In college, Nathan Paine exhibited an unbridled free spirit—playing Hacky sack, riding a motorcycle, and letting his long hair flow like his multi-colored graduation robes. His love of languages and cultures took him around the world and on a path to settle in Japan for decades and now his resume reads decidedly more corporate than one could have imagined. Find out how the external trappings of this life are just a cover to the true essence of being that's inside.
In college, Nathan Paine exhibited an unbridled free spirit—playing Hacky sack, riding a motorcycle, and letting his long hair flow like his multi-colored graduation robes. His love of languages and cultures—inspired by living in France in high school and taking language study in Brazil in undergraduate days—took him to Japan to teach English for a year. That turned into nearly two decades in Japan with a number of international adventures and left him with a resume that reads decidedly more corporate than one could have imagined. Despite the professional path, he has maintained his free spirit, though, by continuing to not take himself seriously and to treat both himself and others with compassion. Even an unanticipated diagnosis during COVID and his move back home to Boston allowed him to a look a little more deeply and realize he's always been the same person.
In this episode, find out from Nathan how the external trappings of this life are just a cover to the true essence of being that's inside.… on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Nathan Paine is Senior Vice President, Client Relations at Prologis, where he's worked for nearly two decades across continents and multiple time zones. He is also into impact investing and making the most of life with his wife and two kids in Boston.
For another story about international living, listen to our episode with Shuhei Sekiguchi.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Nathan Paine: I'm a bit of an odd cat. I kind of do my own thing. People resist it initially, but if you stick with it, they actually accept it. I try really hard not to take myself at all seriously. I take the work seriously, and I enjoy having a livelihood, but the fact that I'm kind of in this corporate job is a lark.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: In college, Nathan Paine exhibited an unbridled free spirit—playing Hacky sack, riding a motorcycle, and letting his long hair flow like his multi-colored graduation robes. His love of languages and cultures took him around the world and on a path to settle in Japan for decades and now his resume reads decidedly more corporate than one could have imagined. Find out how the external trappings of this life are just a cover to the true essence of being INSIDE on today's Roads Taken, with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Nathan Paine and we are going to talk about all kinds of twists and turns that get you to where you are at this very moment. So Nathan, thank you so much for being here.
NP: Oh, thank you.
LJR: So I start this the same way with each of our guests and I ask two questions and they're these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
NP: I would say I was a free spirit. I had a motorcycle. I liked to play Hacky sack. I played Dungeons and Dragons. I wore Birkenstocks. I don't know. I dunno if you remember at the, they have a photo of me in the yearbook in my multicolored robe at graduation.
LJR: Yeah, I totally remember that.
NP: With the long hair, and I still feel that way on the inside. I think it's kind of funny that I'm in a corporate job because that's still who I feel I am. But I was a psych major and I got actually the Ed minor, but then I took it a step further and got my elementary teaching license in the state of New Hampshire. I was a student teacher at Enfield. And so I thought I was going to be a teacher. And that was the plan.
LJR: That was the plan. So with that, you had that psychology background, so that would've started well before you had to do the teaching. Did you kind of go in knowing that education was something that you were interested in or child development or any of that?
NP: Not really. I was really fortunate in junior high and high school to have some great teachers, and so I had…I couldn't envision myself at the time, even in high school being a teacher, but it was really, once I got into school, I started taking some of the education courses and they were just amazing. And so that kind of led to the psych major with a focus on the psychology of learning.
LJR: Ah, so backwards. So from Ed to psych. I get it. So you were tethered to a school there for at least a little while. How did that blossom after we graduated?
NP: So my story begins…so I actually spent my senior year of high school in France. And then when I was at Dartmouth, I did the Portuguese LSA in Brazil. And so I decided that I wanted to do something completely different, but outside of the US after Dartmouth. And so got on JobTrack and I just ended up getting a job teaching English in Tokyo. So that is what kind of took me to Japan.
LJR: Okay. And that's the beginning of a corporate career?
NP: No, no. So I went over there, I got hired and I went over. It was supposed to be a year. And about six months in, I was just bored to tears cuz it wasn't really teaching, it was more English conversation and it wasn't really what I was used to. So I quit that job. I got a job as a head hunter. Which is kind of funny cuz most head hunters in the US you actually need to know what you're doing, whereas this was the late nineties in Japan and there were some advantages being a foreigner in Japan, being a Gaijin, in that you could jump the social and organizational hierarchies and just call like a president of a company because you were kind of outside of the norm.
And so I did that for a couple years, an really interesting experience, and it gave me my first exposure to the corporate side of things, which I had had no interest in. No curiosity at all. But once I got exposure to it, I actually really enjoyed it. And then, the shorter long story is I ended up staying in Japan, not one year, but 15 years.
LJR: Wow.
NP: I did head hunting and then I decided that, I don't know, I was working for a small head hunting company. They, I mean, they were great. But they were all much older than me and I was, I think I must have been 25 or something, and I felt like I was missing out on an adventure or something, so I quit my job. I got rid of all my possessions and I backpacked around the world for about a year.
LJR: Wait—in the middle of the 15 years?
NP: Yeah. Yeah, so I just kind of took off, but I didn't know I was going back to Japan when I left. I ended up going back to Japan, but that was not the plan when I left. So I went, I just kinda left. I got—my company was so nice—they got me on a round-the-world ticket. So I just started going and I started in Thailand and then I went to Vietnam and then Nepal. Oh, Anita Mannon, who was a 96, was doing the Peace Corps in Madagascar at the time, and so I went and visited her and she was in the middle of nowhere. That was like a whole other thing.
LJR: Adventure.
NP: Yeah. And then I went to England and then went back to the US for a little bit and decided that I hadn't really learned as much Japanese as I would've liked. So then I decided to go back to Japan to study Japanese and was out in the countryside setting Japanese and just was bored.
So I went back to Tokyo, so my old company hired me back. Then I was still head hunting, but that wasn't really holding my interest. So I went in-house at a consulting company called Sapien, so it's an American tech company, and then became the recruiting manager and then the HR manager. And then I realized that HR was not gonna hold my interest either. So then I decided to go to business school. So in 2003, I went to France. And studied at INSEAD and then spent the second half in their, at their Singapore campus. But the funny thing about 2003 was it was SARS. And so I didn't really care about SARS, so I got to fly around for really, really cheap. So I went traveling while I was in business school. I went everywhere. I went to Indonesia, went to Thailand, Malaysia.
LJR: And did you stay healthy?
NP: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I know I'm jumping around here a little bit, but when I went back to Japan in 2000, I met my now wife within a week. And so that was 23 years ago. And then while I was at business school, I—totally cheesy—I proposed to her at the Eiffel Tower. So yeah, we're coming up on our 20th wedding anniversary this summer.
LJR: Wow.
NP: And then moved back to Japan. I got a job working at DHL, so totally random. They gave me 40 warehouses and a team of 50 plus 200 contractors. I had never managed before. All Japanese, probably half of them were older than me, and so that was the sink or swim moment. And managed the warehouses for a while. And a lot of this stuff that you see now with like next day delivery and same day delivery, we were doing that 20 years ago, but we were doing it with like hospital parts and semiconductor factory parts and Cisco routers and the like.
So that was my first entry into the world of supply chain and logistics. And then in 2006 we went through a merger and Deutsche Post bought this company Exel and, and put together DHL and Exel. So it was like, it was the largest logistics merger at the time. I think the combined entity had like 500,000 employees. It was just this mammoth project. I got a new boss who I didn't like, and so I left and joined my current company. So that was almost 16 years ago.
LJR: And then, but still you joined them in Tokyo?
NP: In Tokyo, yep. It's a company that builds warehouses. It's, so, a REIT, a real estate investment trust called Prologis. And so in 2007, I was probably like the last employee they hired before the world blew up with the GFC [Global Financial Crisis]. So got, and that was my first time doing anything real estate related cuz I had been on the tenant side, cuz DHL was a customer, so the real estate was way easier than logistics. Logistics is really hard. Really hard. If you know anybody who does logistics, have some sympathy for them because it's like being on call 24. It's like you're an ER doctor and no, and it's like it. Nobody thanks you when it's going well, and everybody yells at you when it's not going well. So that was my first experience with real estate.
So I ended up taking over operations for Japan, South Korea, and Singapore through the GFC. From Tokyo, so that was 2007 to 2012, and then my company moved me to Singapore. I spent three years in Singapore in my current job, which is capital raising and relationship management. So we have private equity funds, and so I started raising capital from Asia-based investors in 2012 til 2015 and then they moved me to the headquarters in San Francisco covering the US and Asia, which was like super ridiculous cuz it's like all the time zones. So you're kind of not sleeping much and then kind of ended up reshuffling and hiring some people. So I went back to covering just Asia from San Francisco. And then during Covid I moved back to Boston where I'm from originally, having been away for almost 25 years.
LJR: And what precipitated that move? I mean, was it Covid or was it I wanna be out of that…
NP: I didn't like San Francisco, so I was there for six and a half years. It wasn't really a fit for our family. My wife's Japanese, both my kids were born in Japan. You know, at a certain point we didn't have any, like many friends or much social infrastructure there. And so we had covid and then we had like forest fires on three sides of us. And it was just like, okay, I gotta get closer to family and to what I know. And so then just moved back. And the day before I closed on my condo, I got diagnosed with lymphoma. And
LJR: Whoa.
NP: Yeah.
LJR: Whoa. Okay.
NP: I told you there are a lot of pivots in this story. It's not very linear.
LJR: Well, you thought, I thought it was just going linear. That's a big one.
NP: Yeah.
LJR: Okay. So the day you, so that was in the middle of Covid?
NP: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
LJR: Oh my gosh. Okay.
NP: The funny part about that is it's like just a mile down the road from Dana Farber. So that was the beginning of last year, 2022. And ended up being in chemo for the first half of the year, which is why I couldn't go to the rescheduled 25th. Cause I was still recuperating from the chemo. So far so good. It'll be a year in remission this July.
LJR: Yay. Congratulations. That's great. This medicine these days is kind of amazing, so, okay. There's so much to unpack here. Wow. That really threw me for a loop. And I bet it threw your family for a loop having just moved really for all intent and purposes, right?
NP: Yeah.
LJR: But you're next to one of the best healthcare facilities for what you need. And your family's there, right?
NP: Yeah. My brother's a 94. He's in Rhode Island, and my mom lives up in Maine.
LJR: Nice. Nice. So, You've kind of reestablished, this is where you're gonna go. Are you still doing all of the time zone things for Asia though?
NP: So we we're fortunate enough to hire a woman in Singapore, so she now covers all of Asia except Japan because I speak Japanese, so I still cover Japan. And so I cover the Eastern US, Canada, and Japan. So much less in the way of time zones except for Japan.
LJR: Well, that's great that you get to keep your, your hand in that, I guess. What I was listening to and all of these switches and I mean, they actually weren't that many switches, maybe just in the early part where we were all doing that, but kind of going up these corporate ranks and bigger companies and different kinds of things and getting kind of traditional VCs, stuff like that is really far away from hacky sack.
NP: Totally.
LJR: …multi-colored robe, man. So you say that, that you still feel like he's in there.
NP: Yeah.
LJR: Does he get to be exercised in that way or, have you kind of come.
NP: Totally.
LJR: Yeah? Okay. Tell me, how does, how does that part of you come out?
NP: Oh, I'm a bit of an odd cat. I kind of do my own thing, and I think that the trick is people resist it initially, but if you stick with it, they actually accept it.
I'm just pretty optimistic. I have a lot of gratitude. Most everything I can find humor in. I try really hard not to take myself at all seriously. I take the work seriously, and I enjoy having a livelihood, but the fact that I'm kind of in this corporate job is a lark for me because what I get the most meaning from is actually teaching.
But what I didn't realize when I set out to be a teacher is I needed to go out and spend 20, 25 years actually learning something. And so I spent a lot of time working either with our investors or my colleagues, just teaching them. Cuz I think there's a lot of people, particularly in finance or private equity, that it's actually in their own best interest to try and make it sound more mysterious than it is. But ultimately what we're doing is quite simple. And I think the people who actually know that are able to take these complex ideas and break them down in a way that is digestible to others. And I think that it also ties into access and making sure that everybody has a fair shot at doing their best.
And because real estate is a historically male dominated industry, and the US is predominantly white, and so there are all these things that I think I'm very well positioned to try to mitigate some of the imbalance that that exists.
LJR: Well, that sounds more like the free spirit [NP: Yeah. Yeah.] motorcycle man. That's great. I'm glad he's not gone.
NP: No.
LJR: I guess one question I'd have for you, Nathan, is if you went back to long hair multicolored robes Nathan, and showed him your resume now, would he have had the foresight or the insight to be able to look in there and realize, oh, just because this looks really corporate, he hasn't sold out, he's still in there.
NP: I don't know. I think it would be pretty hard to tell from the resume alone, but I think like a ten second conversation would sort it.
LJR: 10 seconds?
NP: Yeah.
LJR: What would you, what would you say to him?
NP: It all just, it's all just an intense journey. I mean, even the chemo and the cancer. Is just this an amazing exercise in being present and being grateful and learning how to be gracious to others. It's, it's, I mean, I could go on this. Like I was, I was pretty skeptical about religion and the kind of the dogma around religion until chemo. And then I realized when someone said that they wanted to pray for me, they were sharing something that was sacred to them, and it was the most beautiful gift, and it was so easy for me to intellectualize that away before being in a situation where somebody truly said, I am, I'm going to pray for you. In which case, they're kind of opening their heart and it ended up just being this amazing re-envisioning on my part of all of the beauty that comes with religion. Cuz it's so easy to focus, at least for me, it was so easy to focus on the negative.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. A and it was a gift from them to you. And I'm glad that you are willing to receive it or willing to receiving it.
NP: Well, because when you're on the ropes, you're kinda like, ah, I'm game for anything. Right? You'll take any, but it's, it's but I actually didn't change that much. My body got beaten down, but I wasn't that different during chemo either. This was kind of the mode that I have been working towards. I would say I've definitely chilled out quite a bit since my twenties and thirties and realized that, you know, ego is the connection killer. I mean, I'm really, I have, there are a couple things that rubbed me the wrong way, and one of them is high ego because it doesn't really achieve anything, you know? It kind of destroys the collective mission. But I also realize that ego is, is a symptom of some things that that person is working through. And, you know, I'd be lying to say that I haven't had high ego moments in my life. So, you know, I think that it also helps to just bear in mind a little bit, some sympathy for somebody who's going through that as well.
I'm happy, you know. I'm grateful. I live a blessed life and now that, you know, the cancer is being managed for the moment, I'm really, my job is what I do, but it's not who I am.
LJR: Yeah, yeah. Well it sounds like you are a lot of things, but you're still the same Nathan free spirit, and I'm glad to hear it. I would say you are full of kind of empathy and all of the good characteristics that make relationships so important and worthwhile. So it sounds like, yes, lots of pivots, but also, you know, finding where you need to be, when you need to be there. So we wish you well and thanks so much for being here.
NP: Sure, my pleasure. Thank you.
LJR: That was Nathan Paine, who is Senior Vice President, Client Relations at Prologis, where he's worked for nearly two decades across continents and multiple time zones. He is also into impact investing and making the most of life with his wife and two kids in Boston.//We love that we can reach our listeners no matter where they are or what the time zone might be. Even though we post a new episode each Monday, you can listen anytime wherever you find your podcasts and can find the full archive at RoadsTakenShow.com. And get yourself comfy for the ride; from flowing robes and cowboy boots to doctors' coats and corporate suits, come as you are with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.