From $100 to the Executive Table: What the Journey Taught Me About Success
From a hundred dollars and a dream: how continuous learning and mentorship shaped a journey from technician to global leader.
The More You Know, the More You Grow
In August 1990, I arrived in the United States from the Philippines with an engineering degree, a suitcase, and one hundred dollars in my pocket.
I had dreams, but I certainly didn't have a roadmap.
My first job in America wasn't in engineering. I worked as a nanny. Later, I worked in a jewelry store and then at a bank. Every job taught me something, but deep inside, I knew I hadn't crossed an ocean and left everyone I loved behind to stop there.
Then, on January 15, 1995, I was given an opportunity that changed my life: I became a Network Operations Technician.
I still remember how much I didn't know.
Technology in America was far ahead of what I had experienced in the Philippines. Instead of allowing that to intimidate me, I stayed late. I studied. I asked questions. I learned.
That became one of the philosophies that would follow me throughout my career:
The more you know, the more you grow.
Over the next three decades, my career took me from technician to executive leadership. I led technical organizations, transformed operations, built teams, and eventually led people not only across the United States but internationally.
But the journey wasn't a straight line upward.
There were times I deliberately moved sideways. There were even times when a career decision might have looked like a step backward. I stopped measuring every opportunity by the title that came with it and started asking myself a different question:
What will this teach me?
That question changed the way I thought about success.
I learned that sometimes the experience you gain from a lateral move prepares you for an opportunity you couldn't yet see. I learned that you don't have to know everything before walking into a room—you just have to be willing to learn what you don't know. And I learned that courage doesn't mean you're not afraid. Sometimes courage simply means moving forward while you are still afraid.
As my career grew, something else changed.
My definition of success changed with it.
Early in my life, success meant survival. It meant helping my family. Later, it meant building a career and proving that I belonged in rooms where there were very few women—and even fewer women who looked or sounded like me.
Today, success means something different.
It means developing people. It means mentoring women who may not yet recognize their own potential. It means opening doors and then holding those doors open long enough for someone else to walk through.
And it means remembering where I came from.
That one hundred dollars has stayed with me—not because of what it could buy, but because of what it represented.
Hope.
Sacrifice.
Possibility.
And a promise to myself that I would make the opportunity I had been given mean something.
More than three decades later, I understand something the young woman who stepped off that plane couldn't possibly have known:
The greatest measure of success isn't how far you travel from where you started. It's how many people you help move forward because you made the journey.
