Stacey Trock, the 412th person I’ve met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, has friends and relatives on the left and right, who tend to hold wildly opposing views. But when she announced on social media, in August 2020, that she was moving from America, her homeland, to Australia, there was general agreement she’d made a smart decision: the US, they believed, was fast heading in the wrong direction.

As much as Stacey loved America, she felt the country had become an uncomfortable and unsafe place to raise her young daughter. Now, she’s grateful to live in safe, peaceful Sydney.

Stacey works as a senior copywriter for a digital marketing agency. She also has a quirky side hustle – on weekends, she leads tourists on 10km running tours that stop at all the major attractions in the centre of Sydney. So she’s built an impressive new life for herself.

“If you don’t like how things are, change it! You’re not a tree,” the legendary Jim Rohn once said. Change, though, is hard, because things that are new or different can feel threatening. Stacey made a big change when she moved to Australia; but she’d previously made an even bigger change during her childhood.

Stacey came from a relatively underprivileged community in the Washington, DC area, where low expectations were part of the culture. Her grandfather had left school in ninth grade and her single mum was living paycheque to paycheque, which made Stacey want a better future for herself. To achieve it, she needed to adopt a different mindset from those around her. She became the first in her family to go to university, even earning a full scholarship. And then she went on to attain a Ph.D. in Linguistics and later started her own business.

At the time, there was no reason for Stacey to ever leave America; now, she expects to live in Sydney for the rest of her life. With the US presidential election becoming increasingly bitter and turbulent, Stacey is glad to live in a country with boring politics.