She’s still moving to Doha
On global lives, family trade-offs, and the operational design that makes the choice possible.
A woman messaged me on Instagram a while back. We have daughters the same age. We finally met up in person last week, which, I’ll be honest, is a growth edge for me.
I built a business that doesn’t require me to leave my desk. A team across three countries, clients who don’t need to see my office, and a calendar that mostly belongs to me. The default setting is to stay there and let the work do the talking.
But the work doesn’t introduce you to a woman with a daughter the same age as mine. The work doesn’t put you in a room with another founder making the same kind of decisions you are. That part is on me.
So this year I’m choosing it. More coffees, more in-person meetings, more saying yes when someone suggests we actually get together. It isn’t my natural mode. It’s the mode I’m building into.
And it’s how I ended up sitting across from her last week, hearing that despite everything happening in the world, she’s still planning her move to Doha.
That stayed with me.
Not because it surprised me. I’ve lived here long enough to know what this place actually is, versus what the news tells you it is. I feel safer here than I would in the States. My kids walk into school every day. Life keeps moving. If anything were to shift, the government here knows how to hold the line.
That’s not the feeling I had growing up in America.
I’m old enough to remember bomb threats clearing out the school for the afternoon. We treated it like an inconvenience. A break in the day. Now my friends back home are dropping their kids off at schools with active shooter protocols printed in the parent handbook. Daily news cycles of children who didn’t come home. That isn’t a backdrop I’m willing to give my kids. It’s not the feeling I want them to inherit.
So when this woman told me she was still planning her move, I understood it instantly. But what struck me was something quieter underneath it.
She’s making the decision. On purpose. Because the life she wants for her family doesn’t exist by default in the place she’s leaving.
That’s the part most people skip.
Most lives are absorbed, not designed. You stay where you grew up because that's where you grew up. You raise your kids the way you were raised because that’s the script you have. You build the business everyone else is building because that’s what’s in front of you. And one day you look up and notice that the life you have isn’t the one you would have chosen if anyone had asked you to choose.
The founders I work with are a particular version of this.
Technically, they’re free to live anywhere. They run remote businesses. They have laptops, passports, and clients. What they don’t have is a business that can survive their absence. The whole thing runs through them. Decisions, quality, context, problem-solving. All of it routes back to one person.
So the freedom is theoretical. They could go anywhere on paper. They can’t actually leave.
I watched an old video yesterday. My daughter was seven months old, and we were on a surprise trip to Florida to see my Aunt for Mother’s Day. This was before Copenhagen. Before Doha. Before any of this life I have today, and it brought tears.
The trade-off is real, and I won’t pretend otherwise. My girls have an extraordinary relationship with their grandmother on their dad’s side. They see her often. I’m genuinely grateful for that. But my mom, the grandmother on my side, is in America. What they have with her is FaceTime. Long calls, regular ones, real love. Not the same as a Sunday dinner or a weekend at grandma’s house.
I miss that for them. I miss it for me.
But here’s what I keep coming back to.
A global life isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s an operational one. The trade-offs are real, and they’re chosen, not absorbed by accident. You can only choose them, weigh them, design around them, if the business you’ve built can run without you holding it together every day.
That’s the whole game for me right now. Not lifestyle design. Operational design. Building the kind of company that gives you the room to make the global decision, whatever yours turns out to be.
Hers is Doha.
Mine, for now, is the same.
Yours might be something else entirely.
The point is that you get to decide!