How it all started.

“…the constant pursuit of value, meaning, happiness and a reason to survive projected as the creation of technology that creates awesome experiences for people and which resembles magic, fueled by the unmovable anxiety and negative feelings that an unchanged reality brings.”

It was probably a Thursday when two of my closest friends, my girlfriend (at that time) and I met at a café in my hometown simply to catch up. I had already began to become absent from their lives when this happened. We began chatting about the past and about all of those trivial things we bring to attention when we don’t really have anything to say, because we don’t really do much. But then we started talking about the future. I started -fearing- the future by the beginning of my second year in college. I like to say it was because I could not accept the idea of becoming a soldier of a corporation and working through the day achieving and hoping to achieve goals which weren’t really mine, in a job which would not fulfil me; the reality if that I feared to being good enough to even get into something like that. I was afraid I would be rejected by the world as soon as it was time I became part of it. And so I started to not only fear the future, but to plan how I could make my own and not need to be part of the norm. My girlfriend didn’t really understand or share my sentiment but, interestingly, my friends did. The conversation, then, shifted to “how we can change the world, do what we like and make a living out of it” -the typical hipster conversation, I assume- but I guess I took it a bit more seriously than would be expected. This was probably because I didn’t even realise the topic and the intention were common, and people just didn’t follow through. I thought it was a novel idea and that made it whortwhile to chase it… I lived in my own bubble, evidently.

Toks Garza Sada. It was recently renovated, but this is how it looked then. (Image from “El Norte”: www.elnorte.com)

The third year of college was starting as depression kicked in the hardest. Everything was wrong. The anti-climatic, false, conformist and cold reality of society, the world and life were becoming overwhelming. I couldn’t find a reason to make an effort anymore. I couldn’t find energy to do anything or go anywhere. Staying at home and writing dreary stories, I started to eat less and less and excercise more and more. I dropped around 22 lbs and stopped talking to all of my friends. It was a pretty dark time, but at least I was able to write. It was at this moment that, as a thing of providence, one of those two friends told me about a call for projects that was taking place during those weeks, where people were asked to propose projects for a better future; projects that could change the world for the better within ten years and impact a million people. She said I “had so many good ideas that could definitely change the world” and that “anything you can think of and write will surely be better than the crap most people send to those things”. She hit the right spot: my ego. I guess I hadn’t had a self-esteem boost like that in a long time; it actually made me feel pretty good, although I think I never really told her that. And so, an afternoon when I had to work through differential equations modeling electric and magnetic fields of non-uniform distributions of charges in space, I decided to write my proposal and send those equations to hell. Several weeks later, the email came which said the project had been selected as one of the thirty seven winning proposals from all around the world.

Gifted Citizen’s logo. Apparently, if you search for “Gifted Citizen” i nwikipedia, I am actually in one of the pictures! :P (Image from “Innovadores de América”: www.innovadoresdeamerica.org)

I have told the people who oranized the event, but I’m sure they still don’t realize that their choosing me side by side with the other exceptional thirty six people who came to form the first generation of “Gifted Citizen” in “Ciudad de las ideas” truly changed my life. The thing I remember the least are the speakers who were at the event (a sort of Region 4 Ted that actually did exceed my expectations of Mexican events -kudos to them; it is, honestly, a great achievement of a gathering-); at least twenty five of the other winners had attended Singularity University and my stay at Puebla consisted of constant individual discussions with each one of these individuals (one of them named one of the most powerful and influential women in technology in Latinamerica; another one part of the team responsible for organizing the first-ever giant robot battle between the US and Japan), becoming a true kick-start of my “entrepreneurial/innovation/changemaker/watchamaycallit” life. It was there, at that moment, and because of that, that I gained enough motivation, vision, and self-respect to actually go and try to do something of my life. That was the first time I “pitched” an idea (a world-changing idea, not a business one -thankfully-) in public, for christ’s sake… and it was in an auditorium filled with thousands of people, televised, just having turned twenty one, standing shoulder to shoulder -ok, maybe not their shoulders ’cause I was shorter than them- with all of these people who had worked with NASA and travelled all around the world. I felt at the top of the world and now I believed I could achieve anything. Corina, Yadira, Myriam and Liliana were there, by my side, believing in a runt of a boy that I was -and still am-, and they will be in my heart, for that, forever.

This is a really bad-quality picture of me talking on stage, with “Ciudad de las ideas” organizer, Andrés Roemer. Pics or it didn’t happen, huh? (Image from my private album)

I believe people earn respect. Nobody gives it to you just like that, and you can’t buy it with money, either. I knew a great project came only of collaboration and integration of many, strong people into a hard-working team. I knew I needed to become a leader. Maybe I had the ideas. Maybe I had the vision. But I didn’t have the strength. I didn’t have the boldness. I had the mouth of a bold person but nothing to back it up. No portfolio, if you will, that would make anyone follow me. Pure talk, no proof. Nothing for people to admire or inspire respect. Nothing that would make me follow me. So I had to get it, I thought. And so on January 2013 I took off, alone, from Monterrey’s airport to London, to stay in Europe for six months following three rules: have no money, take no money, use no money; make no plans in advance, find accomodation as you go, wherever you can, with every stranger you can (this was the first time I stayed in the home of a homosexual man, having grown up with heavy prejudices -I’m a proud liberal who has converted from conservatism-); eat only healthy food -no pizza or anything or the sort- and excercise every day. I dropped under 88 pounds by the second month before deciding not to check my weight again. I was kicked out of a couple of apartments and rejected by close friends. I spent so many hours on trains that I lost count, and ate so much peanut butter that the smell of it produces overwhelming negative feelings every single time. I slept two hours a day during the last two weeks in Holland, because I was so hungry I had to pass out in order to actually lose consciousness. And when I returned, I knew I had what it took to become the leader I wanted to be. And the portfolio for the team members I wanted. This may have been unconventional, but I guess I didn’t want to achieve conventional things, right?

This is me, feeling powerful in Amsterdam. I was actually pretty hungry, but I did feel sort of successful, for some reason. (Image from my private album)

On August 2013 I re-enrolled college. I changed my major from Physics to Applied Physics and changed my focus to robotics. Two friends and I gathered seventeen people and started urban projects under the wing of Distrito Tec’s Lorena and Nacho, to whom I still owe everything because they were the first ones to give me a chance to prove my worth. On the side, I joined and quickly took leadership of a team working in an international R&D robotics project by Tecnológico de Monterrey together with the University of Houston. The first year of work resulted in around 45 people coming together to develop three urban projects in our home city, impacting over 250 mid-class and under-priviledged residents, and one filed-for-patent R&D project which won a design prize by Schlumberger and which was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, now having 2,000+ reads and almost 10 citations (which I think is pretty good for an article in the area of sensors).

Figure 1: The aforementioned R&D project resulted in the prototypes being worn by the subject on his right thigh and his left sheen. The devices monitor pressure in real time, as the subject uses the exoskeleton to perform walking, sittng and standing, and left and right turn functions. See the following link for the full article: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/15/2/4550 (Image from my private album)

…and this is how it all started: the constant pursuit of value, meaning, happiness and a reason to survive projected as the creation of technology that creates awesome experiences for people and which resembles magic, fueled by the unmovable anxiety and negative feelings that an unchanged reality brings.

INDI Ingeniería y Diseño

Written by

Tech-Enhanced Human Experience. Development & integration of technical, artistic, and personal human-machine interfaces.

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