I Didn't Want To Go

Why the hardest year of my teenage life became one of the best

Listen here.

I remember the day well. My mom and dad sat the three of us down at the kitchen table and dropped the news: we were moving to Kuwait for a year. My dad was an engineering professor and had the opportunity to take a sabbatical overseas.

This wasn’t the first time we had left home. During my 4th-grade year, we lived in Puebla, Mexico. But this was different. I was sixteen. A junior in high school. And I wanted nothing to do with it.

You have to understand where I was coming from. I’d grown up in a small town in Arkansas. I loved high school. I had a core group of friends. I played trombone in the band. I had finally found my place after hating junior high. And now my parents were asking me to leave all of it behind. A year would be forever!

My dad was born and raised in Kafr El-Shaikh, Egypt. His story is amazing (I will tell it here one day). My mother was born and raised in Mena, Arkansas. Those two cities are 6500 miles apart. The fact that my brother, my sister, and I are here is, in and of itself, miraculous. But their vastly different backgrounds meant they saw the world differently than I did. They wanted me to see beyond small-town Arkansas. They wanted me to know that the world was a much bigger place.

Back to the story. The first day I walked into The American School of Kuwait, I felt completely out of place.

Me, Magnus, and Faisal, our bus driver (not sure who the little kid is)

I didn’t recognize anyone. Kids seemed to know each other and were speaking all kinds of languages. I realized in that moment just how sheltered I’d been most of my life. The world was a lot bigger than I thought.

Those first few weeks and months were hard. I was resentful. I missed my friends. I wanted to go home.

But slowly things began to shift. I started connecting with people from all over the world, including Sweden, France, Greece, Jordan, Syria, Germany, and the Netherlands, to name a few. My closest friend was from Sweden. Magnus lived in our complex, and we had many adventures together.¹ I traveled with my family all over Europe. We visited my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins in Kafr El-Shaikh and took a cruise down the Nile River.

That year changed me.

I went to Kuwait as a shy, introverted kid who was comfortable with who I was comfortable with. I came back a different person. Not because I suddenly became an extrovert, but because I learned something I didn’t know I was missing: how to connect with people who were different from me.

I didn’t want the friction. I wanted to stay in Arkansas with my friends. But I would be a different person from the one I am today had I not gone.

That skill I learned in Kuwait, the ability to connect with people from different backgrounds, became the foundation for my entire career. Thirty years in the corporate world. Building relationships across teams and cultures. Mentoring engineers. Coaching leaders. Getting out of my comfort zone at sixteen paid dividends much later in my life.

I’m not special. Many people have been through much harder things than a year overseas. This is just my experience.

But I think the principle is the same for all of us.

Hard things shape who you become. The challenges you didn’t ask for, the life disruptions you resented, the discomfort you wanted to avoid. Those experiences gave you something. Maybe it’s grit. Maybe it’s empathy. Maybe it’s a skill you didn’t know you were building at the time.

So let me ask you: what hard thing helped shape who you are today? Maybe it was a move. A loss. A failure. A season that felt like it would never end.

And here’s the follow-up question: what gift did it give you?

Because there’s almost always a gift. You just have to look for it.

I’ve been doing a lot of work lately, walking people through their Purpose Factor assessment. Part of that process involves looking back at your life experiences and identifying what you learned. What skills did you build? What perspective did you gain? How can you use that to help others now?

I’m opening up a small group for those who want to discover what they were put on this earth to do and how to live out their purpose. If you’re interested in learning more, click this link to set up a short call with me: Authentic Purpose Mastermind.

But whether you join or not, take some time this week to reflect. Think about the hard thing. And look for the gift.

It’s there. I promise.

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1. Magnus introduced me to New Wave music: Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw, the Human League, and my all-time favorite, U2. I visited him and his family several years later in his hometown of Ängelholm.