The 6 Elements of Joy
[Music]
three weeks ago
a friend called me and asked me if i had
watched the netflix show
called narcos and i said yes
why and he said well i don’t want you to
feel offended
but i didn’t know how crazy things were
in colombia during those years
and i thought to myself yes those
were really really bad years but i
remember having a joyful
childhood so i guess we just learned to
live with it
nowadays colombia is amazing so i
recommend you to go and visit
but anyway in high school i picked
psychology as my career of choice
however my parents had a different plan
for me
as a lot of hispanic parents they want
their kids to be doctors
engineers or lawyers so they gave me
three options civil engineering
industrial engineering
or business they owned a construction
company
and being the oldest kid in the family
they had all their hopes
in me to continue managing the business
my younger brother
was recovering from years of epilepsy
and my sister
was still a kid so
i have to confess that i was pretty
upset with the giving options
and i picked civil engineering just
because i had no
idea what it was about so i went to
university for
civil engineering and i ended up liking
it
and having a blast the thing was
that six months before my graduation
my parents had to close their business
because at the time
the narcos were doing money laundering
through construction
and my parents couldn’t compete anymore
so
what did i do i got married
and got a job obviously a year later my
husband and i
decided to go to grad school and we
wanted to do it
overseas because we thought that would
give us an edge
when we go back home to get a better job
but the problem was that none of us
spoke english
so the options now wrote to spain
but even though the program was in spain
it was in english
because it was the international mba so
we still needed to learn
english at the time jaime’s sister was
living in new york city and she invited
us to live with her
so let me tell you i love new york city
but in my opinion it’s not the best
place to learn english
because everybody speaks everything but
english
or at least everybody spoke to us in
spanish
and that forced us to speak
in english between the two of us and
even fight in english
and that was tough so after a year of
studying english our savings were little
and we didn’t have money now to go to
spain and start again
but we didn’t want to go back to
colombia without our masters so at the
time i had a friend who was living in
manchester new hampshire
and she suggested us to apply to
southern new hampshire university for
our masters
so we did and jaime went first when he
started classes
i decided to look for a job in
engineering
i needed to look for a company that
sponsored me and i also needed to put my
resume together
the problem was that my english was
still massive menos
and i didn’t know any technical words in
english
and at the time there was not such a
thing as google
so what i did is i went with heimet to
his university
and sat in their computer lab with an
spanish
english dictionary and put my resume
together
i remember vividly during that time
that one night we had just played
hyman’s tuition
and we had no money left and we just sat
down on the floor
pray and gave thanks for everything we
had experienced
and just put ourselves in god’s hands
the crazy thing is that the next day
henry got paid 200 for a tutoring
session he had done at his
school and that same day later
i got a call from a company that wanted
to interview me in boston
so i went to this interview and there
were two guys
one was very opposed to what my
expertise could provide
and the other one was very welcoming
arguing that
numbers were numbers here or in any
part of the world i left the interview
feeling
hopeful but mostly grateful because i
finally had had the opportunity to talk
to a civil engineer in this country
two weeks passed and i didn’t hear from
them so i assume
i didn’t get the job so i decided to
call the welcoming guy
and i said look i know i didn’t get the
job
but i would love it if you could help me
improve my resume
so what he said sure come here and i
help you
and surprisingly he changed my whole
resume
but but to my surprise he offered me a
job
two days later and they even sponsor my
work visa
i just couldn’t believe it on my first
day of work
i was very nervous because i didn’t know
how these big tough guys were gonna
react
to a petite latina woman with a strong
accent
they turned out to be great but at this
job
i not only learned about how
construction works here
but i also faced the reality of being
the only woman
wherever i went and that was not an easy
task for sure
but i still went with it a couple of
years later my husband and i felt more
established
and we decided to start a family and we
tried for
six years unsuccessfully and then we
went for ibf
and after a painful emotional and
physical process
we got pregnant with our bella becoming
a mom
working in the construction industry
turned out to be a little bit
challenging
when you work in a male dominated
industry and in the field
you don’t really get a lot of
flexibility but again i still went with
it
two years later i went to bobson college
for my mba
with emphasis in entrepreneurship and
isabella got twin sisters
while all of this was happening i kept
getting compliments about
my jewelry and having the bulk of
entrepreneurship in my mind
i thought i’m gonna start a fashion
business however
i didn’t want it to be one more jewelry
business
so i went back to colombia and i talked
to the artisans that made my jewelry
and i was moved by their stories
i felt privileged to have the life that
i had had
and i felt that i needed to do something
and that’s when i
founded artifactus a sustainable and
ethical
jewellery business that offers
unexpected pieces of jewelry
made out of orange peel and seeds and we
support
vulnerable artisan women for whom this
is their primary source of income
and help reduce the waste of 15 million
tons of orange peel
that get discarded every year i’ve been
with that in fact to six years and i’m
happy to share that we are in a hundred
retailers nationwide
and keep growing however i always
thought
that i needed to do something go back to
engineering i knew there was so many
opportunities in the construction
industry
but i didn’t want to start a company
only for my own financial benefit
i wanted to benefit others too i’ve
always been inclined to
for-profit social entrepreneurship
and that’s when my husband and i decided
to join forces
we wanted to leverage his expertise and
technology
and my experience in the construction
industry and we recently founded
merge tech a mobile application that
connects
on businesses with prime contractors
bringing transparency and quality
to the construction industry so when i
was invited
to make this talk about joy i thought to
myself
i don’t have much to share i have lived
an extraordinary
ordinary life with challenges as all of
us do
however i was able to identify
that throughout all those challenging
years
there were six common elements that
brought joy to my life
and those are personal growth
gratitude authenticity
discipline positive relationships
and purpose personal growth
it takes courage to move from your
comfort zone
to your fear zone but fear is an
important
step move us forward a part of
full of opportunities it is in our
control
or in our power to see it as a positive
or negative thing for instance we can
see stress
as anxiety or as excitement
so don’t be afraid to
leave your comfort zone and move to a
world full of
personal growth i can assure you
that even if you don’t achieve the goals
you set up to achieve you will get to
know
yourself your resiliency your fragility
and your efficacy and in my opinion
trying is the best way to grow in life
gratitude being graceful gives you joy
because it just makes you realize what
you have right
we have a daily routine at home
before we go to bed and after we say our
prayers
each of us give thanks to for whatever
we feel thankful for
we are teaching the girls to be thankful
even if we don’t get all we want and i
look
forward to that moment every day because
i love
hearing what they have to say and it
just gives me so much joy
authenticity being authentic is simply
being yourself
evolving all those social pressures
in my opinion being an immigrant health
may be
my authentic self it is obvious that i’m
different in this culture
i just need to say a word and people can
notice it
it was not easy at the beginning but i
have learned that i’m worthy of love
even with my perfect imperfections so
love yourself accept
others be thoughtful
and be open to be vulnerable i’m sure
you will enjoy
life even more in that way discipline
buddha said a disciplined mind brings
happiness
those who are self-disciplined and
self-control
are more likely to be happy according to
research
when you have meaningful goals and make
progress towards those
goals and eventually you achieve those
goals
you cannot help people to feel happy
about your efforts and your outcomes
we have a role in our house with the
girls
we taught them that they need to make
their beds as soon as they get up
and making your bed is the most
effective and
easiest trigger of joy because it just
gives you an immediate sense of success
i always tell the girls that
luck is at the intersection between
opportunity and preparedness in order to
get lucky in life
you need to be disciplined in what you
are set up to do
it can apply to my luckiness in this
country as
immigrant we can have limited
opportunities but that should not stop
us from learning a new language
a new culture or a new topic and be
prepared for when the opportunity arises
and when it does i’m sure you are going
to enjoy the moment
even more positive relationships
a harvard study shows that the happiest
people
are the ones who lean into relationships
with family co-workers and friends
moving to the usa has been a remarkable
experience
i have learned what new yorkers and
bostonians
appreciate and what bothers them
my latino culture is very buoyant
and therefore more spontaneous and so i
had learned to enjoy
relationships here in a different way
i also think that we have lost universal
norms or behavior and i firmly believe
that if we go back
to practice urbanity and good manners it
will bring us back to those
cordial positive and joyful
relationships with each other
it could be as simple as saying good
morning to your neighbor
or being tolerant and expressing
affection to someone at home
or respecting others rights and not
abusing yours
and purpose this was the toughest for me
i was always following normal like
social
norms right i listened to my parents
i went to school went to college got a
master’s
got a job got married
had kids bought a home but is that
really my purpose
i don’t feel so sometimes finding your
purpose is not right in front of you
what i have learned is that i should
listen to my
cut right that little voice that god
uses to guide us when i founded
artifacts on merge tech
that little voice told me that with
privilege came
responsibility and that i needed to pay
it forward
that i i needed to use the tools and
knowledge that i have learned
throughout my life to help those who
have not had the same opportunities
so i will leave you with this
we have the power
to change how we see our reality
we cannot control what happened to us
but we can control
how we react to it we can control
our own joy or lack of it by seeing the
optimistic
side of those challenging situations in
our
ordinary life we are bringing joy and
happiness into our lives
and we are opening to immeasurable
opportunities
i’m hopeful that today sharing my story
will show you that those challenging
moments in my life
taught me that through kindness
paying it forward and gratitude i could
have
a joyful life and because you are the
authority
of your own life you can do it too
thank you