This story I am about to tell you started in a small town near Medellin, Colombia.
This town was full of kind people who lived relatively simple lives and almost always carried a smile.
These people were surrounded by a beautiful landscape that helped keep a "positive mood." The blue sky, the eternal spring weather, and the peaceful tall green mountains created an idyllic setting, a far cry from all the action happening just 20 kilometers away in the big city of Medellin.
In the 90s, Medellin was considered the most dangerous place in the world. And as much as I would like to tell a different story, it was not easy to grow up in such a place. But it's perhaps precisely where I had to grow up to become who I am today.
My generation was a generation of people carrying deep wounds that became part of a collective trauma. We had to experience firsthand the pain, the desolation, the lack of opportunities, and the culture of "easy money" that the narcotraffic business helped to propagate.
But as Hemingway said, "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong in the broken places." And for many of us, these challenges became an opportunity.
From an early age, we had to learn to survive and thrive in a half-destroyed city. We had to learn delayed gratification and say "no" to many temptations. We had to learn to choose our friends and reference points carefully because we were just one wrong decision away from death or jail.
We also had to learn to heal and use their pain as a resource to move forward in life. We had to let go of the "mindset" victim and replace it with a "yes, I can do" approach.
This generation has produced artists (like J Balvin, Karol G, and Maluma), entrepreneurs, thinkers, and dreamers, who are conquering the world. And I wish everyone would have been able to flourish in the same way. But those who did, prove that we always have a choice.
It doesn't matter where we start. Starting points are rarely perfect. What matters is what we decide to do moving forward, how we transform the things that happen to us into lessons, and the person we become in the process.
How has your starting point helped you to become who you are today?
