Quest for the True North

Paradigm Shift

Filed under career, wealth

I grew up thinking that money was evil and that businessmen were shrewd. It didn’t help that I attended the University of the Philippines, said to be the bastion of the communists. I became a student activist, became an agnostic for awhile, and began to hate imperialist America.

But because of a twist of fate, I landed in the corporate world in a job I didn’t know existed before and never imagined to have. My employer was American, and so it didn’t come as a surprise that I had go to the land of milk and honey to meet the people I worked with and get some training. Anyone in my shoes would have jumped for joy, but I flatly refused to go. I did not want to go. I didn’t see the point in going, because I already knew how to do my job, and I did not want to sign the bond that came with the trip.

Fortunately for me though, I had a manager who had amazing convincing powers. She told me that I would come back a different person–that travel would change me, that there was an experience waiting for me on the other side of the world that I couldn’t get anywhere else. That was what convinced me to go. I signed the papers and packed up. That was how the shift began.

Today, two year and half years later, I have had the pleasure of working alongside Americans, some of whom are my favorite colleagues. I have also finished a course on entrepreneurship, where I came up with business plans and declared to my classmates that I wanted to be rich someday. I have since gone back to the United States, traveled some in Asia, and I plan to go to Europe next. I am not just a child of my country anymore. I am a child of the world.

I used to say that I would rather be very intelligent and poor, like I could live on my ideas alone. Now I say that I am open to the wealth that the universe offers me. There was a time when I thrived on theories like they were my food, and I drank ideas like they were water. Now I prefer results.

Malcolm Caldwell, in his book Outliers, said that to become successful, one does not have to be the smartest. You just have to be smart enough. The old theory that IQ is the end-all and be-all of success is that–old. It has been debunked by countless stories of B students who rose to become inventors and CEOs. Their A classmates become the managers of the companies that they build.

I have since gone back to the university for law school, but I deliberately chose not to live within the parameters of the campus even though it is where the cost of living is cheapest. I also chose to continue to work so I would have a life outside of the academe. The academe is sometimes not the best place to have a realistic view of the world. I would rather be smart enough and be rich in experience than be very intelligent and look at the world through a fiberglass. Life is meant to be lived, not studied.