What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

Born and raised in Brazil, soon in life I started to experience, the challenges of growing-up in a developing country and more specially in a more female dominant environment due to my specific circumstances in life. At that time, little did I know about the meaning and life impact of all typical challenges regarding education, financial stability, and opportunities. But luckily, I was surrounded by strong and hard-working women who taught and inspired me so much, especially two which I want to introduce.

One, a primary school teacher, who was abandoned by her husband and migrated with four children from the Northeast of Brazil to São Paulo in search of work and better living conditions. From selling encyclopedias door-to-door, this woman ended up running her successful own business for many years. Her example of strength and dedication was marked in her crooked backbones, and she was also my grandmother. The other, also a public-school teacher, faced the death of my father at the age of 32, with a 4-year-old girl and a 5-month-old baby boy. Throughout her life, my mother struggled to support my brother and me, always prioritizing our education to ensure we could have a good future. Overcoming all challenges (personal losses, financial instability, gender, etc), her example taught me that education, hard work, perseverance, and faith can lead us to achieve our goals and dreams.

It didn’t take long until it was my turn to experience some of these challenges myself. Despite my family’s lack of financial means, my dedication to studies and my determination to change my future led me to a personal sponsorship for my studies in a top private school. I took the opportunity to challenge myself and prepare to enter a very prestigious business school in São Paulo, financed by a student loan. This and the commitment I had mentally to be a changer in my family pushed my dedication at work. The results didn’t come as fast as the challenges in the male-dominated environments of business school, consulting, and financial market. Long working hours, facing intimidation or disfavoring from some people, harassments from others, but I knew I had reached amazing opportunities for learning and developing professionally. I pushed and challenged myself, outperformed, achieved my goals, and helped others on the way as my role models taught me.

Thank you to the women of my life and to all the people who contributed in many ways to show that we can achieve our goals with collaboration, in addition to education, perseverance, hard work, dreams, and faith.

What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

Since I was younger I’ve always been very expressive, but instead of seeing it as a strength, I used to want to hide it. When I wanted to talk, no matter how relevant the topic was, I used to make everyone laugh. So at those moments I felt dumb and stopped feeling confident about speaking out loud. This, unfortunately, lasted till I was at university.

However, when I started to work everything changed. I realized how important it was to ‘speak up’, to share your ideas, to expand some debates and also to make questions. I needed to push myself to overcome my fear, which was challenging, but it is so worth it. Now, I try to do it not only for myself but also for those who are as scared as I once was. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is to ‘not be afraid of your own light’, it will surprise you.

I understand the importance that “fitting in” and not attracting too much attention can have or seem to have, but sacrificing what we like or who we are to achieve it is really not worth it. I’ve learned a lot about myself and there have been moments in this journey that truly marked me: when I decided to bet on my dreams and my future and apply for an MBA at ESADE and when during the pandemic, in my eagerness to do something about the increase of domestic violence in Peru, I created “Hazlo por Ti” (Do it for Yourself). A program of free psychological and psychiatric help from specialists at a national level. In the beginning, I thought that no one would want to join the idea, but I had to believe in myself and with a lot of drive I managed to get it off the ground and it is something I will always be proud of.

By respecting and accepting ourselves we are also strengthening our empathy towards others. But to achieve this we have to take the time to get to know ourselves and not put external opinions above what we want to be or accomplish. I am still on this learning path, but every day I reassure myself that by being authentic I can build bridges and unlock benefits for myself and others. I invite you to give it a try.

What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

My extensive backpacking experience in over 30 countries can be a good topic to share. Growing up, I had never had the opportunity to travel abroad as my parents were not financially well-off. However, as a university student, I embarked on my first overseas journey, travelling around South India for two months by local bus, with the money I had saved from working part-time at a bar. This experience led me to explore even more countries. I am a holder of a Laotian elephant rider’s license, have jumped into an icy lake in Moscow, swam with wild whale sharks in the Pacific Ocean, taken a shower naked with well water in the depths of the jungle with locals, and did a lot more. These experiences were particularly special to me as I could speak no other language than Japanese for the entire time. Interacting and communicating with locals beyond the language barrier, despite the challenge, was fun like nothing else, and greatly enriched my humanity. Embracing and appreciating other cultures also helped me to better appreciate and understand my own culture as a Japanese.

When I became a mother, I thought my days of adventure were behind me, but I still regretted not being able to engage in deep conversations with people from around the world. So, I made up my mind to study English seriously during maternity leave. I learned vocabulary from NETFLIX during breastfeeding time and practised speaking to my baby, who was patient with mistakes and the same stories. As a result, we both were able to speak English together. This ultimately led me to pursue an MBA, in one of the most globally diverse settings in the world. For me, an MBA program represents the realization of a dream, despite my lack of overseas experience and language skills, but have always yearned to explore the world. And I am excited to see what other dreams and aspirations will come to fruition from here.

Wishing you all a successful and fruitful MBA journey!

What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

I was born into a Colombian family of humble origins that built a business from scratch. Creative entrepreneurs who, without many tools, managed to excel, honestly and responsibly, by contributing to the economic and social development of their family and their community.

Growing up surrounded by successful entrepreneurs has been very inspiring but also a great challenge for me. Since I started my professional journey, I have been confronting unconscious biases and working to silence an inner voice that unjustifiably insinuated that I wasn’t capable enough to face leadership roles as my parents have done.

This personal journey began by identifying that this self-perception problem was not only mine, but that it occurs in many women, who face unconscious biases, learned stereotypes, and social barriers, which make us less prone to exercising leadership. Concepts such as the glass ceiling and the impostor syndrome are present in our professional trajectories and lead to the indicators we know today.

Naming it was a great start, but what made the difference was looking around and being inspired by other women’s stories. I am not talking just about great business women or public figures, but also about the ones whose successes might not look that big, but were really impactful within their communities.

My grandmother is the one who has inspired me the most. A woman who came into this world more than a century ago, who never went to school and learned to read and write by looking through the window of the little school in the town where she was born. At the age of eight years old, she was orphaned by her parents and then by her grandparents and finally abandoned by her brother. She was a single mother with four children. She did all kinds of jobs to support her family and educated her children with values. She always reinforced the importance of education, but the only one who was able to go to university was the youngest, my father.

Today, two generations later, I am studying an MBA at one of the best business schools and I know that I owe a great part of the privilege of being here to the efforts of my grandmother. Her will, her ambition and her desire to grow, led her to building a family that supported me to become who I am today.

Thank you for being my inspiration abuelita Margarita!

What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

“One invisible but essential fact about me is that I have deep passion for mountain sports, particularly mountaineering. Not only do I derive a great deal of happiness and achievement from this sport, but I have found it to be extremely humbling and an excellent form of character building.

What started as out as a small hike up a hill in Malaysia developed into a full-blown desire to climb mountains that were bigger, higher and more challenging. At fourteen years old, I became the youngest Singaporean (a much younger Singaporean would take this title years later!) to summit Mount Kilimanjaro and in 2018, I would go on to summit Mount Elbrus in Russia. After the MBA, I aim to complete the seven summit challenge which entails climbing the highest mountain on each continent (I have five left).

I’d like to share three lessons that I have kept from my climbing endeavors over the last fifteen years.

1) You win some, you lose some. Despite the best preparation, equipment, and planning, there will always be factors outside of your control in the mountains. The weather might decide to turn bad, forcing you to abandon a summit attempt weeks in the making. The same goes for the rest of life, you are going to lose some battles; what matters is that you shrug it off quickly, avoid the blame game, and move on to the next battle.

2) This too shall pass. Every emotion – the highest of highs and lowest of lows – passes in time. Succeeding in a climb that took months of preparation feels great for a few days before the euphoria passes, and similarly, the disappointment of failing to summit a mountain passes quickly. Remember that all moments in life, both happy and sad, will eventually pass. Stay humble in your victories and stay positive in your defeats.

3) Mind over matter. While everyone has a physical limit, our brains are programmed to protect us and often cause us to think that we are at our limits when in fact, we can push much further. Summit days on mountains are often extremely long and it is common for climbers to reach a point where one’s mind becomes the biggest enemy; an inner voice telling you to give up and turn around every minute. The same goes for other aspects of life – take that step and push yourself one step further whenever your mind tells you to give up.”

What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

My life has been filled with many ups and downs that have shaped me into who I am today. Two in particular stand out in recent memory that have changed how I see the world.

I studied abroad in Turkey back in 2015 and lived there for two years. I fell in love with the people and their culture. I volunteered in the local church and taught English to pay the bills. On July 15th, only 1 km from where I was living, the Turkish military marched while fighting against thousands of Turkish citizens in an attempted coup. Government buildings were bombed from the air, there were mandatory curfews, the airport was shut down, tanks were in the streets, and F16 jets flew so close the walls of my small apartment shook throughout the night. I laid under the blankets fearfully following the news. I was scared for everyone in the streets, I was scared for all the beautiful friends I had made, and I was genuinely scared for my own life.

March 13th, 2018, I rolled into the operating room of UCSF for surgery. Paul is my cousin, and we grew up in the Philippines together. We were the same age, lived in the same neighborhood and were classmates in the same school. We were very close. When I found out that both his kidneys were failing I was heartbroken. I knew I had to do whatever I could to help. I decided to move back home to California from Turkey, so that I could start the process of donating my kidney to Paul. After months of testing, lab works, and counseling, we were ready. I knew the risks. I knew I was healthy. I knew that the probability of success was in our favor. Even though the love I felt for my cousin, and my faith in God gave me security, I was still scared.

The coup was short lived, and I went on with my everyday life after a couple of days. My cousin, Paul, now has a healthy kidney and no longer has to be attached to a machine a couple times a week. 5 years later, I am healthy and well. I moved back home to the Bay Area to donate my kidney, yet to my surprise I met the love of my life, we got married, started a family, and now have moved half-way across the world to Barcelona, so I can pursue my MBA. What is invisible but essential about me is that these two experiences, sowed with uncertainty and fear, opened into moments of beauty, love, and hope. That a poor, rural girl from the Philippines, raised by a single mom in the rough streets of Richmond, can pursue higher education in Syracuse, live her life to the fullest in Turkey, and now embrace an incredible adventure in Barcelona with her husband and son. Moments like these helped me to be content and satisfied about the life I have and further affirmed and increased my faith in God. The challenges of my life have been showered with blessings and I believe that a life well-lived is a life in service of others, where that service might be invisible but it is truly essential.

What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

To answer this question, I would like to start with my early childhood growing up in Norway. 

I grew up with my mother and her female partner in a suburban area in Oslo. This was in the early ’90s and growing up with “two mothers” was quite unusual, I would even say radical. As an adult, I look back on my upbringing and feel a strong sense of privilege having been raised by two strong women. 

I also travelled a lot as a young child. I visited China, Fiji and Australia twice before I was 12 years old and somehow, we never ended up staying in the tourist areas. My mother was always keen on showing me what she thought was the local way of life. So, in Fiji, we visited a local village and met the village chief, and in Beijing, we would get lost in the side streets and visit local artists whom we communicated with using a simple dictionary and hand signals. 

My untraditional upbringing and early childhood travels have made me very open and curious about new cultures. I, therefore, decided to take a leap of faith and move to Harbin in Northern China to study Mandarin once I finished my undergraduate studies in Finance.

I remember Harbin as a melting pot of different cultures. In my language school, half of the class came from Russia and the other half were Korean. I remember being so amazed by Korean mannerisms and especially the tradition of bowing to people older than yourself. It was also my first time interacting with Russians. I remember my Russian classmates as friendly and fun to hang out with. The school also had plenty of exchange students from Africa and I developed close friendships with people from Benin and Zambia. 

Fast forward ten years and I am currently living in Barcelona pursuing an MBA. If you see me in the hallways, you will probably never be able to detect from my appearance any of the diversity I carry with me from my lived experiences. I think this goes for a lot of the people we meet in life. It’s generally quite hard to tell what kind of invisible diversity people carry with them. I, therefore, believe that the best approach is to meet people with genuine openness and curiosity. Be kind to the people around you and dare to include new people in your circles of friends, regardless of where they come from or what they have done in life. 

Best of luck to all of you on your MBA and future endeavours in life!

What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

One of my least favorite but most thought-provoking experiences as a working adult was when I was enlisted to join the project management team for a country-wide, government-run covid relief initiative in Japan. I hope to share my realizations while trying my best not to make this sound like a job application (lol).

I was born and raised in Washington, USA.  In 2014, I moved to Tokyo, Japan to study liberal arts. I was curious to explore my Japanese identity by building a life there. I stayed in Japan for 3 years after graduating where I blindly took a stab at management consulting in an “international” (pretty hardcore Japanese) company. 

I was working on a COVID relief initiative. It was a special project designed to help the Ministry of Economy & Trade provide SMEs with financial support as the pandemic and quarantine took a toll on their livelihood. The process involved an application for financial support, reviewing the application, and finally the provision of money.

My first role in the project management office was to track and report at the headquarters any potential issues across all other teams. I hated this job because I felt like I had so little control—why did I have to risk my life during the pandemic and go into the office to help those who were probably all at home staying safe? As if that wasn’t frustrating enough, I had no idea what I was doing because I don’t know how you predict all possible issues for such a large-scale program. Through much of the confusion, however, I realized what’s important is not having the answers but being able to ask the right questions—to not be afraid to ask for help because it’s ok not to be able to do things alone and it is better than not being able to do anything at all. So, at least I picked up a valuable life lesson. 

A few months later, I was spontaneously re-assigned to a different role, where I was overseeing (not singlehandedly, of course) the operations of the applications’ evaluation process. This involved about 50 processing centers throughout all of Japan, each with a couple of hundred part-timers looking for a temporary job, all working to manually review each company’s application and documentation. At this point, my pride was a little hurt. Already having had imposter’s syndrome as a business consultant with a liberal arts degree, I thought I had been moved due to my lack of contribution, and I was left feeling disappointed and extra demotivated. Surely I was capable of doing more than answering these operators’ questions like a customer support agent. 

This experience ended up sparking an important shift in my mindset on being a member of society. As I interacted with the operators, I realized that a). I don’t know anything about their background and skills, and that b.) we are all working on this ad hoc project with equal (no) experience or qualifications. While titles had given me a false sense of hierarchy, I had a moment of realization that we are all just equal members of a community with different roles, working together to keep the country and its citizens healthy through an extremely difficult time. It also reshaped my personal meaning of building a career, from “how do you want to make money?”, to “how do you want to help the people around you?”

Eventually, I moved back to the PMO where I worked on the most interesting part of the project—fraud investigation. While the various schemes we uncovered from companies trying to extort the relief package were sometimes too comical to believe, it reminded me that even in an almost ideal community, people will no matter what try to take advantage of the system. I also picked up some of my most valuable social survival skills, like maneuvering communication in a team of highly closed-off, hierarchical, and socially awkward people (my presence didn’t help). As my involvement in the job came to a close, I found that my experience wasn’t so much dependent upon the environment as much as it was on what I decided to make of it, and that with a positive attitude, I have the power to change my own and others’ experiences.

Ask anyone around me and they will say I definitely have more to complain about Japan and its problems, but the truth is through living and working there, I was able to appreciate the beauty of collectivism, a value with which I wasn’t familiar from my time in the US and found to be equally as vital in maintaining a healthy community.

Throughout my journey here in Barcelona and beyond, I hope to continue being able to appreciate and absorb the different “norms” of countries outside of my own.

What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

Something that’s invisible but essential about me is that I have lived through three different types of natural disasters. It might be cliché, but it´s true – this has taught me resilience and gratitude, as you never know what tomorrow will hold. And that when things are tough, just keep on moving, don’t stop.

The most significant experience was in 2004, when I was in Phuket on holiday during the tsunami that impacted a significant portion of Southeast Asia. It was December 26th 2004 when I woke up to trembling at about 7:00 AM. Still half asleep, I didn’t think much of it since l had been living in Tokyo at the time, where earthquakes were common.

My family and I tried to book an excursion to a nearby island but weren’t able to since the operator wasn’t leading that tour that day. Instead, we went on a snorkel tour. We later learned that that island had been completely wiped out by the tsunami.

At about 9:00 AM, we head to the beach to get on the boat. Once we’re there, my dad points out how far out the tide seemed to be compared to the day before. We didn’t think much of it, but that coupled with the trembling I had felt earlier in the morning, were the key indicators of an incoming tsunami.

We move on with the day and get on the boat and go out into the deeper ocean. After about an hour or so of travel, the captain announces the water isn’t safe for us to snorkel in. After some confusion in communicating between the captain and us he gets a radio call from shore announcing that a tsunami had hit, and we couldn’t return yet.

I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation until slowly the boat was surrounded by household items – beds, refrigerators, chairs, even TVs. If we looked closely to shore, we could see how the shore would appear and then disappear, a sign of aftershocks. Local fishermen on longboats drove around us selling lychees. We saw a german couple being ferried back to shore looking injured, dazed, and confused.

After what was probably 7 hours on the boat, we were finally able to return to shore. My brother and I got on a Thai long boat which was packed to the brim with items fishermen had collected from the sea. With the family together onshore, we had just enough time to gather our valuables before running through a destroyed hotel, passing overturned cars and fallen trees, to a car that would take us to a Buddhist temple up the hill.

We spent the night with a few hundred other hotel guests, waiting for instructions on how to evacuate back to Bangkok. The weirdest part was that in this daze that was the day after the tsunami, we walked into town and there were restaurants functioning. I even got my hair braided. We went to the internet café and after contacting family to let them know we were OK; my brother checked the NBA finals scores. Even in chaos, life went on.

After many more hours of waiting and uncertainty, my family was lucky enough to fly out of Phuket. Through this experience I learned that when you go through something difficult, stick close to the ones you love. Be grateful always, and we really are quite small in this world.

What is invisible but essential about YOU? or ESADE? or Barcelona?

After spending 4 years at my undergrad university, when I was doing my final packing, I remember tearing off more than 100 pages from the back of my notebooks because they were filled with poems and short stories. The poems were not necessarily my best work, but in this moment, I  realized that writing was something that had become important to me subconsciously.

Next year when I moved to Pune for my job, I started to take my writing more seriously. I was working 12-14 hours some days, with  2-3 hours of travel time, so in order to make time for my writing, I stopped going out with my colleagues for lunch breaks. I would quickly finish my food in 10 minutes and dedicate the remaining 30-40 minutes, hiding in some corner of the campus, typing furiously on my phone. I wrote every day and have written everyday since. 

One realizes that something has become essential when they are not doing it for any outcome or a reason. With me, writing became that. I would be in the middle of a traffic jam, standing in a packed public bus on a humid day, or in bed at 3 am, and  I would suddenly feel the need to take out my phone and write.

It was in 2017, when I first heard about the concept of open mics. I remember taking a bus for more than 2 hours, right after my work ended, on 6th January, to somehow make it in time for the event. I was so late that I was  number 40, after 39 other poets, many of whom were regulars and already had a fan following. By the time my turn came, people were visibly bored and tired. I still remember being the last guy on stage, in a fancy rooftop pub, wearing my formals, even forgetting to remove my office ID, and people in front of me just started to leave or look like they wanted  to throw things at me. I always had stage fright, and this experience didn’t help. However, I continued going to different literary events and open mics, and things got better. This video is from December 2017, almost one year after my first open mic, and even if you can’t understand the language, you can see the crowd’s reaction and see the progress I have made since being number 40 on that Friday night in January 2017.

Immediately after this performance, I moved to Germany for my work, and it truly opened me up to a new world. I met lovely people, writers from more than 40 countries in one place, and we would jam together every Sunday for 3 hours or so. I went to Berlin and Amsterdam to attend writing workshops, and took a 9-hour long bus to Paris to participate in the Paris Lit Up event, where, through some magic, I was the opening act as well as the closing act in front of more than 250 poets from around the world. In the same year, I received the ‘Ambassador of Word’ award from Museo de la Palabra, Cesar Egido Serrano Foundation in Madrid for one of my short stories. I also attended the Frankfurt Book Fair,  where I got to meet and talk to Paul Beaty, the 2016 Booker Award Winner.  In January 2019, right before I  moved back to India, the anthology I had been working on with my friends in Frankfurt came to fruition and was published by Amazon. We dedicated it to the city of Frankfurt, and  decided to make the AIDS-Hilfe Frankfurt (AHF) its lifetime beneficiary.

As I continue the next chapter of my life here at the ESADE MBA, I  try to spend my Sundays whenever possible with the writing community in Barcelona. I genuinely believe that in order to write better, I must continuously strive to become a better human being, who can one day be the voice of those who are disadvantaged . It also means the realization of one’s mortality, and that there is always someone better than you, and that there are more things you don’t know than the things you know. I believe that this realization remains at the core of my being.