The Gift of Paris Is Leaving It
Two years in France changed Borderlands forever. Not because of what I built there, but because of who I became before going home.
Wheels up at 11 a.m. next Tuesday.
Today Borderlands moves its headquarters from Paris back to Salt Lake City.
Two years ago, I moved my family here believing a media company could be headquartered anywhere in the world and produce the same results.
I was wrong.
For two years, my wife and I dragged our three kids through Airbnbs across Paris, Copenhagen, Ljunghusen, and Frederiksværk. We asked them to learn languages we didn’t speak and build a life that never stayed still for long.
Somewhere along the way, Paris got under my skin and into my blood.
I became obsessed with the Americans who came here looking for something they couldn’t quite name. Hemingway’s neighborhood became mine. I walked past the cafés where he and Fitzgerald escaped the cold over wine. Gertrude Stein’s apartment was a few minutes from our grocery store. John Steinbeck’s old apartment sat just beyond the Métro stop on the way to church.
At first I thought those places held some kind of magic.
Now I think they held something else.
Pressure.
Paris demands your attention. It compresses life. It makes you wrestle with your work, your identity, your ambitions, and your limitations. It’s a constant reminder that you’re somewhere extraordinary, but not because of you. You’re just another person trying to become worthy of the place.
Looking back, I don’t think I could have built this version of Borderlands anywhere else. In next week’s episodes of the podcast I’ll do a good old fashioned ‘family’ meeting and explain this in depth. It goes live the moment I take off from the Paris airport.
Every great American-in-Paris story ends the same way.
The gift of Paris isn’t living there forever.
The gift of Paris is leaving it.
You leave carrying a version of yourself that didn’t exist when you arrived.
Paris gave me vision before it gave me results.
It didn’t build Borderlands. It built the person who could.
Now it’s time to find out whether that’s true.
See you at Borderlands.cc.
This is so beautifully said, Josh. My family and I visited this spring for a few days. We ran into you and your wife on our way to the Louvre (I was the star struck southerner in the H1’s). I arrived with little to low expectations and left with a hole in my heart. We all did. Paris is the metropolitan worlds manifestation of enchantment - it imprints on you.
You (or Kiprun…?) created a video earlier in your Paris adventure saying something like “I’m a trail runner and I love wild mountains, but now I live in here and its nothing like what I love, but I love it all the same…” That mindset - letting multiple truths live in the same place together without friction - is a great reminder to fully be ones self. Thanks for that.
May we never have that Paris shaped hole in our hearts filled with anything else.