Is death a prerequisite to a happy ending? But if you’re dead, maybe that’s not such a happy ending, is it?

I guess my question is: When do you know that a story–or at least a chapter of your life–has ended? I’ve found that this question can apply equally to one’s personal life (when do you know that a relationship isn’t working out?) and to the life of a business as well. With my first start-up, I often wondered: When is it time to call it quits? Or is this just the dramatic climax before getting to the eventual happy ending? Hindsight is always 20-20, as we say in the US, but is hindsight is a prerequisite to being able to analyse and understand your personal story? Maybe I just need a really good therapist.

One of my favourite happy ending movies of all time is “Pretty Woman”. But who knows what happens after Julia Roberts “rescues” Richard Gere? Maybe 3 months later he finds a hot intern who also has a heart of gold but without such a suspect past. Maybe she finds out she had some sort of life-threatening sexual disease spawned from her time in the backseats of so many cars.

My life has been a series of happy endings followed by unforeseen complicating details:

• I got into Yale College thinking that it was the logical result of my hard work in high school, and that the mission was accomplished, but then I realised that the real hard work had only just begun and now the mission was to get into Yale Law School.
• I got into Yale Law School and then realised that nothing that I had done before mattered other than as preparation, because the real goal was to get onto law journal, and then to get to be executive editor, and then to get an appeals court clerkship, and then to get a Supreme Court clerkship, and then to become a professor at an Ivy League law school, and then to become the most published and famous law professor of all time, and then . . . .

This explains a large part of why I left the US. We’re a country of deferred gratification, whereas Europeans seem more focused on living for today. One of my best friends in law school was a Rhodes Scholar, one of the most brilliant students there with killer recommendations from the top professors, a brilliant career as a law school professor ahead of her and job offers from Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. All of this being a black, Jamaican woman with a very thick accent. From her perspective, she got “off-track” when she didn’t get the Supreme Court clerkship. She became borderline suicidal. She was so obsessed with achieving her goal that her fiance ended up leaving her, because the thought of marrying him was not enough to satisfy her, and he didn’t want to marry someone like that. Achieving a desired professional milestone was much more important than personal fulfillment and more important than her supposed life partner.

I realised at that moment that I didn’t want to go down that road. Professional success is important, but there are other things that are more important in life. That’s when I decided that I was going to Europe–the land of living for today. At Yale Law School, they’d promised that it was time to “get off the treadmill”. That we’d finally arrived. That we’d no longer need to continue the hyper-competitive tendencies that had taken us to the summit of American legal education. And as a token of good faith, they’d told us that there were no grades. Just pass or fail (and of course, for exceptional efforts, honours). The weird thing is that the lack of grades just made us more competitive and we simply found new ways to validate our superiority relative to our peers, to the extent that things life a judicial clerkship and law journal became literally a matter of life-and-death (even though anyYale Law graduate will get a job at 95% of the top US law firms–and thus a starting salary of $150.000 plus bonus–without either a clerkship or law journal being a prerequisite).

In Spain, let’s just say that I don’t have this problem of a hypercompetitive environment. As my fellow expats and I often muse, we love Europe, because here people “work to live” rather than “live to work”. I have become an avid skier, have done lots of wine tasting, have travelled a lot, made a lot of friends, don’t mind a good party, spend lots of time at the beach and walking in the city . . . . Life is much more relaxed and personally fulfilling here, but as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, this comes at the cost of a more competitive economy and thus professional opportunities. Having a nation of citizens who believe that professional success is a matter of life-and-death really boosts productivity. Having a nation of people who don’t value success as much leads to a relatively happy population, but not so much productivity. I’m sure there’s a better balance to be found, but I haven’t found it in any of my travels.

More recently, I started to think about happy endings when my company, Goa Internet Services, was selected by a group of editors as one of the 100 most innovative companies in Europe. Within a few weeks, we’ll be off to the French Riviera to network with international venture capitalists, press and other entrepreneurs. We know that it’s no guarantee of VC-funding, but I was still really, really excited about the honour . . . until they sent the pro forma invoice telling us how much it would cost to attend. Once again, a happy ending with unforeseen strings attached. A new chapter begins . . . .