What Iceland taught me about Life

A personal reflection, offered especially to anyone here who has grown bitter — about the closed doors, the connections they lack, the sense that the deck is stacked. Or who has been knocked down so hard they are not sure they can get back up. I have been in both of those places. This is what I found on the other side.

Let me tell you how I arrived at the life I now have, because it did not begin with success. It began at a great height — and then it began with a fall.

The height

I came to Iceland in 2006, near the top. I joined Glitnir as Executive Director on the Strategic Growth team — a team of three, reporting directly to the CEO of the bank. I was the internal consultant driving the bank’s expansion into the world: all of the mergers and acquisitions, the growth of every business unit, the work of taking a small Icelandic bank global.

And we did. When I joined, we had four offices. By 2008 we had offices in eleven countries, and we had grown the balance sheet tenfold. Those were wonderful, exciting years — building something across the world from a small island, at altitude, in the room where the decisions were made. I will not pretend, knowing how it ended, that all of that growth was wisdom; some of it was the fever of the era, and the era was fragile in ways few of us fully saw. But the work was real, and I was good at it, and I was, for those two years, as inside the machine of Icelandic finance as an outsider could possibly be.

Then, in 2008, the rug was pulled out from under my feet. The bank collapsed with the rest of the system. The thing I had helped build across eleven countries was simply gone.

The fall

For a while after, I took a job with the resolution committee, helping recover what could be recovered from the bank’s investments in Asia. From building a global bank to sitting at a recovery desk, most days staring at a screen with little real work to do. I have never been able to live inside work that produces nothing, and this produced nothing. So in early 2010 I decided to leave and find something worth doing.

I could not get a single interview. Not one.

Sit with that with me, because I had to. I hold three master’s degrees. I was a PhD candidate in economics. Two years earlier I had been in the CEO’s inner circle, growing a bank across the world. I was voted as one the five most valuable players in the bank of 2000 employees. And now, in the Iceland of 2010, not one door would open far enough even for a conversation. I watched people with far less on paper land on their feet and carry on. And the only difference I could name between them and me was that they were Icelandic, and I was not, and I looked different.

That is when I learned the thing no one tells you: being inside a system is not the same as belonging to it. My place at the top had been real, but it had been rented — and when the collapse ended the tenancy, I discovered how little of it had ever truly been mine.

I am going to be honest about what that did to me, because if I clean it up, this reflection is worthless to the person who needs it. I fell into depression. Not sadness — depression, the real thing, the kind that makes the day heavy before it has begun and empties the meaning out of things you used to care about. I had fallen from a height, lost the work that had defined me, and been shown a door that would not open, and I did not know who I was without the title and the company. I complained bitterly — behind closed doors, to my wife — about corruption, about cronyism, about a country that would let you in and then not let you belong. The easy exit was right there: my wife gently suggested we simply move back to the United States, where I could have my old job back with a single phone call. I could have done it. Many would have, and been right to.

I did not do it. I told her, instead, that I was going to fix this.

The thing bigger than myself

She asked the obvious question. What problem, exactly, are you going to fix?

I did not have a plan. I had a conviction: that anyone who could add real, net value to Icelandic society should be able to come here and do it — and that they should not have to be born Icelandic, or married into the right family, or connected to the right people, to succeed. I believed it with my whole heart, and I believed I could work on it, though I had no idea how.

And here is the part I most want to say plainly, for anyone reading this from inside their own darkness. What lifted me out was not that the depression simply passed, and it was not that I talked myself into feeling better. It was that I found something bigger than myself to give my life to — and turning toward it, day after day, slowly turned me back toward the living. I searched for what actually builds an open society, and I came back to a writer I had read closely, Nassim Taleb, and a line that lodged in me: that venture capital is the positive side of a black swan. I found Fred Wilson writing on the power law of venture returns, and Brad Feld on how you actually build a startup community, from the ground, in a networked world. The vague vow became a concrete mission: to build a vibrant community for founders — for anyone who wanted to build something valuable in Iceland, whoever they were, wherever they came from.

Focusing on that — something larger than my own wound — is what carried me out of the dark. I offer that as my truth, not as a prescription, because depression is not always a thing a person can purpose their way through, and if you are in it, there is no shame in needing more than a mission — a hand, a doctor, another person to sit with you in it. But for me, the work that was bigger than myself was the rope I climbed. It gave the days a direction, and direction, it turned out, was most of what I had lost.

What Iceland actually taught me

Here is the truth I arrived at, and I offer it especially to anyone standing where I stood, full of a bitterness they have every right to feel.

Iceland is not for everyone. It is a hard place. It will not take you at face value, and it does not care what your CV says. Your degrees do not buy you a seat. Your title does not open the door — I learned that as violently as anyone can, having held the title and watched the door close anyway. You can arrive with every credential in the world and this community will, quite calmly, wait to see what you actually build before it decides what you are worth to it.

For a long time I experienced that as cruelty. I have come to see it as a kind of honesty — even a gift. Because that is not Iceland being unfair. That is Iceland being right about life. The world does not owe you a place because of what you are on paper, or because of what you used to be. You earn your place by what you make, what you contribute, what you commit to and see through. Iceland simply makes that law unusually visible and unusually strict, because it is small enough that there are no shortcuts and nowhere to hide behind a résumé. If you are willing to work on something you genuinely care about, and commit to it, this community will reward you and take you in. It will fold you into its we. But you have to build first, and show what you can do. That is not the closed door I once raged at. That is the whole of life, told to me plainly by a small country that refused to flatter me.

What actually changed

And now the part I most want you to hear, if you are carrying the bitterness I carried.

Is there corruption in Iceland? Cronyism? Absolutely. I will not tell you it does not exist — it does, and I felt its edge at the worst moment of my life. But here is what I learned, and it surprised me: corruption and cronyism exist in every society on earth. In a small community they are simply more visible — everyone can see everyone, every connection is on display, so what stays hidden in a large country sits in plain sight in ours. More visible is not the same as more common. It only feels that way.

And here is what changed everything for me. Nothing about the cronyism was fixed by my anger at it. Not one door opened because I was bitter. What changed was this: the day I let the bitterness go — the day I stopped measuring my life against the closed door and poured that same energy into the work, into building my own agency and the community I believed in — the corruption did not get solved by anyone, but it quietly disappeared from my world. Not because it was not there. Because I had stopped standing in front of it, waiting for it to move. I had walked around it and started building. And it turned out the door had never been the thing keeping me out. My attention to it was.

That is not a comfortable lesson, because it puts the weight back on us. The corruption is real, and it is not your fault, and it is also not your excuse. You can spend your life at the sealed door, cataloguing its injustice, and you will be right the whole time — and you will build nothing. Or you can turn around, find the work that is yours to do, commit to it, and let the door become irrelevant. Both are available. Only one of them builds a life.

What life is, as far as I can tell

I did not come to Iceland to learn how to live. But that is what it taught me, in the hardest and most useful way it could.

Life is hard. It will knock you down at every chance it gets — that is not pessimism, it is just the terrain. It knocked me from the top of a bank to the bottom of a depression in the space of two years. The question was never whether you get beaten; you will. The question is whether you get up, dust yourself off, and go back to the work — of building something, of improving yourself, of strengthening the community you are part of. You cannot give up. And you cannot let fear run you. Fearlessness and courage are not the absence of fear, or hurt, or even despair — it is the decision to keep building anyway, with all of that still inside you. That decision, made again and again on the ordinary mornings, is the whole journey.

I was a man who helped grow a bank across eleven countries, and then could not get one interview in this country, and then could barely get out of my own head. Today I cannot imagine my life anywhere else, among any other people. Iceland did not owe me that, and it did not hand it to me. It made me earn it — and in making me earn it, it gave me something far more valuable than a job or a title. It gave me my purpose, my people, and a way of standing in the world that I did not have when I arrived at the height, and did not have in the fall.

So if you are here and you are bitter, I understand. I was too. If you are here and you are in the dark, I understand that even more. But the way through is not to win the argument about how unfair it all is. The way through is to rise — and you rise by finding something bigger than your own wound to give yourself to, and then working on it, and on yourself, one ordinary day at a time. The door will not move for your anger. It becomes irrelevant the moment you begin to build.

Get up. Dust yourself off. Build. That is the whole of it, and it is enough.

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If you are struggling with depression or despair, please do not carry it alone — reach out to someone you trust, or to a doctor. Finding purpose was my path out, but no one should have to climb out by themselves, and there is strength, not weakness, in asking for a hand.