I was chatting with an old colleague of mine at the Airbnb headquarters. Man, that place is sick!!! He’s a bit older than me so it’s always nice to hear his feedback, especially since he’s gone down a similar photographic route as me. A couple things stood out from our chat, like the free kombucha on tap. Say what?! That’s crazy. But the main thing was talking about career decisions, and deciding where to live and work if one plans to have kids in the near future. And I definitely want to have a family one day. So the question became, what do I do?

He responded, “Well, I think the real question is what would you regret not doing when you have children?” I really like this question. It has echoes of a question we’ve come across quite often when we try to figure out what the hell we’re going to do with our lives: “What would you do if you were going to die tomorrow?” But it’s less cliche and it’s still about the same thing, which is time. And sure, having children isn’t as time sucking as death but it definitely cuts your time by, let’s just say roughly 80%.

So, what would you regret not doing with the limited time you have here? Fortunately, my answer to this question isn’t a long laundry list of things I need to do. I’m already doing it. Building something uniquely my own. This website and all the work I share here is the story of that journey.

by Jason Lam