When in some places work meetings start with people introducing their preferable pronouns, in Israel we start with a briefing about the closest bomb shelter. When in other places people skip important meetings to take care of their pet goats (true story), in Israel people join meetings on Zoom from Army Reserve Service during breaks from patrols or other duties.
I wrote about this last June. The war will end, I said, and when it does, hundreds of thousands of Israelis will come back – to work, to building, to a country in crisis. And crisis breeds resilience. They’ll come back hardened as fuck.
Nine months later, nothing has changed my mind. If anything, I’m more convinced. The people who learned to operate under rockets, who managed companies while covering for half the team on reserve duty, who wrote code between sirens – they are coming back with muscles that can’t be trained in peacetime. Extreme communication, chaos management, creative problem-solving under constraints that most people can’t imagine.
Good luck competing with them. Good luck competing with us.