Work hard and rely on yourself

This year it is high time to stop blaming the government and other people and institutions for our problems. The time has come to take charge of our own life and be responsible for our destiny. If we are poor and jobless, let us do something constructive and immediate and start doing it with a sense of urgency. Let us acquire new skills, learn a new language, connect with more people, and, yes, explore other options.

If the doors for employment are always closed, then we should try entrepreneurship. We should stop knocking at gates that have no chance of being opened to us. Let us expand our horizons and try new ways. Success will not come to us. We have to work hard for it and fight for it.

First of all, we must have clear goals, with specific timetables. We should not allow ourselves to be pushed around and pulled from one direction to another. I was just a son of a poor couple with eighteen children and survived in a small cogon hut in our mountain village in Pusodsawa, Langin, the most outlying barangay in Ronda. At the age of six, I was plowing cornfields, and climbing coconut trees for a fee of twenty centavos per a hundred nuts I processed into copra. I was pasturing goats, carabaos, and cows and raising chickens. At age twelve, I took hold of my life by leaving home to work as a working student, and the rest is history.

That is why I feel angry at millennials today who are late reporting for work because of the traffic. I used to walk four kilometers every day just to go to school, barefoot and without baon. I do not understand why young workers complain of too much workload because when I was twelve I carried sacks of corn, rice and bananas and never complained. This is not just a matter of different generations. This is a matter of attitude and outlook and values, and character. When I was a working student, I used to walk from Cebu City Hall where I worked as court interpreter until five and report for class in UV College of Law at exactly 5:20pm. No snacks, no money for jeepney fare. And never late, never absent.

When I became a lawyer, without having to take the pre-bar review (because I could not afford to go to Manila), I was offered jobs by Secretary Blas F. Ople (a Labor Arbiter at age 27 while I was being wooed by Atlas Mining to work as a junior officer), I was enticed to leave the government and join Petron, which I did, then I was pirated by San Miguel Corporation, at a time that I had a very attractive job offered by PAL. When I left SMC, I was given a check of one million to accept the job as Vice President (for both HR and Legal combined) of Pepsi Cola. Why was I an attractive target of executive job hunters? I was only a poor provinciano from Langin, Ronda, Cebu. I did not finish law in UP nor Ateneo, (well UV is a better law school). Why was I a hot item? Not because I am brilliant. It is because I am hard-working.

I report for work before seven in the morning and goes home at seven in the evening. When report is due every last Friday of the month, I submit it at noon of the last Wednesday. I never sacrificed the quality of my output because of strict deadlines. I respect my superiors and never speak ill of my employers. I always give a lot more of what are demanded of me. I never go to my superiors and present problems. I go to them with solutions. Again, this is not a matter of generation, whether baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y or millenials.

This is a matter of character, of values, and of attitude. And these are what matter most, not where you come from, not where you studied, not credentials but character.

Character is what matters most.