Pedra Branca Boulevard
Imagine you left your family behind to try a new (a)venture. I was invited to be a salesman with no experience, by just being a technical skilled person. You land on a paradise, full of opportunities. What is the first thing to do after you get fired?
Well, I looked around and found myself alone. So I reached to talk to the few people I met there. I went down this boulevard of broken dreams and met them discussing their business. That pumped me up to ask for a mentoring meeting the day after.
Lucifer TV Show Promo Poster
New Amsterdam TV Show Promo Poster
Just to set the scene. Launch Formula had reached its peak, purpose was the word of the year, and there were two new TV shows called Lucifer and New Amsterdam. Bear with me you will understand. One of myy mentor, a lady over her forties, businesswoman asked: - What do I intend to do? - What was I good at?
The nerd me, I always liked to learn from people and share what I learned, this last one was a way to practice the new learned subjects. What profession does that? Immediately I recalled that I could be teaching. But no regular teaching. It should be teaching in a way I wanted to be taught.
There was it. Teach the way I wanted to be taught. I started to take a deep dive into myself. I noticed I learned best about things I like, which also was a way to share things I was good at, also I would look for further materials regarding what I liked. In order words, I could dig more materials and talk with more people about them.
In Brazil, English is a technical lingua franca, I mean, we use English to sound fancy and many business buzz words are in English. Budget, Marketing, Startup, etc. many times we do not even know how to translate this dialect. Also bearing in mind that people do not need to work in something they do not like. I could teach based on these technical words and furthermore, I always thought that people sharing knowledge with far more people in English, into a more competitive environment, like being able to speak in English I was at least five years in the future.
And last, but if I did not see why to learn or how I would use these newly acquired knowledge and skills, I would drop the course and be a closed person such as a stubborn I know I am.
Voila, the three tractors of knowledge: likes, dos, and purposes.
Learning Tractors
Then, I did a course called Empretec. That course was conducted by the United Nations in partnership with the local SBA. Everybody I met said it was mind-blowing. Indeed it is, but I was curious to know what was the secret ingredient to that. First, I noticed the management of expectations. That was key to me. Then the storytelling, the narrative of the course, in a circle that I could be in different levels of knowledge and it would still be interesting and, finally, the tutors. A business person, a sports person, and a psychologist. I will not talk further about it or it would give too many spoilers, but, honestly, you should do Empretec.
Remember that Lucifer TV show? There was a motto on the main character that he was always trying to seal a pact with the devil. "What do you desire?" So I added that to my course/sales pitch. "What do you want to learn?" With the question in mind, "How do you learn the best?" (Orally? Written? Practicing in real life?) New Amsterdam's main character had another motto, "How may I help?" This was key to my heart. I always thought about giving more than asking for anything. (This, later on, led me to be more implosive than explosive.)
Immediately I decided to open a sole proprietorship of private English classes and started to look around for people like me, entrepreneurs. I was lucky to have the best places around me. A university, a lab city (more of a lab neighborhood), businesses, a startup accelerator. That's how it gets started.
Empathy-meter set to the maximum
With my empathy-meter set to the maximum, I decided to reach out for things to learn and teach, tell stories, test ideas, and be a curious volunteer. I ended up doing a lot of things. Being in a lot of events, I tried things here and there. At a certain point, I had a logo, uniform, site, branding, presence. Do you know that expression "to hear all the hats?" That was me. I was the one-man show of English Classes.
This led me to get into courses such as UC Berkeley's Lean Startup Launchpad, which later would set me to build the English for Startups course. I was awarded one of the finalists of the Salto Program a sole proprietors acceleration program. I became the only business in the size to get the Google for Education, I started to have the Brainiac (allusion to the Superman's antagonist) syndrome willing to devour all the knowledge and collect all the technologies, be part of as many groups as I was capable of. Yet alone.
I was studying many courses (as you can see on my certificates page), auditing courses because I was trying to get a masters degree, being nominated as a Director (fancy word to Host) of the local chapter of Startup Grind, I organized toe State Events for the Google Educators Group in my State. I was a speaker for Google Business Group and many other places. I got the chance to be a mentor of startup weekends, hackathons that led me to be the head organizer of the Nasa Spaceapps Hackathon in my city (see my volunteer experience).
Meanwhile, I had classes experience as an outsourced English teacher, and later on, it led me to be an outsourced bilingual course pedagogical coordinator (check my teaching experience page), this last gig besides the private English Classes I was presenting, I was able to save money and present myself with a business/innovation/education mission to the Silicon Valley, and I did my best to live it all (you can learn more about it here).
The covid pandemic locked everything up, I was not able to get my students back and focused on my comfort zone studying. I went back to the university and got an Educational Technologies Specialization. I was invited to join the Peeragogy project (you can learn more about it here).
I had friends, mentors, and mentees… but still, I was not happy. Maybe this with the fact, I was imploding, that led me to two major burnouts. I got back closer to my parents' out of respect for myself. Got new friends. Became the leader of Google Educators Group in my parents' home city, got Google Education Level 1 Certification, I am studying maths to become a teacher, because I understand that merely speaking English abroad is not a differential anymore, but if I also spoke numbers, it could be, also I would be closer to innovation and programming the things I like most, at the same time I decided to study the Google User Experience Certificate Program that prompted me to do a portfolio you can see here done.