My Origin Story, Part 1: Little Rock
In 2012, I was 22 years old, sitting in a client's office in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was my first time in the United States and I had just built my first model. I thought it was going to be my moment, then my manager brought someone else to present it.
The year was 2012. I was 22 years old, six months into my first real job, and sitting in our client’s office in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was my first time in the United States and I was staring at a spreadsheet with 500,000 rows.
I was supposed to make a “model”. Nobody could tell me what exactly a model was. Nobody explained what I was supposed to build. The task was something like: here are all the buildings this client owns across the country, here are their maintenance expenses, figure out how much money we can save them by consolidating suppliers. Go.
I had just learned how to do vlookups. I was struggling to understand index matches. For weeks, I worked until 4am, googling everything like a madwoman.
Eventually, I figured it out. I built my first model, I did it on time, and it worked: scenarios, projections, numbers that looked like we could save this client a shit ton of money. (Well… We were never gonna save the client money, not really, but that’s a story for another time.)
I was so proud of my model. The formulas were complex, the results were elegant, and I had figured it out completely on my own. I thought, “When we present this to the client, someone is going to ask who built it. That will be my moment.”
Then my manager Henry brought John to the client meeting instead.
Not me, John.
John, who had just graduated from UCLA and was very proud of it. John, who didn’t build the model. John, who had no clue how anything in it worked. John, who told me later he was furious about the whole thing too.
I sat there, outside the meeting room, and said nothing. I was 22, it was my first job, I was in a country I'd never been to before, and I couldn’t yet articulate what had just happened.
But I understood it.
Your work doesn't speak for itself.
Doing the work and getting credit for it – they are two completely different games. I had spent my whole life mastering one of them. I wasn't aware the other one was even a thing.
A few months later, I quit. I flew back to Manila and started building a list of 100 dentists in Alabama. I was done waiting to be invited into the room. I decided to make my own.
I didn't know it yet, but it was going to be the hardest year of my life. That's the next post.
This is the first post in a series about my origin story. After this job, I never again applied for a role I was qualified for. That became the foundation of everything I teach at Brave New Path.
Names have been changed.