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Lost everything at nine years old
Arriving with nothing
The father had built a family business with his own family, and it was a big one. In the US, the family stayed with an uncle, Nasi, and the adjustment was not very hard for the kids. As the boy grew up, he watched his father lose that spark and fail to begin again. The father tried his hand at a lot of things as an entrepreneur and did his very best.
What it drove
It drove the boy, his brothers, and the rest of the family to rebuild. Many immigrants have a chip on their shoulder, and he had a particularly big one. He also did not want work or fortune to break him as a person, so he learned to keep the two apart: he gives work every inch he has, and he knows who he is whatever the world throws at him.
The engineering mindset
Years later, as Uber's CEO, he does not get stressed by situations, and his wife calls him a robot. He approaches problems with an engineering mindset: list them, pick an approach for each, and test and learn. Not everything improves in a straight line, and overthinking only makes things worse.
Why do immigrant families start so many companies?
Researchers point to selection: people who leave one country for another tend to be willing to take risks and to work hard for a fresh start. Another factor is limited options, since a newcomer may have fewer employers who will hire them at their level. A 2011 report from the Partnership for a New American Economy found that 40 percent of the 2010 Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children.
Why does an engineering mindset calm stress?
Psychologist James Gross at Stanford has studied cognitive reappraisal, which means reframing a situation to change its emotional impact. In laboratory studies published in the late 1990s, reappraisal reduced both the felt and the physiological reaction to upsetting material, while suppressing the reaction did not. Treating a problem as a list of items to test and revise is a form of reappraisal. Engineers rely on this loop of listing, trying, and measuring because it turns an open-ended worry into a set of defined steps.
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