I was six years old when my family landed in New York City. I didn’t understand much at that age, but I understood that our apartment was smaller than the last one, that we moved school districts more than any kid I knew, and that my parents kept repeating the same sentence to reassure me and my brother, as much as themselves: “We’re temporarily poor, but we’re smart, we’re well-educated, and we’ll figure things out.”

My father was an international commercial banker in Taiwan. My mother was one of the youngest executives at another bank. By any measure, they had already built something. Yet they packed up what they had and bet it on a country where they had no name, no network, and no safety net. That is a strange kind of courage: the courage to walk away from something you had already earned because you believed the US had much more to offer their children and that future generations could achieve even more.

This year, the United States of America turns 250. I’ve come to believe our country, at its best, runs on the same operating system as the outlier founders: hold two opposing truths in tension, dream big, and keep your feet on the ground. It is the optimism Feynman admired in Einstein. Feynman said Einstein is a giant because his head is in the clouds, but his feet are firmly planted on the ground, much like how America is a giant.

America was founded on that optimism 250 years ago. A group of people made a bet on a dream, in an idealistic form of government that had never quite been tried at scale, for the benefit of generations they would never meet. It didn’t work perfectly then, and it doesn’t work perfectly now. No enduring institution does. We remain a flawed country, but also beautiful and full of promise. The founding wager was that ordinary people, given enough freedom and enough stake in the outcome, would build something extraordinary. That bet has paid out for two and a half centuries in a way almost no other bet in history has.

I think about this every time I meet a founder who arrived here from somewhere else, still building, still sending money home, still explaining to relatives why they left a stable job for something so uncertain. I recognize that person. I was that person’s child. What I’ve learned from sitting across the table from hundreds of them is that America’s real exports are optimism and permission. The optimism to dare to dream big. The permission to reinvent yourself, to fail loudly and try again, to be from somewhere else and still be from here in every way that matters.

My son is a teenager now. He doesn’t carry the same anxiety I grew up with, and I’m grateful for that, even as I make sure he knows what it cost to get him there. He is inheriting a country that is 250 years into its own long becoming, still arguing with itself, still correcting course, still, on its best days, choosing to bet on the future rather than settling on heritage or pedigree.

That’s the country I’m proud of. Not a finished one. A founder’s country, permanently early-stage, permanently building, still convinced that the next chapter will be better than the last, and still willing to let a six-year-old from elsewhere and temporarily poor grow up to help build some piece of our country in his own way.

Happy 250th birthday, America. Thanks for taking a bet on my family.