[Applause]
okay so when I say biggest fear how many
of you immediately think have a specific
thing I’m sure that for many of you
that’s a pretty abstract question and I
wish that I could say that my biggest
fear is something like loneliness or
global warming changing the world as we
know it or war but it’s not my biggest
fear is something far more simple and
far more material what I fear more than
anything else is a single gray office
cubicle
now that cubicle has offended a great
desk a great computer a great mousepad
but that grayness that I’m speaking
about it bleeds out into the rest of my
office into my grey colleagues into the
grey weather outside into the grey sound
of meetings upon meetings before finally
my gray bus ride home now
this fear has less to do with the fact
that I’m colorblind and a lot more to do
with exaggeration sometimes I need to
exaggerate all of that grayness in order
to be able to frighten myself enough and
maybe that might make not a lot of sense
right now but hopefully it will by the
end of my talk because today I want to
talk about fear as something that’s
silly as something that’s inevitable and
most importantly as something that’s
absolutely necessary I’ve come to
realize now in my mid-20s that if I’m
not afraid on a daily basis well that
I’m doing something wrong when I was
about four my father let me watch
Jurassic Park and for those of you who
don’t know it’s a film about wild
dinosaurs roaming on an island and
eating all the visitors and I remember
this moment because it’s my first memory
of being truly afraid and funny enough
it wasn’t during the film that I
remember being scared although I might
have suppressed that who knows but it
was actually that evening waking up in
the middle of the night because I had
dreamt that a t-rex bit through the roof
of our apartment in Phoenix Arizona that
I remember walk into the kitchen and
trying to explain to my parents that I
couldn’t go back into my room because
well there was no longer a roof there
it’s that period in a child’s life where
you have difficulty differentiating
dreams from reality and you wake up
looking something like this every
morning
and as I was growing up many of my fears
were tied into films about evil children
in small villages about sharks and dark
waters but also about other things the
children are normally afraid of such as
spiders underneath the sink Heights
girls shriek Annamma tree but do you
know what the opposite of fear was for
me growing up it was Bulgaria and where
more specifically it was a small town in
central Bulgaria called Sibley though
now I’ve tried for a very very long time
to explain what it was exactly about
this town but I think there’s something
to be said about those early mornings on
the river about the smell of my
grandmother’s cooking first thing when I
woke up and about that feeling of
endlessness that ironically you can only
get often the smallest of towns that
just made sense it was a place where I
wanted to be a part of everything of
every street game of every secret
hideout of every breath that somebody
takes before diving off a cliff into the
river below and I remember there was
even this fear of mine one summer that I
wouldn’t be there when my grandmother’s
laundry machine was finally fixed and
this viewer had less to do with the fact
that I wouldn’t have to wash clothes by
hand as much as it was about the fact
that I would miss out on something
however small and trivial it was it was
important for me in the overall
clockwork of that town now sea level was
a place as I’ve mentioned that I’ve had
a lot of memories and the thing is all
these fears that I’ve spoken about so
far are sort of silly there are fears
about prehistoric animals eating you in
the middle of the night or not being
there for the installation of a home
appliance but I came to understand fear
in a different way in May of 2013 and at
this point in my life as a 24 year old
I have no living grandparents left
within the country and May of 2013 was
the first big death in my family my
grandmother enslave Oh passed away and I
think from the very little that I’ve
told you so far about my memories there
you can understand that having her pass
away was the equivalent of taking out
the crown of a wristwatch which is the
winding mechanism and so I started to
wonder I started to think how much time
did I have before this place stopped
feeling like home
and before that I didn’t really think of
time as something to really fear in fact
maybe I was too liberal with it I didn’t
think about how quickly my summers
passed by or what I achieved in between
because in the
that one against the whole point of
being a teenager right I mean I could be
nostalgic about my friends about my
childhood memories but something like a
five-year plan now not for me but that
was before I lost the comfort of being
at home with my family and my friends
because time when I was a child existed
only during my summers and everything
else was sort of just this winding down
until the following May or June at this
point in my life as a 24 year old time
matters a whole lot to me it scares me
and very often it controls me but it
matters a whole lot now in the same way
in the beginning of the talk I asked
about everyone’s fear I want to ask
another question maybe this time with a
show of hands and that’s how many of you
knew a hundred percent and I mean 100
percent what you wanted to do in
university
exactly exactly
neither did I I still don’t understand
how anybody expected my mind at 18 or 19
years of age to come up with such a
monumental decision I mean I was having
enough trouble deciding what I wanted
from a vending machine let alone what I
wanted my life to be I didn’t know one
thing though and that’s that anything
that kept me in one spot where I had to
sit behind a desk rifle through emails
enter the office at sunrise and leave at
sunset in the winter was not a place I
want it to be and I think it’s clear
that my fear of time and that of gray
office cubicle slowly starts to go hand
in hand here because there’s something
infinitely frightening about this
hypothetical scenario if we take a
hundred gray cubicles with great
keyboards gray mouse pads all next to
each other and that’s that everybody’s
time seems to pass by and more or less
the same way
I mean sure different meetings different
phone calls different snacks in the
cupboards different photos of island X
that the family went to last December
but overall there’s this unison which
scares me and so I started to think I
started to wonder what jobs what career
paths would allow time to constantly
flow in an interesting way and my first
thought was journalism I mean I loved
writing I had just gone into filming and
there was something infinitely
interesting about talking to countless
people all with their own stories from
their lives and their ambitions maybe
journalism would make time feel more
meaningful and so I tried for a year
studying
in Canada and the problem is that I
quickly came to the following conclusion
and that’s that if something doesn’t
excite me if it doesn’t feel right if
it’s not something that I look forward
to every day what’s the point of waiting
for it all to make sense
our generation using its infinite wisdom
has come up with a perfect word for this
that’s used for all the most stupid
reasons but jokes aside though I
remember in my first year because
covering local elections in a town in
Canada isn’t as exciting as it sounds
and being constantly told by my teachers
that a career in journalism was
necessarily supplemented by a part-time
job as a barista whether I was using my
time in the right way I started to get
scared because in the end I thought that
hey maybe I might just end up behind
another desk and so I switched
universities moving from one to another
this time to focus on something that I
never thought I would international law
me in the Netherlands somebody who has
trouble deciding between more than one
option on a menu
being asked to argue something out of
global importance it didn’t really make
a whole lot of sense but human rights
that though because it was sort of like
journalism in a way I mean you get to
talk with new and interesting people
from all around the world with important
human stories to tell maybe human rights
would make time feel more meaningful and
I guess that’s what we all want right
whether it’s a friendship a relationship
that next Netflix series that you’re
gonna binge watch an hour before your
exam it’s that question of substance
that question of weight that goes into
so much of what we do and the thing is I
didn’t find that substance in my first
year in the Netherlands because do you
know when you realize the time is being
wasted for me it was when everybody in
my class was dying to talk about their
opinion on European Union legislation
and I was sitting there just trying to
calculate my grocery cost for the next
week I realized that I was gonna spend
my 3 years doing something I was only
half involved in but and this isn’t
important but I didn’t want to drop out
of an ivory university out of
uncertainty because maybe some things
you have to slowly come to like and
while I waited for that specific
transition I met a good friend of mine
who similarly was looking for a way to
make his three years in university more
interesting now I’m skipping over a lot
but at the end of our first year at the
ripe age of 20 without
any knowledge of taxes company
management basically what money is as a
whole we founded our freelance
documentary and film company in the
hague and it’s an interesting feeling
starting a company out of fear fear that
time felt insignificant and that if I
wasn’t gonna be that one lawyer in my
class who stood out then I was just
gonna be another one of those stuck
behind a great desk and there are two
reasons why my fear of time and have
great cubicles slowly diminished over
the three and a half years that we ran
our company and the first being that we
were traveling to new and interesting
places to Asia to Africa to Western
Europe all to film these projects there
were about real human stories and the
thing is time began to feel so abstract
so imprecise because an hour and Tokyo
feels a whole lot different than an hour
in the mountain villages of Nepal and
the second reason why my fear of time in
office cubicles diminished was because
it was replaced by a far bigger far
greater fear taxes bureaucracy trying to
manage both of those in a country where
you don’t speak the language and you
don’t understand those blue letters
coming in through your mailbox without
Google Translate I did pick up at the
end of the three and a half years though
that van de Koning or by the order of
the king was a pretty big deal as far as
fines went to go and so those new
thoughts new experiences new people
every day constantly kept things
interesting and the thing is it’s easy
to have a fear like a great cubicle
because it doesn’t really change I mean
it doesn’t change forms it’s not
something abstract and most importantly
it’s not something that tries to
convince you that it’s not something you
should be afraid of and because of that
it’s very easy to justify a lot of
things for yourself based on this very
material fear whether that’s late nights
working or investing money you’re not
comfortable with or not being there for
people it all made sense in the end if
it meant that I could push away all of
that brainless that I was so frightened
by because in the end the opposite of
your worst fear must be some form of
happiness right well yes and no I don’t
know maybe it’s the fact that I’m still
very young but a bit over a year ago I
started to notice time passing by yet
again and it didn’t really make sense
because I was doing something that I
loved I was getting the opportunity to
travel to new and interesting places
why then that I suddenly start to worry
about how I was using my time and here’s
the thing I think sometimes when you’re
focusing so much on your ambitions when
you’re constantly trying to reach those
goals that you’ve set for yourself you
can forget about a whole lot of your
life I know that was the case with me I
didn’t believe in burnouts I also didn’t
believe that I would ever reach a state
of unhappiness that I couldn’t pull
myself out of because in the end you
can’t really plan sadness and the thing
is everyone was constantly telling me
that I was doing all these interesting
things getting to go to all these
interesting places that for a very long
time I convinced myself that my
unhappiness was something else maybe it
was tied in with the weather maybe I was
a bit tired of the Netherlands or who
knows maybe it wasn’t my week but then
it didn’t go away not when I went to
sunnier places not when I travelled to
the opposite corners of the world and
certainly not a few weeks later or a few
months I don’t want to put a label on
anything I was feeling but I went to a
liberal arts school or depression was
treated as a very normal thing as
something that everybody should feel
comfortable talking about and the thing
is I was never one of those people who
felt comfortable talking about that I
had been to countries both first and
third world where people had suffered
through things I couldn’t possibly
imagine the death of children of parents
of family members what right that I have
to think that any of my issues were
valid and the thing is that way of
thinking worked for a very long time but
at one point I reached the third fear
that I’d like to talk about today which
is possibly the most difficult to
describe and that’s fear for oneself now
I mentioned earlier that it’s easy to
fear something like a gray office
cubicle but it’s also easy to fear
Heights girls time on dark places open
spaces because all of those things
technically in one way or never can be
avoided but fearing for yourself without
really knowing what you’re afraid of
except that it simply doesn’t feel good
on a daily basis well that I wasn’t
prepared for in May of 2017 I left the
company that I’d spent three years
building with my friend and came back to
Bulgaria to create the single biggest
tourism campaign ever men have made
about this country I traveled for four
months with a beat-up old car filming 50
episodes and uploading them online and
the thing is I call it a tourism series
but we might as well call it what it is
it’s a mid midlife crisis
and the thing is that I got the
opportunity to talk about this project
at a lot of different media’s in the
country and the question I inevitably
got asked all the time was the same and
it’s what made you come back and do this
and the answer that I always gave was
the same it was cliched it’s my summers
here that made me come back it’s my
memories from being a kid and sure as I
told you all that’s technically true in
a way my summers were everything to me
nostalgia drives me on a daily basis but
that’s not the reason I came back the
reason I came back is honestly because I
ran away from a lot of things but most
importantly from dealing with a fear
that I wasn’t prepared for and so I
thought to myself that coming back to
the country where all my biggest fears
such as time started what helped me
figure some things out and now that
project is over and the fact that that
romanticism and adrenaline rush of road
tripping across the country is done i
sat down and I started to think a bit
happier a bit calmer now what do I want
to do with my life and I’d spent four
months constantly going back and forth
doing interviews for different media
organizations that I thought to myself I
want to be behind the camera again I
want to start a new media company maybe
it was time to stop working alone and in
February after sending out countless
messages to different organizations and
not receiving any response in Bulgaria I
started to wonder like maybe my luck had
run out I mean I was constantly being
asked for four months to be here and
there for interviews and now I was
thinking to myself that maybe it was
time to get a job a real job as some
people might call it and so I started
looking online at media organizations
nonprofit tech companies and I started
to do the one thing that I never thought
I would do I started to look for a desk
job and I started to think to myself
that you know maybe I might develop in
ways that I hadn’t thought about maybe
it might be good for me who knows maybe
I might actually like being behind a
desk but then I stopped and I forced
myself to imagine an even darker shade
of that initial gray cubicle that
frightened me so much and that’s why I
mention in the beginning that sometimes
it’s necessary to exaggerate your fears
I don’t want anyone going away thinking
I’m oblivious to the fact that modern
workstations that aren’t square shaped
and gray don’t exist I know they do I’ve
had friends work at hedge funds
development organizations tech startups
with offices that make my open working
space at home look like a sheep’s pen I
know
these places exist but more often than
not I need to pretend like
because I know that my goal of working
on something big on something that
matters and on something most
importantly that’s my own isn’t going to
be easy and I’ve gone through enough
fears in my life so far ranging from
dinosaurs to time to uncertainty that
fearing a gray office cubicle and making
it out to be the single greatest threat
I face makes more sense than anything
else even if most of that fear is
fabricated and so I want to finish on
one last thought and that’s that they
say we should overcome our fears and if
that’s a fear of the opposite sex or
trigonometry then you know go for it
but I’ve co-founded a company out of
fear I came back to Bulgaria to buy a
500 year old car to road trip across the
country out of fear and I’m gonna make
sure that I don’t lose sight on any of
my goals out of an increasingly
exaggerated fear of a single gray office
cubicle I hate but I also love that
cubicle and everything it stands for
thank you [Applause]
okay so when I say biggest fear how many
of you immediately think have a specific
thing I’m sure that for many of you
that’s a pretty abstract question and I
wish that I could say that my biggest
fear is something like loneliness or
global warming changing the world as we
know it or war but it’s not my biggest
fear is something far more simple and
far more material what I fear more than
anything else is a single gray office
cubicle
now that cubicle has offended a great
desk a great computer a great mousepad
but that grayness that I’m speaking
about it bleeds out into the rest of my
office into my grey colleagues into the
grey weather outside into the grey sound
of meetings upon meetings before finally
my gray bus ride home now
this fear has less to do with the fact
that I’m colorblind and a lot more to do
with exaggeration sometimes I need to
exaggerate all of that grayness in order
to be able to frighten myself enough and
maybe that might make not a lot of sense
right now but hopefully it will by the
end of my talk because today I want to
talk about fear as something that’s
silly as something that’s inevitable and
most importantly as something that’s
absolutely necessary I’ve come to
realize now in my mid-20s that if I’m
not afraid on a daily basis well that
I’m doing something wrong when I was
about four my father let me watch
Jurassic Park and for those of you who
don’t know it’s a film about wild
dinosaurs roaming on an island and
eating all the visitors and I remember
this moment because it’s my first memory
of being truly afraid and funny enough
it wasn’t during the film that I
remember being scared although I might
have suppressed that who knows but it
was actually that evening waking up in
the middle of the night because I had
dreamt that a t-rex bit through the roof
of our apartment in Phoenix Arizona that
I remember walk into the kitchen and
trying to explain to my parents that I
couldn’t go back into my room because
well there was no longer a roof there
it’s that period in a child’s life where
you have difficulty differentiating
dreams from reality and you wake up
looking something like this every
morning
and as I was growing up many of my fears
were tied into films about evil children
in small villages about sharks and dark
waters but also about other things the
children are normally afraid of such as
spiders underneath the sink Heights
girls shriek Annamma tree but do you
know what the opposite of fear was for
me growing up it was Bulgaria and where
more specifically it was a small town in
central Bulgaria called Sibley though
now I’ve tried for a very very long time
to explain what it was exactly about
this town but I think there’s something
to be said about those early mornings on
the river about the smell of my
grandmother’s cooking first thing when I
woke up and about that feeling of
endlessness that ironically you can only
get often the smallest of towns that
just made sense it was a place where I
wanted to be a part of everything of
every street game of every secret
hideout of every breath that somebody
takes before diving off a cliff into the
river below and I remember there was
even this fear of mine one summer that I
wouldn’t be there when my grandmother’s
laundry machine was finally fixed and
this viewer had less to do with the fact
that I wouldn’t have to wash clothes by
hand as much as it was about the fact
that I would miss out on something
however small and trivial it was it was
important for me in the overall
clockwork of that town now sea level was
a place as I’ve mentioned that I’ve had
a lot of memories and the thing is all
these fears that I’ve spoken about so
far are sort of silly there are fears
about prehistoric animals eating you in
the middle of the night or not being
there for the installation of a home
appliance but I came to understand fear
in a different way in May of 2013 and at
this point in my life as a 24 year old
I have no living grandparents left
within the country and May of 2013 was
the first big death in my family my
grandmother enslave Oh passed away and I
think from the very little that I’ve
told you so far about my memories there
you can understand that having her pass
away was the equivalent of taking out
the crown of a wristwatch which is the
winding mechanism and so I started to
wonder I started to think how much time
did I have before this place stopped
feeling like home
and before that I didn’t really think of
time as something to really fear in fact
maybe I was too liberal with it I didn’t
think about how quickly my summers
passed by or what I achieved in between
because in the
that one against the whole point of
being a teenager right I mean I could be
nostalgic about my friends about my
childhood memories but something like a
five-year plan now not for me but that
was before I lost the comfort of being
at home with my family and my friends
because time when I was a child existed
only during my summers and everything
else was sort of just this winding down
until the following May or June at this
point in my life as a 24 year old time
matters a whole lot to me it scares me
and very often it controls me but it
matters a whole lot now in the same way
in the beginning of the talk I asked
about everyone’s fear I want to ask
another question maybe this time with a
show of hands and that’s how many of you
knew a hundred percent and I mean 100
percent what you wanted to do in
university
exactly exactly
neither did I I still don’t understand
how anybody expected my mind at 18 or 19
years of age to come up with such a
monumental decision I mean I was having
enough trouble deciding what I wanted
from a vending machine let alone what I
wanted my life to be I didn’t know one
thing though and that’s that anything
that kept me in one spot where I had to
sit behind a desk rifle through emails
enter the office at sunrise and leave at
sunset in the winter was not a place I
want it to be and I think it’s clear
that my fear of time and that of gray
office cubicle slowly starts to go hand
in hand here because there’s something
infinitely frightening about this
hypothetical scenario if we take a
hundred gray cubicles with great
keyboards gray mouse pads all next to
each other and that’s that everybody’s
time seems to pass by and more or less
the same way
I mean sure different meetings different
phone calls different snacks in the
cupboards different photos of island X
that the family went to last December
but overall there’s this unison which
scares me and so I started to think I
started to wonder what jobs what career
paths would allow time to constantly
flow in an interesting way and my first
thought was journalism I mean I loved
writing I had just gone into filming and
there was something infinitely
interesting about talking to countless
people all with their own stories from
their lives and their ambitions maybe
journalism would make time feel more
meaningful and so I tried for a year
studying
in Canada and the problem is that I
quickly came to the following conclusion
and that’s that if something doesn’t
excite me if it doesn’t feel right if
it’s not something that I look forward
to every day what’s the point of waiting
for it all to make sense
our generation using its infinite wisdom
has come up with a perfect word for this
that’s used for all the most stupid
reasons but jokes aside though I
remember in my first year because
covering local elections in a town in
Canada isn’t as exciting as it sounds
and being constantly told by my teachers
that a career in journalism was
necessarily supplemented by a part-time
job as a barista whether I was using my
time in the right way I started to get
scared because in the end I thought that
hey maybe I might just end up behind
another desk and so I switched
universities moving from one to another
this time to focus on something that I
never thought I would international law
me in the Netherlands somebody who has
trouble deciding between more than one
option on a menu
being asked to argue something out of
global importance it didn’t really make
a whole lot of sense but human rights
that though because it was sort of like
journalism in a way I mean you get to
talk with new and interesting people
from all around the world with important
human stories to tell maybe human rights
would make time feel more meaningful and
I guess that’s what we all want right
whether it’s a friendship a relationship
that next Netflix series that you’re
gonna binge watch an hour before your
exam it’s that question of substance
that question of weight that goes into
so much of what we do and the thing is I
didn’t find that substance in my first
year in the Netherlands because do you
know when you realize the time is being
wasted for me it was when everybody in
my class was dying to talk about their
opinion on European Union legislation
and I was sitting there just trying to
calculate my grocery cost for the next
week I realized that I was gonna spend
my 3 years doing something I was only
half involved in but and this isn’t
important but I didn’t want to drop out
of an ivory university out of
uncertainty because maybe some things
you have to slowly come to like and
while I waited for that specific
transition I met a good friend of mine
who similarly was looking for a way to
make his three years in university more
interesting now I’m skipping over a lot
but at the end of our first year at the
ripe age of 20 without
any knowledge of taxes company
management basically what money is as a
whole we founded our freelance
documentary and film company in the
hague and it’s an interesting feeling
starting a company out of fear fear that
time felt insignificant and that if I
wasn’t gonna be that one lawyer in my
class who stood out then I was just
gonna be another one of those stuck
behind a great desk and there are two
reasons why my fear of time and have
great cubicles slowly diminished over
the three and a half years that we ran
our company and the first being that we
were traveling to new and interesting
places to Asia to Africa to Western
Europe all to film these projects there
were about real human stories and the
thing is time began to feel so abstract
so imprecise because an hour and Tokyo
feels a whole lot different than an hour
in the mountain villages of Nepal and
the second reason why my fear of time in
office cubicles diminished was because
it was replaced by a far bigger far
greater fear taxes bureaucracy trying to
manage both of those in a country where
you don’t speak the language and you
don’t understand those blue letters
coming in through your mailbox without
Google Translate I did pick up at the
end of the three and a half years though
that van de Koning or by the order of
the king was a pretty big deal as far as
fines went to go and so those new
thoughts new experiences new people
every day constantly kept things
interesting and the thing is it’s easy
to have a fear like a great cubicle
because it doesn’t really change I mean
it doesn’t change forms it’s not
something abstract and most importantly
it’s not something that tries to
convince you that it’s not something you
should be afraid of and because of that
it’s very easy to justify a lot of
things for yourself based on this very
material fear whether that’s late nights
working or investing money you’re not
comfortable with or not being there for
people it all made sense in the end if
it meant that I could push away all of
that brainless that I was so frightened
by because in the end the opposite of
your worst fear must be some form of
happiness right well yes and no I don’t
know maybe it’s the fact that I’m still
very young but a bit over a year ago I
started to notice time passing by yet
again and it didn’t really make sense
because I was doing something that I
loved I was getting the opportunity to
travel to new and interesting places
why then that I suddenly start to worry
about how I was using my time and here’s
the thing I think sometimes when you’re
focusing so much on your ambitions when
you’re constantly trying to reach those
goals that you’ve set for yourself you
can forget about a whole lot of your
life I know that was the case with me I
didn’t believe in burnouts I also didn’t
believe that I would ever reach a state
of unhappiness that I couldn’t pull
myself out of because in the end you
can’t really plan sadness and the thing
is everyone was constantly telling me
that I was doing all these interesting
things getting to go to all these
interesting places that for a very long
time I convinced myself that my
unhappiness was something else maybe it
was tied in with the weather maybe I was
a bit tired of the Netherlands or who
knows maybe it wasn’t my week but then
it didn’t go away not when I went to
sunnier places not when I travelled to
the opposite corners of the world and
certainly not a few weeks later or a few
months I don’t want to put a label on
anything I was feeling but I went to a
liberal arts school or depression was
treated as a very normal thing as
something that everybody should feel
comfortable talking about and the thing
is I was never one of those people who
felt comfortable talking about that I
had been to countries both first and
third world where people had suffered
through things I couldn’t possibly
imagine the death of children of parents
of family members what right that I have
to think that any of my issues were
valid and the thing is that way of
thinking worked for a very long time but
at one point I reached the third fear
that I’d like to talk about today which
is possibly the most difficult to
describe and that’s fear for oneself now
I mentioned earlier that it’s easy to
fear something like a gray office
cubicle but it’s also easy to fear
Heights girls time on dark places open
spaces because all of those things
technically in one way or never can be
avoided but fearing for yourself without
really knowing what you’re afraid of
except that it simply doesn’t feel good
on a daily basis well that I wasn’t
prepared for in May of 2017 I left the
company that I’d spent three years
building with my friend and came back to
Bulgaria to create the single biggest
tourism campaign ever men have made
about this country I traveled for four
months with a beat-up old car filming 50
episodes and uploading them online and
the thing is I call it a tourism series
but we might as well call it what it is
it’s a mid midlife crisis
and the thing is that I got the
opportunity to talk about this project
at a lot of different media’s in the
country and the question I inevitably
got asked all the time was the same and
it’s what made you come back and do this
and the answer that I always gave was
the same it was cliched it’s my summers
here that made me come back it’s my
memories from being a kid and sure as I
told you all that’s technically true in
a way my summers were everything to me
nostalgia drives me on a daily basis but
that’s not the reason I came back the
reason I came back is honestly because I
ran away from a lot of things but most
importantly from dealing with a fear
that I wasn’t prepared for and so I
thought to myself that coming back to
the country where all my biggest fears
such as time started what helped me
figure some things out and now that
project is over and the fact that that
romanticism and adrenaline rush of road
tripping across the country is done i
sat down and I started to think a bit
happier a bit calmer now what do I want
to do with my life and I’d spent four
months constantly going back and forth
doing interviews for different media
organizations that I thought to myself I
want to be behind the camera again I
want to start a new media company maybe
it was time to stop working alone and in
February after sending out countless
messages to different organizations and
not receiving any response in Bulgaria I
started to wonder like maybe my luck had
run out I mean I was constantly being
asked for four months to be here and
there for interviews and now I was
thinking to myself that maybe it was
time to get a job a real job as some
people might call it and so I started
looking online at media organizations
nonprofit tech companies and I started
to do the one thing that I never thought
I would do I started to look for a desk
job and I started to think to myself
that you know maybe I might develop in
ways that I hadn’t thought about maybe
it might be good for me who knows maybe
I might actually like being behind a
desk but then I stopped and I forced
myself to imagine an even darker shade
of that initial gray cubicle that
frightened me so much and that’s why I
mention in the beginning that sometimes
it’s necessary to exaggerate your fears
I don’t want anyone going away thinking
I’m oblivious to the fact that modern
workstations that aren’t square shaped
and gray don’t exist I know they do I’ve
had friends work at hedge funds
development organizations tech startups
with offices that make my open working
space at home look like a sheep’s pen I
know
these places exist but more often than
not I need to pretend like
because I know that my goal of working
on something big on something that
matters and on something most
importantly that’s my own isn’t going to
be easy and I’ve gone through enough
fears in my life so far ranging from
dinosaurs to time to uncertainty that
fearing a gray office cubicle and making
it out to be the single greatest threat
I face makes more sense than anything
else even if most of that fear is
fabricated and so I want to finish on
one last thought and that’s that they
say we should overcome our fears and if
that’s a fear of the opposite sex or
trigonometry then you know go for it
but I’ve co-founded a company out of
fear I came back to Bulgaria to buy a
500 year old car to road trip across the
country out of fear and I’m gonna make
sure that I don’t lose sight on any of
my goals out of an increasingly
exaggerated fear of a single gray office
cubicle I hate but I also love that
cubicle and everything it stands for
thank you [Applause]
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