Where You Can Go, and Where You Want to Go

I was in grade four, maybe grade five. Our music teacher, who was also the assistant principal, was holding class in the school chapel, and something I said made him stop.

“Ambisyoso ka, no?”

The class laughed. Being called ambitious was not a compliment then; it meant you had forgotten your place.

I was not offended. I have always been fairly self-aware, and he was right. What stayed with me was what he did next. He turned to the class and asked them why they were laughing, then told them that ambition is a good trait, that wanting more is not the same as believing you are owed more, and that the only condition attached to it is that you work for it.

I did not have the words yet for what he handed me. It was this: the size of what you want is not something other people get to set.

What I could not have told you at the time was what I was ambitious for. My Emerald City was already there; it just had no shape. All I could describe was a feeling of not wanting to be constricted.

At that age the clearest form of freedom was small. It was being able to buy the food I wanted. My parents gave us a good life, and we also saw what it cost them to give it, which is its own education. I went to a private school. I went to the mall. Friends came back from trips with stories about places I had not been, and I was watching a wider world arrive through a screen, the way my whole generation did.

The version I wanted most was oddly specific. I wanted to be the rich uncle. I wanted my nieces and nephews telling their classmates they had missed a week of school because their uncle flew them somewhere.

That is a child wanting nice things, and partly it was. But the shape underneath it was already correct. What I wanted was never the thing bought; it was having enough room to make something happen for the people I care about.

What does freedom actually mean?

Three things, and you need all of them at some level before the word applies.

1. Financial freedom. The one everyone talks about, and the only one most people measure.
2. Time freedom. The right to decide what your hours go to.
3. Location freedom. The right to decide where you spend them.

You can run a company, earn well, and still have to be in a building at eight in the morning. You can work from anywhere and still have someone else owning every hour of your day. One without the others is a better cage, not an open door.

Should you be realistic when you set goals?

Be realistic about where you are standing. Do not be realistic about where you are going.

This is where most people go wrong, and it is reasonable that they do. They build the plan from last year’s numbers, this year’s capacity and the industry’s averages. That is not a plan; it is a forecast wearing a plan’s clothes, and it will deliver you somewhere nobody actually chose.

Where you can go is arithmetic. Where you want to go is a decision. They are not the same question and they should not produce the same answer.

Is it bad to change jobs often?

When I started, the market said yes. I went around it.

When I started working in 2018, still in university, the accepted wisdom in the Philippines was that you stayed with a company for at least two years. Move faster and recruiters read it as a defect. You were a jumper. You lacked patience.

I already knew I did not do well in places I had stopped enjoying. So I had a choice that a lot of people face without recognizing it as a choice. Take the path that was available, or go looking for one that actually went where I wanted.

I found freelancing. oDesk at the time, which became Upwork. The short stints that counted against me in one system became the portfolio in another; different clients, different countries, different industries in the same year, and rates that moved because the market I was selling into was not the one I lived in.

I want to be careful here, because this is where these stories usually turn into an advertisement.

Freedom has a price and it is charged continuously. To keep growing you have to keep entering water you have not swum in, and there is always a stretch where you are the least experienced person in the room. Growth reads well in a sentence and feels like doubt while you are inside it. There were campaign weeks where I worked harder than I ever had in an office. Freedom was never the absence of hard work; it was control over when, where and how the work happened.

How do you delegate without losing control?

Enough to think, and not more than you have agreed.

That instinct now shows up in how I take on clients, and I call it parametered autonomy. We agree the destination first, then the strategy, the deliverables, the boundaries and the budget. Inside those, I want room to move without every small decision travelling back to the founder for approval. If it has to, the founder is the bottleneck, and they have paid for a strategist while keeping the thinking on their own desk.

It runs both ways. The freedom I ask for is the freedom I am trying to hand back. When something comes off a founder’s plate completely, what they get in return is attention, and the ability to spend it on the decision that actually needs them, or on their family.

The Emerald City has changed how it looks many times; what sits underneath it has not moved.

When the road in front of me did not lead there, I built another one.

Most people never stop to ask whether theirs does.