningful position at a recognizable company, quality references, top scores in a standardized test. Then, the follow-up work of getting a visa approved during a foreigner-unfriendly administration; not to mention putting myself into severe personal debt to finance it.

Each of these steps would exclude some percent of the population, and once I arrived it was hard not to feel like the rewards should start rolling in. But once the dust had settled, I felt like a small fish in the ocean, with no guarantees of anything. One of 500 people in my class, from one of many good business schools in the U.S., with only a few truly great companies hiring – and who is to say they want to hire MBAs, anyway?

The lesson from being one of perhaps 10,000 candidates starting from a similar baseline, is that you have to consistently show up, stand out, and create opportunities for yourself: passing (or even having a perfect GPA) won't cut it; the default route of classes, clubs, trips, and programmed recruiting might yield some kind of internship, but not necessarily the best one for your ambitions. And if entrepreneurship is your objective, the default route will absolutely derail you – despite how many classes still claim to teach it.

This is why I realized 95% of the work lay ahead of me. I had extremely high surface area not just in MBA circles, but across MIT and Harvard. I spent weekends hacking with strangers, I tried to help every person or company I met, I took bus rides to New York, flights to Los Angeles and San Francisco (sometimes just for one meeting or one event) – and 9/10 times it led nowhere. But when it worked, it paid off in enduring ways: investors that became friends, collaborators that could become co-founders, impressions that led to internship offers.

Sam Altman once reflected: "When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane. It was frequently unnecessary, but three times it led to career-making turning points for me that otherwise would have gone the other way."

I believe this now.

The challenge is that a priori, I had no clue which ones would pay off. A hackathon I won that felt like a big deal for me, only received passing acknowledgment from others. A week I skipped classes to get in front of one AI pioneer did lead to the supposedly fateful meeting, but nothing afterward. But a weekend building with friends during a Boston snowstorm, and a single seemingly unrelated Zoom call, would end up tying together beautifully and help me land my summer internship at an AI lab.

So, it is not trivial to be accepted into countries like America to work or study, especially if you are studying at a place like MIT, getting a job in tech, or being admitted into some kind of startup accelerator. But that just puts you at the starting line, with a long track still ahead.

The encouraging thing is that most of what will be expected from you in these situations is nothing you have not encountered and surmounted before in some way, shape, or form. But you will also need to grow. Surface area and breadth will eventually need to make way for depth, and to be excellent at anything in a place as competitive as America, you will need to stretch every fiber of your being.

You mostly move to places, not countries

In my circles back home, moving to America was an unorthodox move. Many South Africans have historically emigrated to the United Kingdom or Australia; an increasing number dabble in the Netherlands these days: sometimes to settle, sometimes for a work or a study stint. There's a fear of "brain drain," and in recent times with more excitement about the country, perhaps even stigma around leaving.

So before I left, I was frequently asked why I wanted to go to America: didn't I know how expensive it was? Did I know anyone on that side? What about the current administration? What about gun violence, ignorant people, Palestine, and the other usual reservations?

I did not really move to America, I moved to Boston. More specifically, I moved to Cambridge, the suburb/city across the river which is home to MIT and Harvard. Most specifically, I moved to MIT, for the sole reason of learning about AI.

Before, I had been working in the games industry in Africa, a gratifying job but not overly consequential for someone in their 20s in the middle of the AI boom. Stanford and MIT seemed appealing, the former leaning toward entrepreneurship and the latter toward deep technology, but both undeniably AI hubs. (Admittedly, I interviewed for both and only got into MIT, so that made my decision easy.)

I had never been to Boston before and I still do not really feel like I have lived there, a year later: sure, I have been to some restaurants and museums, and I have walked the Freedom Trail. But the reason it feels like an unfamiliar city is because MIT stayed true to its promise of AI leadership. I was completely sucked into an ecosystem of classes, competitions, professors, researchers, startups, and hackers the likes of which I had never seen. There is no approach, company, tool, or breakthrough that someone hasn't heard of or doesn't have an opinion on. When you are in that environment, you are only bottlenecked by the rate at which you can absorb new information. You can catch up on years of progress and actually feel at the cutting edge. And if there is ever an open slot in your calendar, there is always something happening at Harvard.

Can a place really change your "slope" as much as I have implied? Paul Graham weighed in on this once:

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time. [...] Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren't genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him?

Besides being surrounded by excellent minds and peers, Cambridge has a gravitational pull: any Nobel laureate, AI pioneer, or hotshot founder of a newly minted billion-dollar startup who is not already based there, makes a point of visiting every so often. People who if you were almost anywhere else would ignore your emails, now literally come to you. I have met a dozen such individuals in the last year – not just attended their talks – and had the opportunity to ask questions, leave an impression, and exchange contact details. This is where that 95% of effort becomes important again, but that effort would be wasted if you were anywhere else.

Except, perhaps, for Silicon Valley. This summer I moved to the West Coast and realized firsthand that if you want to work in or build a company in AI, San Francisco and its surroundings are probably better than Cambridge. What Cambridge invents, Silicon Valley sells, and startups have a tendency to be inventive along the way – which is why people can succeed there without ever visiting the East Coast. There is something in the water here and as much as one can intellectualize it (like I am doing right now), it really is something you need to see for yourself.

I do not even think Silicon Valley is that efficient at allocating capital, there are just more people trying. More founders, more VCs, and many wealthy companies that can afford huge contracts. Even if the yield of startup factories such as Y Combinator are theoretically lower than some other boutique accelerator (the batches are getting bigger, the bar is getting lower), they operate at a scale that can spit out more consequential companies than any other hub on Earth.

When I buy a coffee these days, I see 0.1% of my net worth disappear. If you are a billionaire, that is a $1M check into a startup, or $100K into ten founders. You can understand then why California's 250+ billionaires can make dozens of angel investments a year into anyone decently interesting, without feeling the sting, and occasionally get a great return. Selling to big businesses is always hard, mainly because of complex organizational structures and user-buyer disentanglement: but when you are in Silicon Valley, you endure that pain and can sell to the most valuable companies in the world; anywhere else, you sell to your national bank or a consumer packaged goods company. You just have more leverage as a young person trying to make a dent.

You do not need to embrace a country fully to reap the benefits of its most magnetic cities or academic hubs. I also think that big, successful countries tend to be so heterogenous that it is difficult to embrace them fully anyway. There are certainly more neatly packed cultures and parts of the world one might want to retire into, but that should not be a first-class priority when you are young and ambitious.

All credit to Marc Andreessen for putting it so urgently:

Once you have picked an industry, get right to the center of it as fast as you possibly can. Never worry about being a small fish in a big pond. Being a big fish in a small pond sucks – you will hit the ceiling on what you can achieve quickly, and nobody will care. [...] In my opinion, living anywhere other than the center of your industry is a mistake. A lot of people – those who don't live in that place – don't want to hear it. But it's true. Geographic locality is still – even in the age of the Internet – critically important if you want to maximize your access to the best companies, the best people, and the best opportunities. You can always cite exceptions, but that's what they are: exceptions.

The part you might like to hear is that America is not strictly the best place for every industry. Anime? Tokyo. Casual mobile games? Istanbul. Advanced semiconductor fabrication? Hsinchu. Hardware prototyping? Shenzhen. Being rich? Monaco. Whatever it is you care about, get to the center of it, even if the place feels exotic from where you stand now. Do not settle for second place: you might think it is "good enough" relative to where you are in life, but in any Top 5 list things are never evenly distributed – there are power laws at play. The difference between #1 and #2 will be far greater than between #2 and #3, and 80% of talent, rewards, or whatever you care about will accrue to first place. You need to have a winner's mindset if you want to be consequential.

Still, America is goddamn beautiful

One of the things I was fortunate enough to do in the years before coming to America was to travel to 30+ countries. This achieved three things: when my MBA classmates travelled every other weekend (Iceland is only a 5-hour flight from Boston!) I felt zero FOMO; when I did want to travel I felt more compelled to travel within America than without; and when I did that, I could better contextualize whether what I saw was at all special.

America pretty much has it all: cities, farms, deserts, forests, lakes, beaches, mountains, tropics, glaciers, plains, and so on. Yes, I have spent time looking at art in New York, eating burritos in San Jose, and attending music festivals in Chicago, but what has inspired far more awe has been autumnal hikes in Acadia, sheep farming in Colorado, and lakeshore activities in Tahoe. The natural splendor of this country is astounding, with a National Park system that preserves and makes accessible all its treasures. It is like being able to travel all of Europe (eastern and western) with no borders, one language, and one currency. [1]

There is something beautiful about its people, too. America is a startup. Its founding story feels somewhat familiar: talented "employees" become dissatisfied with the "incumbent," they leave to build something independent, people join and invest, fierce competition ensues but they win market share anyway, then they scale with pivots along the way; and over time they weed out the rotten parts of their culture and – at least when zooming out – become a more inclusive organization.

I would encourage you to read about the lives of the charismatic Washington (CEO), the productive Hamilton (COO), the wealthy Hancock (angel investor), Jefferson's brand-building, Franklin's strategic partnerships. It makes for an amazing story, and it is the root of America's cocktail of values: individualism, liberty, self-reliance, equal opportunity, free enterprise. It is easy to take these for granted when you live there, or to dismiss them as propaganda when you do not; but having travelled across Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America, I have always found at least one of these things to be lacking – and the emergent property of putting them all together is intoxicatingly freeing.

There is a can-do, question every institution attitude that I have found in certain Americans (even outside the cities) that has honestly had a transformative impact on my own operating system. It does not mean to say these people cannot be wrong, stubborn, or ignorant (even in Boston I get asked whether Africa is a country), but the times that they are right, the persistence that goes hand-in-hand with stubbornness, and even the productivity that ignorance begets – has led to awesome historical outcomes. And this culture maps directly to startups. To quote Steve Jobs: "It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy."

You can make the argument that America is losing its dominance, and having spent some in both America and China I can see how this might be the case (especially when considering consequential technologies like robotics, clean energy, and open-weight AI), but that matters less for where you likely are in your career right now.

Things move faster these days, but it still takes time for hegemony to change. Europe was the global hegemon for almost five centuries before America took over. America has held its spot for nearly 100 years and while I reckon we will see another shift in the 21st century, this will not be the decade. Slope matters, but so does baseline: when I was in Africa I was so excited about its steep gradient that I forgot it was starting from the lowest point in the world; even if America is in decline, the point of intersection for these two economies started to feel a lifetime away.

There are safer, older nations and there are cheaper, younger ones – I would just urge you to consider both slope and intercept for the industry you want to be in. You can bet on the next great place, but if you are anything like me and lack the foresight to time that transition precisely, going to the current best place for something and assuming it will hold for this early chapter of your career is a reasonable bet too.

People will make or break you

I have come to be reminded that you really are the average of the people you spend time with. In some cases you are the floor (a member of the group drags everyone down [2]), in some cases the ceiling (you will work relatively harder but not feel the need to push much further than that), but I would say in the long run you settle at the average.

My MBA class is full of lovely, well-rounded people, but they come from such a multitude of backgrounds (which I am of course grateful for) and have ambitions of going into so many careers that if you are not careful about who you spend time with, you will end up spending an average amount of time doing the average things: drinking, travelling, some sports, some panel discussions, and the most popular Sloan (MIT's business school) classes. Moreover, as with any cohort of people roughly the same age, the usual dynamics return: cliques, rumors, chasing status.

In fact I think my classmates worked way harder before business school and will likely work way harder after, which is precisely why it becomes okay to take it easy for the two years: there may never be a chance to have this much fun (and still feel productive) again. And it is so easy to be self-aware of MBA stereotypes and still play into them because everyone is just as self-aware – it becomes self-reinforcing.

The only challenge is that not everyone has a right to stay in America afterwards; not everyone has a job to go back to; not everyone has their tuition paid for by a company, or their family, or even savings. Despite knowing I could not take it as easy as everyone, when I spent time with them I had so much fun and yearned to be included so much that it distorted my reality. And candidly, it was only when my friends and family back home snapped me out of it that I was reminded of my constraints and the reason I went to America in the first place.

It was when I started saying no to things that I knew would bend my reality, that my world opened up and I met amazing people in MIT's other schools, while developing a better eye for unconventional people in Sloan – mainly immigrants and entrepreneurs.

Generally, I have found that people who have sought opportunity before will seek it again and see it in others and nurture it in others. My immigrant friends have worked harder than anyone else to be at MIT, and are the least likely to feel they have "made it" by being there. My entrepreneurial friends may not have the most stacked résumés, but I can learn more from them in an hour than anyone else [3]. These people normalize working on weekends, normalize staying in Boston over the January break to build or take interesting classes, and helped me construct a web of accountability throughout the latter half of my first year at MIT.

This has been true in Silicon Valley as well. I ended up living in a hacker house with a 21-year-old South African Harvard dropout (who raised money from the Zuckerbergs) and a University of Southern California dropout (who went from intern to on-paper millionaire faster than anyone I know), among others. With them, there is basically working and sleeping, they do not have preconceived notions of how a day or weekend should be spent, they follow their curiosity and focus only on bottlenecks for their businesses, and their intensity rubs off on me – and yes, they do take breaks. As I advise their startups and they continue to inspire me, I am sure we will grow together, and that is exactly the type of friends you want to be looking for.

I have also learnt to be wary of nihilists and sociopaths. Some people are too "smart" or too rich to care about anything, and as an optimist it can be draining [3]. Some people do not realize the platform they have been given at MIT, or Harvard, or any of the top schools they have gone to; the opportunity to help people or invent the future. Some people, particularly on the West Coast, have socially-engineered themselves into positions of wealth and prestige, without giving much back in return. It can be frustrating to see people lie compulsively and raise money from all the investors and accelerators you hear about; almost tempting when you see how easy it is: but I maintain that it will never be sustainable.

What I really look for in people is common ground. Part of the reason I went back to school as opposed to another route to America, was that I felt I would have time to acclimatize to American traditions and get along better with strangers – but going to one baseball game will not make you any friends. You can tell when someone's interests, values, or background deeply aligns with your own, and that's what makes them want to spend more time with you.

I have not made friends or mentors by asking a smart question, pretending to care about a sport or hobby, or the sheer fact that we go to the same school or are classmates [4]. Instead, I have gotten along with South Africans, entrepreneurs, people who like video games, and men and women of culture (i.e. they watch anime). There are so many interesting, successful people out there, but you only need to build non-transactional, lasting friendships with one or two of them for everything to change – and common ground will solve that. They will route interesting opportunities your way, and you will be amazed by how soon you end up as a first-or second-degree connection to people you normally only read about in the news.

Of course, you also have special people back home. One thing I truly regret about the months leading up to my departure was that I started feeling sick of home, and then so quickly became homesick once I had settled in America. I have friends from high school, university, my first few years of working, my travels, that all seem impossibly far these days. They too can keep you accountable and add texture to your life, if you are willing to put in the long-distance effort. The hardest part about being so far away is that relationships can go from "making new memories" to "catching up," which when done enough times devolves into catching up about what you were catching up about. It hurts to realize that you might be able to count the number of times you will see certain family members again with your fingers alone. Chasing your dreams comes with sacrifices.

My friends back home are also some of the brightest and smartest people I know, even after a year in MIT and Silicon Valley. I went home once, for a wedding, and was utterly reminded of this fact. I have come to believe there are intelligent, ambitious people in more or less the same proportion everywhere – but your ambition can only scale according to what you know is possible. I never thought I would make it to America, I even applied to several business schools in Asia to hedge my bets: you only know when you try, and I am confident that many people I know could have made it this side too.

Some of them might feel it is too late by now, but it is not too late for you. Acceptance rates can look scary, but most people do not even apply, and if you have ever beaten those kind of odds in some other domain in your life, why should things be any different this time?

Conclusion

One of the most layered, formidable characters I have encountered in fiction is Karsa Orlong, from Steven Erikson's epic fantasy series Malazan Book of the Fallen. A member of the Teblor, an isolated tribe of warriors, he descends from the mountains and into the wider world. He is utterly humbled by the power of the beings and nations he encounters there, but he does not respond by concluding that the outside world is therefore culturally superior. If anything, his experience often strengthens a different kind of Teblor pride.

Karsa gradually separates power, technology, and civilization from human worth. He can acknowledge that outsiders possess vastly greater military organization, sorcery, wealth, cities, knowledge, etc., while simultaneously thinking that much of civilization has made them less free, less honest, less self-reliant, and more spiritually degraded.

America can be very hard to dismiss on material terms. The scale, capital, infrastructure, institutional depth, technology, professional opportunity, and sheer competence of parts of the system are extraordinary. Living inside it can make weaknesses in South Africa feel much more visible.

But that does not require the conclusion that American life is simply a higher rung of civilization. You can simultaneously notice things that South Africa may preserve better: social warmth, informality, stronger extended-family or friendship cultures, less obsession with professional identity, a different relationship to leisure, or simply a sense that people can feel more human and less optimized. [5]

The slightly uncomfortable second half to Karsa's story is as follows: once you have left the mountains, you cannot fully go back. Exposure makes you more critical of home too. Things that once seemed normal can start looking dysfunctional, complacent, or needlessly limiting. So you can end up belonging psychologically to neither place completely. For me, America destroys some illusions about South Africa, while South Africa gives me a vantage point from which some American assumptions look bizarre.

You need to decide what to do with that knowledge. Do you hold on to a piece of home with the conviction that it will help you do better in the country you have moved to? Or do you take what you have learnt from that new country back home and make it a better place?

I have made up my mind, at least for now. I feel closer to the center of something I have been circling my entire life, and I am not yet ready to leave.

"Witness? Yes, you are witness. Even so, what I shall shape, you cannot imagine. No one can." – Karsa Orlong

"Let him who would move the world first move himself." – Socrates

"Set the controls for the heart of the sun." – Pink Floyd

What will you shape? How will you move?

I had been contemplating this essay in the weeks leading up to my anniversary, but the date truly snuck up on me. As such there is no one to thank for reviewing any drafts, but of course there is a mob of people I feel grateful to on both sides of the Atlantic. To name a few who barged into my thoughts while writing: thank you Jono Tooke, Shane Weisz, Daniel Van Reenen, Adam Gear, James Hart, Stephen Chang, Manfredi Bernardi, Edmond Valar, Romi Wagner, Jessica Sun, Anton Hantel, John Koury, Dave Bisceglia, Amanda Herson, David Frankel, Henk van Biljon, Simon Lee, Nathan Cloos, Gurjinder Dhaliwal; and, best for last, Mom.

Notes

[1] It is unfortunately quite expensive (you could fly to Nagano and ski for a week in the "Japanese Alps" for much the same price as a long weekend in Aspen), but diners and hostels do exist.

[2] There is some study about people walking on treadmills in an office. But beyond that, I am sure everyone knows the feeling of being pulled down by people visibly trying less, or who are negative about life.

[3] I have this thing where I really hate wasting white rice, because it used to be such a luxury good that some people would even trade their family heirlooms away to get some (I will literally use burnt rice to make tea or deodorize containers). Even though to most people in America it is laughably affordable today, I do this out of reverence for the dead. Though hyperspecific, whether people I speak to find this behavior pathetic vs. quirky is a litmus test for what kind of person they are.

[4] You will notice who friends of convenience are when people graduate, or intern in the same city as you but never reach out – or you do not feel the need to reach out to them.

[5] This is very akin to how Japan reconciled its national identity and sense of moral character with the West's military-industrial might during the Meiji period. It even developed the slogan *wakon yōsai – "Japanese Spirit, Western Learning"*.