I have worked on Wall Street, lived in the United States, Taiwan, the Philippines, Cambodia, Venezuela and Colombia, built companies, and started over from scratch in Austria. Not all of it was good. Some of it was hard. Almost all of it taught me something I did not know before.
The most important lesson is simple: freedom is not a state. It is a test. It arrives without warning, usually when you are least prepared. An authority that does not want to be responsible. A friend who disappears. A business partner who suddenly tells a different story. A country that closes its borders overnight.
I call these moments Freedom Tests. I am writing a book about them. Here I will publish some of the stories in advance.
Why now? Because in my new book I write about the biggest of these tests, the one coming for all of us: systems that become faster than people and institutions can follow. If you want to know how to stay capable of acting in that world, you learn the most from the small tests you have already passed. Or failed.
I write directly. I also keep the parts where I do not look good. Otherwise the story is not true.
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Richard Frederic Bertossa