“You’re flying to LA? Just to get a visa to Europe?”
My friend’s eyes widened in disbelief as she surveyed the mountain of paperwork sprawled across my dining room table.
Tax returns, credit card statements, employment contracts, proof of health insurance —basically everything short of a blood sample.
As a Turkish citizen living in the U.S. at the time, getting a 7-day tourist visa to Europe felt like training for an Olympic event. I had to physically drag myself—and this entire bureaucratic pile of documents—all the way to Los Angeles for an in-person interview at a consulate. The prize? Not gold, but a sticker that would grant me the superpower to step over a border.
Before I became a U.S. citizen, I must have lost months of my life enduring the soul-crushing ordeal of collecting documents, planning for months in advance, waiting in line at consulates for visa interviews, and enduring minor anxiety attacks in immigration lines—hoping that maybe this time I won’t be pulled aside for “additional questioning.”
Fast forward to the day my American passport arrived in the mail. I remember holding that little blue booklet in my hands, the golden eagle glinting in the light. Tears welled up—not just for the physical object, but for the liberation it represented. Years of anxiety melted away.
Most of my American friends don’t think twice about their passport. It’s not that they don’t appreciate their country; it’s that they’ve never had to think about their passport at all. To them, it’s a regular accessory, a key to the world that’s always been there on their keychain.
They don’t realize the weight of its power because they’ve never been burdened by its absence.
It’s not just about a passport, of course—it’s a broader point about recognizing privileges we often overlook. Most of us don’t wake up every day thinking about how amazing it is to breathe air. But when you’ve struggled to catch your breath, you never forget that feeling of relief when you finally can.
We are creatures wired for forgetfulness in joy. It’s in our nature. Over time, the extraordinary becomes ordinary, and the remarkable becomes routine.
We get so focused on what’s wrong that we forget to celebrate what’s right. The things we once yearned for fade into the background as we chase after the next big thing. And once something becomes the background, we stop noticing it. We only see the cracks, not the beauty.
It’s a shame to live inside a dream fulfilled, yet unnoticed, caught forever in the relentless pursuit of what’s next.
So, before you rush off to the next thing, take a beat. Look around at what you already have—the freedoms, the comforts, the moments that you once only dreamed of.
These days, crossing borders feels almost like a game to me. Every time I glide through immigration without a visa, I find myself doing a little victory dance at the airport—sometimes just in my mind, but often for real.
It’s a playful way of reminding myself to appreciate what I have.
Because the key to contentment often isn’t in having more—it’s in remembering how much you already have.
P.S. I’m SO excited to re-open the doors to my blockbuster course, The AI Advantage, in just a few weeks.
The course that transformed the game for nearly 400 students—deemed “the best online class I’ve ever taken” by a previous participant—is getting even better with the upgrades brewing in my lab.
👉 Be the first to know when doors open by jumping onto the waitlist at this link.
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