I was twelve years old when I moved to the United States. I spoke no English, knew very little about the culture, and suddenly almost everything around me was unfamiliar.
New language. New culture. New food. New environment. A completely different way of life.
Looking back, I think that experience shaped me more than I realized at the time. I had to adapt.
But adapting wasn't new to me.
Growing up, I was energetic, competitive, curious, and a little wild. I played sports, practiced martial arts and parkour, explored places I probably shouldn't have been exploring, and was always trying to figure things out.
If something broke around the house, I'd rather take it apart and figure out how it worked than simply replace it. If I struggled to understand how something functioned or how it was meant to be, I wouldn't just give up. I would dedicate my time to approaching it from different perspectives and looking at it from different sides so I could find something I hadn't noticed before. It might take a while sometimes, but eventually I'd find the solution.
That tendency followed me into adulthood.
Over time, my curiosity shifted from figuring out how things worked to figuring out why people, businesses, and systems behave the way they do.
During COVID, I came across a short video of someone explaining a method of getting paid by sending messages through social media. I didn't know much about marketing at the time, but the idea caught my attention. I reached out, and that interaction introduced me to the world of marketing.
Once I started learning what marketing actually was and what it could do for a business, I went down a rabbit hole.
I spent the next couple of years studying marketing, then sales, copywriting, social media, email, psychology, customer behavior, and eventually technology and AI. The more I learned, the more fascinated I became.
What attracted me wasn't simply the idea of selling something.
It was the puzzle.
Marketing sits at an interesting intersection of business, psychology, creativity, and strategy. You can look at a problem, form a hypothesis, try something, observe what happens, and then ask why it worked or why it didn't.
That last question is probably what interests me most:
Why?
Why did people respond this way?
Why did they ignore that?
Why did something that seemed like a good idea fail?
Why did something unexpected work?
And what can we learn from it?
That curiosity eventually led me into project management as well. One of my most memorable experiences was managing a difficult roofing project that involved insurance complications, multiple adjusters, communication breakdowns, and problems that couldn't simply be solved by following a checklist.
It taught me something important:
You can't always control the problem. You can control how you respond to it.
Since then, I've continued exploring different disciplines rather than trying to fit myself into a single box. Marketing taught me how to understand people. Sales taught me how to communicate and persuade. Project management taught me how to navigate complexity and actually get things done. Studying psychology taught me to question why people behave the way they do. And my growing interest in data, technology, and AI has given me new ways to investigate problems and work more efficiently.
I don't see these as unrelated skills.
I see them as different tools.
Give me a problem and my instinct is to understand it, break it down, look for the root cause, consider different possibilities, and figure out what should happen next.
Sometimes that means analyzing information.
Sometimes it means talking to people.
Sometimes it means building something.
Sometimes it means taking something apart and rebuilding it.
And sometimes it means realizing that my original assumption was completely wrong.
I'm still learning. There are plenty of things I don't know, and I've become increasingly comfortable with that. In fact, I enjoy being around people who know more than me because there's always something new to learn.
But I don't want to spend my life simply becoming competent at things.
I want to become exceptionally good at understanding problems and creating solutions.
Over the next five years, I want to push myself far beyond simply acquiring skills. I want to discover connections between ideas that other people haven't considered, develop ways of thinking that are genuinely useful, and create something that leaves an imprint on the business world.
And if I manage to discover something truly valuable, I don't want to keep it to myself. I want to teach it, refine it, and pass it on to the people who come after me. By passing it to the next generation, I give them the opportunity to take what I discovered or created, build upon it, amplify it, and turn it into something far greater than what I could have created alone.
I believe everyone has potential, regardless of where they start. I believe we need more curiosity, more objectivity, more willingness to question our assumptions, and more time spent actually thinking before deciding what we believe.
I love learning from people who are smarter than me, because every new thing I learn becomes another piece I can combine with everything I already know. Sometimes those combinations lead to ideas that I never would have reached by studying any one subject alone.
And above everything else, I want whatever I accomplish to be something that brings me closer to pleasing God.
I'm still figuring out exactly where all of this will take me.
But I know what I'm chasing.
I want to leave something behind that wouldn't have existed if I hadn't pursued it.