The Pleasure of Change
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In this letter, I am going to talk to you about how what looks like a massive change was actually a series of big changes. I am doing it because I want to show you that making career shifts are not only possible, but that they can be pleasurable. The rub being that pleasure is not inevitable. It is a choice. It's a special kind of choice because it opens you to a simple truth: you cannot do it alone.
When I decided to apprentice myself to my mentor, I went down a path of becoming a functional expert in helping people make career changes happen. My own career shift has been a way for me to become a person who can help others who want to make changes (at any scale) in their careers. It is seductive to think that we are the only ones impacted by our decisions to change; that is never true. Depending on the size of change, you need different kinds of support. I made many big changes and so I needed a number of people who aligned with the spirit of what I was trying to do and help me get there. At the end of this email, I'll share my list of functional experts because they are people who invested in and aligned themselves with the kind of change I wanted to make and helped me to make it pleasurable.
In August 2025, I started my 40th year in a new apartment in a new part of New York City, in a new career of my choosing. This August on my 41st birthday, once again, I find myself in a new apartment. Only this time it's in a new city, where I am learning a new language, and I am still, very happily, making my way in my new career. If that feels linear, I promise you it was not.
In the original version of my plan, I would be out of New York by the end of October 2025. I was going to do everything related to my new business from Madrid. I was going to move into a permanent apartment in a neighborhood that I loved. I was so eager for a change that I assumed everything would fall into place if I wanted it badly enough. In sense, this was me hoping that vibes, rather than a real plan, would carry me. I've driven massive change in large (and occasionally very large) organizations for long enough to know that this approach is actually the best way to ensure that nothing changes[1].
I spent most of August lying on that couch in Brooklyn dreading the number of things I needed to accomplish to be out of New York by October. By that point, my 12 weeks to accomplish all those tasks had become 8 and each day my stress grew. When I spoke to my mentor about this he reminded me of something that I had misplaced briefly in the midst of my massive change(s). He said: "Our clients come to us because we model what happiness and satisfaction in a career can look like. If you aren't doing that in your own career (and life), you aren't actually showing your clients that what we say is possible is actually achievable for them".
This conversation woke me up.
If I listed out the things that I had done since I resigned and then looked at all the things I had left to do, my frozen response made sense. From the time I had resigned, I had: negotiated my exit, incorporated Matka, landed my first major corporate client, packed up 90% of my belongings and moved them to storage, found a tenant for my apartment, moved out of my apartment, moved into a temporary apartment[2]. I had also started calling friends and colleagues (i.e. you!) helping them understand this big pivot I was taking asking them if they could introduce me to friends who felt lost in their careers who might need my help. A former boss (a no-nonsense senior executive who knows exactly what he's talking about) very kindly pointed out that I did not even have a website explaining what I did. I realized that I was pushing to move fast because I associated speed with success. This was not helping me here.
My friend, artist and textile-expert, Nikita re-introduced me to a word: "fursat". When I studied Arabic, I knew that the word means (among others) a vacation, a retreat, a rest. The texture of this word changed when it made its way into Hindustani (through Farsi) where it's come to mean quotidian pleasure of everyday life, the pleasure of moving with the tide and the season. Fursat is way of being that prioritizes what needs to be done over what must be done. My mentor reminded me that pleasure was a need as much as my former boss reminded me that having a website was also a need. There was a pleasurable way to make my change. And this pleasure was essential to my business and my authenticity in my new profession.
Taking a step back, I asked myself, what were the things in my life that I could take pleasure from. Where could I take more pleasure? Where could I release the "must" a little bit?
So I took stock: I had moved to Brooklyn to be within walking distance of my boyfriend before our relationship went long-distance. I had two whole decades of friends in New York that I hadn't had the time to enjoy and wouldn't have as much access to when I lived in Spain. I thought about my favorite event from the summer of 2025 - the New York City Drag March - and realized that I wanted to be there for Drag March 2026. From this vantage point, oriented around the things I enjoyed, I saw that there was no pressing need to move in 8 weeks because I needed more time with all the parts of my life that mattered to me.
With this spaciousness, I could properly focus on all the tasks associated with running my business and moving to a different country: immigration, taxes, technology, business development. Immediately, the tension became more manageable. When I paid attention to my needs, I understood that I deserved to cultivate pleasure in the midst of massive change. This was fursat. And don't you know: only when I started to embrace the pleasure of connecting with an attitude of happiness and plenitude did I land my first set of clients.
I will not pretend that this was a simple shift. The body gets used to operating under stress. And while I pushed myself hard in 2025, it was on the back of pushing myself for over a decade before that. It was only by consciously savoring that I was able to slow down enough, and I became myself again.
Next month I find out whether my Digital Nomad Visa application was approved or not. It will also be the end of my first 3 months in Madrid, and I am so excited to share all the things that have happend: from breaking my foot literally 1 hour after I sent the last of these emails, to how life is treating me as I settle into the rhythm of living in a completely different place.
As always: if you can think of 1-2 people who need more fursat as they navigate their careers, please forward them this email. If you, or someone you know, are thinking of making a move to new country and need someone to talk to, please come talk to me!
As promised here is the list of things I did in the fursat-ordered way with the people who helped me do them:
- Staying grounded through massive change: Dr Ryan Kull has been my therapist for a very long time. I cannot fathom having made it this far and through this volume of change without him. With gentle and insightful care, he's helped me develop the resilience and skills to take me through some of the biggest changes in my life over a relationship that is almost as long as mine with New York City.
- Employment & Contract negotiation: No matter how much trust you have with a party, and I have extremely high trust with all of my former employers, it is always good to have someone in your court. It's best if that person leads with integrity, pays close attention to detail, and collaborates effectively to preserve and respect that high trust you've built with your former employers. Eyad Asad at Cohen, Weiss & Simon had been that person for me.
- Website, Branding & Photography: I called RuAfza (aka Siddhant) in a flap about needing a website yesterday. She instantly understood what I was looking for and walked through what else I would need. Besides making me look really good in my photos, she really helped me balance tight messaging with creative direction in a very tight timeline.
- Taxes: Obviously, between going from being a full-time employee my whole life to starting my own company and moving to a different country I needed to think about my tax situation. I have had the fortune of working with a really good group of analytical and integrated people who were able to help me with my strategy. Melissa Rosenfeld at Lisch & Lisch has been helping me with my taxes in a clear and methodical way over more than a decade and helped me understand the tradeoffs with different corporate structures so I could make informed decisions for myself. Now that I am a digital nomad in Spain, I work with Heather Zapata and her team at Big Cake Tax who are uniquely positioned to understand the tax issues with digital nomads in Spain. Heather has a no-nonsense atttitude that has helped me prioritize what would make my life easiest. Along with her advice, I have worked with Jose Garcia at Your Spanish Tax Advisor to navigate the various complexities that arise for digital nomads in Spain. Jose has a comprehensive set of tools like tax simulations and scenario analyses that help him diagnose the right approach tailored to you.
- Actually becoming a digital nomad: Max Agazzi at Atlex Legal is one of the most patient and calm people I have worked with through this year. He's adapted through my changing target move dates and provided sage counsel as I have made these big decisions. He and his team have a really wonderful way of focusing on the most important action I need to take in the moment.
- Moving into my first Spanish apartment: John Vigil at Premium Stays went above and beyond for me. From late night calls in NYC (he is based in Spain, so this was early hours in Madrid), to checking out apartments and interviewing landlords, to negotiating a deal where I sign a 6-month lease with the option to extend further, John has been a real support in navigating the market. I am now in an excellently located, fully furnished apartment as I investigate the neighborhoods I want to be in longer term.
You'd be surprised the number of these types of organizations whose approach to change is simply prayer rather than a plan. I found myself doing the exact same thing at this moment in my life. ↩︎
Which meant that I had done the least fun thing in New York City - find a place to live and then move into it... ↩︎