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I was going to write to you about place anyway. It is a chapter of the book. But on August 10 my country, and especially my city, was struck by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake, and the chapter stopped being theory. So today I want to share with you a part of my story and a part of my book.

Let me start from the end.

On August 10 at 5:34 in the morning, my phone rang. It was my mom. I jumped out of bed and stepped out of the room where Celeste and Cata were sleeping. When I answered, she was screaming and crying, and my first thought was: my father died. Then she said, “we are going to die, everything is falling.” I understood it was an earthquake, and my first instinct was to calm her down. After two minutes she could breathe again. We switched to video, and she was right: everything in their condo was on the floor. Plates, paintings, TVs, glasses. Then I called my mother in law to make sure she was safe too. And as the minutes passed, we began to discover the magnitude of what had just happened.

It was the strongest earthquake Colombia has recorded this century, and the most destructive day in Pereira’s history. As I write this, more than 300 people have died. More than 54,000 families have been affected across the country, with over 11,000 homes destroyed and another 47,000 damaged. In Pereira alone, close to 58,000 students have no school to return to. We are still trying to process it. To digest it. To understand what comes next.

So why am I telling you all of this?

Because I want to talk with you about the place where you were born and how it shapes you. And because in my case that place is Pereira, I want to tell you a little more about my place. My story.

As Eric Weiner puts it: “I’ve always been a big believer in the power of place. I believe that where we are affects who we are when it comes to happiness, spirituality, economics, and creative genius.”

You are not just born into a family. You are born into a place: a culture, a context, a system that shapes what you believe is or is not possible.

We like to think we shape our own destiny. That hard work and ambition are enough. That where you come from does not determine where you can go. That last claim is partially true.

But here is the fuller truth: place matters.

It shapes your language, your beliefs, your access to opportunity. It defines what you see, what you normalize, what you question, and what you dare to dream about.

I know this not just as someone who studies these patterns, but as someone born in Pereira, Colombia, a city that taught me something most places do not: that extraordinary things happen when communities decide to build them together. Some might call that luck. To me, it was simply the reality of the place I grew up in.

I am going to start with my own city, not just because it is the place I was born, but because I find it unique, and because place is hard to see when it is invisible. We will get to the global research (Bratman, Chetty, Florida, Moretti, Weiner) soon enough. But first, Pereira, the place that taught me to recognize community-made success when I see it.

* * *

A city built by its citizens

Pereira (pronounced peh-REY-rah) is the capital of Colombia’s Risaralda department, set in the foothills of the Andes at the heart of the coffee-growing region. It sits within the area recognized in 2011 as the UNESCO Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia.

When I was born in 1981, Pereira had about 350,000 people. It was not cosmopolitan. It was not famous. It did not have global industries or elite universities. The only international corporation in town was a Suzuki motorcycle assembly plant.

But it had something else. An extraordinary spirit of collective action.

What sets Pereira apart, something I have never encountered elsewhere with the same intensity, is that it is a city literally built by its citizens. Not metaphorically. Literally. The main highway connecting Pereira to Armenia, the iconic statue of the Bolívar Desnudo in front of the cathedral, the San Jorge Hospital, the Matecaña international airport, the military battalion headquarters, the Olympic Village and sports complex, even the city zoo: in most cities those would have been government projects or private developments. In Pereira, the people themselves raised the money, organized the labor, and physically built them.

The vehicle was something called a convite.

* * *

What a convite actually is

The word convite comes from medieval Latin convitare, “to invite,” entering Castilian through Catalan convit. In peninsular Spain it meant a banquet, a feast you were invited to. The first dictionary record appears in 1617, in the Vocabularium Hispanicum Latinum et Anglicum. In the New World the word specialized: a convite came to mean a community-summoned workday, where neighbors of every class converged with their own tools, food, and labor to build a public work no single person, family, or government could afford alone.

The convite is not the same as a minga or a mano vuelta, even though these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. The minga (from Quechua minka) is the broader Andean tradition of communal labor for a collective or public good. The mano vuelta, or mano prestada, is dyadic reciprocity between two households: I help you build today, you help me build tomorrow. The convite sits between them. It is one-day, large-scale, and Catholic-mediated. A priest, a civic leader, an alcalde, or a Junta de Acción Comunal president convenes it. The community brings its labor. The host community provides food, and the workers are paid in commensality and prestige, not in deferred labor.

Pereira inherited the convite from the Antioqueño colonization of the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. As the historian Eduardo Santa wrote in La colonización antioqueña: “La mayor parte de las obras públicas se construían en convites o mingas, en los que participaban desde los más destacados fundadores hasta los más modestos aldeanos.” Most public works were built in convites or mingas, in which both the most distinguished founders and the most modest villagers took part.

One honest caveat: although the practice of collective labor is what founded Pereira, the word convite as applied to specific Pereira works does not appear in the nineteenth-century chronicles. The cronistas of the founding era (Echeverri Uribe, Sánchez Arenas) describe the same activity using different words: limosnas, paseos, colectas, bazares. The terminology of the convite Pereirano crystallized only in the 1920s and 1940s, when the city’s self-consciousness as the Capital Cívica de Colombia matured. The practice is older than the name.

And the people who did the practice were not only the people the founding stories named. One of the founders Pereira’s official mythology long forgot was Guadalupe Zapata, born in 1841 in Carolina del Príncipe, Antioquia, and recorded in Pereira’s 1867 census as a twenty-eight-year-old Afro-Colombian single mother. She panned gold at the foot of what would become Plaza de Bolívar, ran a way-station fonda called “Las Lupes” that fed travelers and laborers passing through, and under Ley 70 of 1870 was titled thirty-five hectáreas of land. The historian Alexander Cuervo Varela, in his Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira thesis on her, calls her “the antithesis of the narrative of power concentrated in titans, heroes, and great men.” Pereira finally named a plaza for her in 2013.

* * *

The neuroscience of place

What Pereira taught me as a child, modern science now confirms: places shape people. They do more than frame our memories; they sculpt our minds. A 2019 paper by Bratman and colleagues in Science Advances found that exposure to natural environments is associated with increased happiness, social engagement, and a stronger sense that life tasks are manageable, alongside decreased mental distress. The political scientist Kevin Leyden, in a 2003 paper in the American Journal of Public Health, found that residents of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods report significantly higher social capital than residents of sprawling car-dependent ones. Green parks and walkable streets help us feel good and connect more deeply with our neighbors, a point the urbanist Jane Jacobs spent decades defending, most famously in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).

Culture leaves its fingerprints on the brain too. Children in different cultures develop different neural pathways, some emphasizing individual identity, others emphasizing relational identity. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has put the point sharply: “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.” Those feelings are constantly shaped by our cultural surroundings. Take Los Angeles, a city on the Pacific coast. Many of its poorer children grow up without ever seeing the ocean, because the transport, the gas, or the day off work to reach it is more than the family can spare. They share a city with the ocean and never meet it.

Economics adds another layer. Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas research at Harvard shows that the neighborhood a child grows up in can predict that child’s future earnings more accurately than many school-level variables. Brain scans even reveal that children from different economic environments show measurable differences in regions governing language and learning.

We like to imagine the mind as free-floating, but the truth is more grounded. We do not just live in places. Places live in us.

* * *

Two garages

In The Problem with Half Stories I told you what the garage myths of Apple, Google, and Amazon leave out. So I will not retell them here. But there is one part of those stories that geography explains better than anything else: the garage itself.

A garage in Mountain View, California, is not the same as a garage in Pereira, Colombia. The same individual effort produces dramatically different results, depending on what surrounds the garage.

This does not mean innovation cannot happen in Pereira. It absolutely can and does. But the “same” individual effort produces different results depending on geographic context. Place does not determine destiny, but it shapes possibility.

* * *

What Pereira taught me

Growing up in a city built through convites taught me lessons I did not even realize I was learning. That community is normal, that collective action is how things actually get done. That different backgrounds, ethnic, religious, economic, make a city stronger rather than weaker. That civic pride is something you earn by contributing, not something you inherit. That leadership can be distributed, that a Franciscan priest, a Rotarian, an Afro-Colombian fondera, and an alcalde can all be founders of the same place. And that individual achievement is meaningless unless it adds to collective flourishing.

These were not lessons taught in school. They were mythologies absorbed through daily life, in a place where community-made success was visible everywhere I looked. Many of those stories were told at our dinner table by my parents.

* * *

A tradition that mutates

The civismo of my grandparents’ generation looks different from today’s. Pereira has grown into a city of more than 470,000 people, with multiple universities, technology companies, and global connections that were unimaginable when I was born. The Suzuki plant is no longer the only international corporation. The challenges have changed.

On January 25, 1999, the terremoto del Eje Cafetero, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake, killed 1,185 people and damaged more than 100,000 buildings across the coffee region. The official reconstruction was state-led, through FOREC (the Fondo para la Reconstrucción y Desarrollo Social del Eje Cafetero) and a 225 million dollar emergency loan from the World Bank. The formal response was institutional, not communal. But on the ground, the response looked like a convite. Ollas comunitarias organized by barrio. Brigades of remoción de escombros. Milk companies distributing free milk vereda by vereda. Hospital San Jorge became the regional referral center. The same hospital the city itself had paid for half a century earlier, when Aleyda Mejía was crowned Reina de la Caridad in 1943 and all of Pereira raised the money for its new building.

And now the tradition is being tested again. I am not in Pereira right now, and watching from afar has been its own kind of pain. But even from Los Angeles I can tell you what happened within hours of the earthquake: thousands of people in the streets, helping each other, feeding each other. In the centro, the hardest hit zone, I watched people pull strangers from the rubble with their own hands. Across the city, neighbors did not wait for official help. They cleared debris, set up tents, and organized community kitchens on their own. And at Hospital San Jorge, hundreds of pereiranos lined up spontaneously to give blood, at a blood bank that carries a name you already know: Aleyda Mejía.

It was one of the most devastating moments in my city’s history. And at the same time, I have never been more proud of the place where I was born.

The tradition adapts. It always has.

* * *

Why place matters more in a connected world

In our increasingly connected world, it might seem like geography matters less. I can video call someone in Singapore, read a book written in India, and sell services to clients in Europe without leaving my home in Los Angeles.

But the research suggests the opposite. In a knowledge economy, place matters more than ever, not less. Richard Florida has shown that creative and economic success increasingly concentrates in cities with the right combination of talent, tolerance, and technology. Enrico Moretti’s data goes further: workers in innovation hubs earn dramatically more than equally talented workers elsewhere, not because they are smarter, but because productive environments amplify individual capabilities. And in Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Genius, breakthrough innovation almost always shows up where diversity, failure tolerance, and cross-disciplinary mixing already exist.

The lesson is not that some places are inherently better than others. It is that different places create different possibilities, and recognizing this is essential for understanding why individual effort alone is never sufficient.

* * *

Place does not determine destiny, but it shapes possibility. And people, together, shape places. That is the principle Pereira wrote into my life before I could read, and the one it is writing again right now, in the middle of the rubble.

So let me leave you with the question this essay has been circling. What kind of place were you born into? How did its culture, its opportunities, and its limitations shape your sense of what was possible? I would love to read your answer in the comments.

And if you came this far and want to help, I want to share a cause that is very close to our hearts. La Casa de los Sueños, the home of the foundation Malabareando las Calles, finds children living on the streets of Pereira, including kids facing sexual exploitation and child labor, and works with them through art, yoga, and dance to help them leave street life for good. The earthquake destroyed their house too. They are rebuilding it the way Pereira has always rebuilt: together.

Help La Casa De Los Sueños

Un abrazo,

Andrés F. Giraldo

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“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — attributed to Jim Rohn

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This one comes from a chapter of the book I am writing. It is about friendship.

Friendship is one of the most ordinary things in a human life and one of the things we examine least. Some people have two friends, and some have two hundred. What almost nobody does is decide which of those they want to be.

A few years ago I was having a beer with a friend I admire, a magician who has done beautiful work with Magicians Without Borders. He said something that stayed with me. “You only get a few windows to make friends. Family, school, university, work. After that the door closes.”

Later, in Los Angeles, a different friend told me the same thing, pointing the other way. “We have to take advantage of this stage, becoming parents. It is one of the last windows we get.”

Two friends who have never met, believing the same thing: that friendship is something that happens to you when circumstances put you in a room.

I told them both the same thing.

You deserve the friends you want.

Most of us treat friendship as fixed. Your friends are whoever your circumstances handed you, the school you went to, and the block you happen to live on. You accept what arrives and you call it destiny.

I do not believe that. Friendship can be intentional. You can decide what kind of people you want near you and then go find them. You can build something around shared values instead of a shared zip code.

And when you do, those people end up shaping your health and your happiness. Sometimes your business too.

If I am honest about the people closest to me today, around seventy percent of them are friends I went looking for. Cold messages. An introduction I asked someone for. One time I walked up to a stranger after a conference because I could not think of a better plan.

Mario is the clearest example.

Chamorro

Fifteen years ago we had just moved to Los Angeles. One night I turned on the TV and there was an interview with a guy doing art installations in New York and Boston with Post-its, asking people one question: what makes you happy. I got hooked on the idea.

I looked him up on Facebook. We had two friends in common. I sent him a message.

He answered, very friendly, and I told him that if he ever came to L.A. I would love to have a coffee.

Time flew.

Then I saw a post of Mario in San Francisco and I wrote to remind him about the coffee. I know. A little bit weird. But he said yes, and he ended up staying at my house for a week.

The story is much longer. What I can tell you is that a Facebook message and a coffee changed my life. Mario is my brother from another mother. He has been there for every up and down of these fifteen years.

None of it was on a calendar. There was no window. I opened one and he let me in.

When self-made becomes self-isolated

In May 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness and social isolation a public health crisis. The line everybody quotes from that advisory is the comparison to smoking: weak social connection carries a mortality risk similar to fifteen cigarettes a day. The research underneath it, a meta-analysis led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, put numbers on it. Loneliness raises the likelihood of early death by about 26 percent. Social isolation by 29. Living alone by 32.

The same advisory found that even before the pandemic, about half of American adults were carrying measurable levels of loneliness. And people between 15 and 24 now spend roughly 70 percent less time in person with their friends than people that age did twenty years ago.

The number that unsettles me most is not in the advisory. In 1990, 3 percent of Americans said they had no close friends. By 2021 it was 12 percent. Quadrupled in one generation.

This is not only an American problem. Britain appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2018. Japan appointed one in 2021. When two governments create a cabinet position for a feeling, something has broken.

What is causing it? Many things. But one of them is the mythology of self-made success, which is what this newsletter exists to argue with. When you believe you are supposed to do it all on your own, investing in people starts to look like a distraction from the work. It is not a distraction. It is the work.

Scott Galloway makes a version of this point constantly, in his podcasts and in Adrift. Americans have walked away from the places where people used to gather, from churches to Scout troops to bowling leagues, and most adults today barely know their neighbors.

The damage goes past individual mental health. The structures that used to hold people together are coming apart one by one. People move every few years for work, so the neighborhood stops being a place where anyone knows your name. Families scatter across continents. Church and civic life lose their pull. Even the friendships that used to come built into a job have thinned out with remote work and the gig economy.

Social media promised to replace all of it, and it delivered something. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But what the research keeps finding is that the shallow connection crowds out the deep kind, and scrolling crowds out showing up. I can reach four hundred people before breakfast and still eat alone.

The Colombian writer Gilmer Mesa said something to me once that I have not been able to shake. In Colombia the neighbors used to hold everything up. Now we care more about the person far away on a screen than the one standing three meters from the door.

What the body already knows

John Cacioppo spent his career at the University of Chicago studying loneliness, much of it alongside his wife Stephanie, also a neuroscientist. He arrived at one conclusion. Human beings are not designed for independence. We are designed for interdependence.

The evidence is physical. Loneliness shows up in the body the way chronic stress does, with a weaker immune response and higher inflammation. Isolation degrades thinking itself, measurably, in memory and in decision making. Connection runs the other way and releases the chemistry that helps you recover.

Cacioppo’s own summary was that we do not get our strength from rugged individualism. We get it from the ability to plan and work together.

However much we love the rock anthems about walking alone, we were not built to walk alone.

What it costs

I am not going to pretend this is easy, because it isn’t.

Most of the messages I have sent were never answered. A few people answered to tell me they were not interested. And more than once I met someone and found that the person in front of me was nothing like the one I had built up from a distance. That is the arithmetic. It does not improve much with practice.

But a handful of those messages turned into people I love sharing my life with. Mario is one. I did not earn him. I asked, and I was willing to be told no.

Rohn was probably right that you become the average of the five people around you. What he left out is the part that matters. Nobody assigned you those five.

So, a question.

Who is the person you already decided not to write to?

And what was the reason you gave yourself?

Un abrazo,

Andrés F. Giraldo B.

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^{Editorial credit: Celso Pupo / Shutterstock.com}

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For years, friends have asked me a version of the same question. If everything is community-made, where do I go? If nobody is self-made, does my effort stop counting?

It is a fair question, and for a long time I did not have a clean answer. This newsletter is partly how I look for one, out loud, while I work out my own ideas and feelings about the story I am trying to change. The self-made myth has been with us for generations, and with the leaders we have today, politicians and entrepreneurs alike, it keeps growing. I want to offer a different story, and I want to find the people who already sense it is true.

The biggest obstacle to changing a myth like the self-made one is not data, stories or arguments. It is ego.

It is deeply human to want your effort to count. That is why so many people tell half-stories. They leave out the privilege, the lucky break, the door someone held open, because what they really want to say is simple: I have merit. I am worth it. I earned this. I understand the impulse completely, because I lived it. For a good part of my life, I was that person, and thanks to a good community, I am not anymore.

Let me tell you one of the stories that helped me see it another way.

A while ago I was talking with Raghava K.K., an artist I love and admire, about ego, and about how differently people and cultures relate to it. Ryan Holiday’s book Ego Is the Enemy had come up, and we realized we read it through very different lenses. If you treat your ego as the enemy, Raghava said, you spend your life at war with a part of yourself. And it is hard to be kind to yourself while fighting a war on the inside.

Then he gave me an exercise. Write four love letters, he said, one to each part of the inner self:

1. Manas, the mind that doubts

2. Chitta, memory

3. Buddhi, reason

4. Ahankara, ego

Today I want to stay with the fourth one, Ahankara.

The letter to the ego was meant to open with love and gratitude. Something like: Dear ego, today I want to thank you for. And then, in the same letter, you were supposed to name everything you do not like about it too. The goal was not to defeat the ego or pretend it is not there. The goal was to recognize it as part of you, part of your complexity, and to stay in charge of it. Because the real problem is not that you have an ego. The problem is when the ego is driving and you are in the passenger seat.

• • •

I am not telling you this only to invite you to try the exercise, though you can. I am telling you because it points to something I want to be very clear about. Being community-made does not mean erasing yourself. It does not mean pretending you did nothing, or that your talent and your work do not matter. They do.

There is good evidence for holding both at once. In Good to Great, Jim Collins studied companies that made a durable leap in performance and found their leaders shared an unusual mix: real personal humility alongside fierce professional will. He described it as the window and the mirror. When things went well, these leaders looked out the window and gave the credit to other people, to the team, to luck. When things went badly, they looked in the mirror and took the responsibility themselves. The leaders who did the reverse, claiming the wins and blaming the losses on circumstance, tended to fall short. By the way, I am reading his most recent book, What to Make of a Life, and I love it. I will talk about it in a future essay.

The self-made myth trains us to do exactly the wrong thing: to stand at the mirror and collect every success as proof of our own greatness. Psychologists even have a name for the underlying reflex, the self-serving bias, our habit of crediting ourselves for what goes right and blaming the world for what goes wrong. Community-made asks for the opposite reflex. Look out the window more often. And still, do your part.

The clearest picture I have found for this is an orchestra. For it to sound beautiful, you have to be a great musician. So do the people beside you. So does the conductor. The instrument has to be good, the room has to be right, and a hundred other things have to line up. Take any one of them away and the music suffers. Your excellence is necessary. It is simply not enough on its own.

The World Cup is on right now, so the other picture is easy to reach for. Colombia and the United States both advanced to the next round. To make either squad, you have to be a great player. But no great player carries a team alone. The teammates matter. The coaching staff matters. The years of training matter. You give everything you have, and you still need everyone else to do the same.

• • •

So here is what I hope you take from this. Do your part as well as you possibly can. Honor your effort and your gifts. And at the same time, remember that on its own it was never going to be enough, and it never will be. There is nothing diminishing about that. It is the more honest story, and the more generous one.

You are not self-made. You are community-made. We all are.

• • •

I did not want to end this one on an idea alone.

As I write this, Venezuela is living through a catastrophe. On June 24, two earthquakes struck within seconds of each other and brought down homes, hospitals, and whole blocks of La Guaira and Caracas. Thousands have been killed or injured. Many are still missing. Many are still under the rubble as you read this.

This is where community-made stops being a theory. A community is not only the people who help you build something. It is also the people you show up for when their ground gives way. If the idea in this essay is true, then a moment like this is exactly when it has to mean something.

So I am asking you to help, in whatever way you can. Give to a relief organization that is already on the ground and can turn money into water, medicine, and shelter fast. Cash to a trusted, vetted group does far more than anything we could ship ourselves. Groups like the International Rescue Committee and the Red Cross are working in the region now. If you are closer to it, share verified information and check on the Venezuelans in your life.

None of us got here alone. No one should have to get through this alone either.

Un abrazo,

Andrés F. Giraldo

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“A system isn’t just the sum of its parts. It’s the product of their interactions.”

Donella Meadows

One of the biggest problems with the self-made myth is how narrow it is. When you sit down to take stock of your “merits,” one of two things is happening. Either your ego has the wheel and you are airbrushing the support, the luck, and the timing out of the picture. Or you have not yet become conscious of how many forces had to align for you to be exactly where you are.

The opposite is also possible. When you start to see yourself as a community-made person, when you recognize the power of all the systems around you, your universe expands. So does your gratitude.

That shift did not happen to me overnight. It happened in three encounters, spread across many years, with the idea that everything is connected.

• • •

Three encounters with systems thinking

The first time I heard the words “systems thinking” was in high school in Pereira. I was sixteen, studying philosophy, and our teacher asked us to write an essay on a problem we noticed in our own culture. I wrote about how reactive we are as Colombians. How we wait until the bridge is broken to repair it. How we wait until the patient is dying to call the doctor. How we wait until the country is on fire to start talking about prevention. I did not know I was describing a systems problem. I just knew that our short-term reflexes kept producing the same long-term disasters. That essay never left me, even when I forgot it for a decade.

The second time was years later in Pereira, when my father-in-law handed me a copy of The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. He did not give me a speech. He just said: “Read this. You will see your business differently.” And I did. Senge’s idea of the learning organization, where personal mastery, shared vision, and systems thinking sit at the center, gave a name to something I had felt but could not articulate. That there is a difference between solving a problem and changing the conditions that produce it. That most leaders work on the first. Very few work on the second.

The third encounter came through my friend and mentor Josep M. Coll. Over many long conversations, and later in his book Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking, Josep taught me that the systems view is not just an engineering discipline. It is a way of seeing the world that ancient wisdom traditions arrived at long before MIT did. The Buddhist concept of pratityasamutpada, dependent origination, says that nothing exists on its own. Everything arises in relation to everything else. The Taoist concept of wu wei, effortless action, says that the wisest move is the one that flows with the system rather than against it. Twenty-five centuries before Donella Meadows wrote Thinking in Systems, monks in the foothills of the Himalayas were already saying: you are not separate. You never were.

• • •

The bridge to community-made

So what is the bridge between all this theory and the idea that no one is self-made?

It is this. Think of your life as one very complex system. The answer to “who am I?” is not a single line of credit going to a single person. It is the sum of many, many smaller systems, each one contributing something you did not choose and could not have created on your own.

Your family. The economic means available to you. The geography of where you were born. The timing of when you arrived in this century, this decade, this month. The education you received. The political system you grew up inside. The language that was given to you, with all the concepts and limitations it carries. The mentors who decided you were worth their time. The friends who showed up. The books that found you. The trips that opened something inside. The illnesses you survived. The losses that sharpened you. The strangers who, in some random moment, said the one thing that changed how you saw yourself.

All of that is the system. You are the temporary configuration of it.

• • •

The goods and the bads

The goods, because maybe like me you were born into a family with opportunities. In my case, two parents who modeled entrepreneurship and made it seem possible. A city, Pereira, with a culture of civic collaboration and business creation. None of that was earned. All of it was given.

The bads, because every challenge also belongs to the system. When my father’s business went bankrupt during my teenage years, I watched my family rebuild from scratch. That experience taught me more about resilience and money than any class at any university. It was painful. It was also part of what made me. The obstacles that humbled me, the failures that recalibrated me, the people who told me no, the deals that fell through, the friends who left, the year I almost gave up on what I was building. All of that is part of the system too. The bad teachers are still teachers.

The point is not that everything happens for a reason. Whether or not that is true is up to you to decide. What I am certain of is that everything happens in relation to everything else. And once you can see those relations, you cannot quite go back to the story of the lone hero.

We are the sum of many systems.

We are WeMade.

Un abrazo,

Andres F. Giraldo B.

As I promised, once a month.

When I was in my twenties and just starting my journey as an entrepreneur, I was obsessed with biographies. I read about founders, inventors, and visionaries the way other people read thrillers. I loved the arc: humble beginnings, impossible odds, breakthrough success. And somewhere along the way, without realizing it, I started telling my own story the same way.

After my father went through bankruptcy, the self-made narrative became even more seductive. I needed to believe that effort alone could rewrite a family’s fortune. So I emphasized the risks I had taken, the businesses I had started, and the hours I had worked. I talked about building things from scratch.

None of that was a lie. But it wasn’t the whole truth either.

I was telling myself a half-story, and I didn’t even know it.

Half-stories are everywhere. You’ve probably heard these a hundred times:

Google was born in a garage.

Amazon started in a humble office.

Bill Gates was just a nerdy kid who dropped out of college.

These are the stories that get shared on LinkedIn, repeated at startup conferences, and printed on motivational posters. They’re clean. They’re inspiring. They fit perfectly in a tweet.

They’re also dangerously incomplete.

The rest of the story

Let’s slow down and look at what we usually leave out.

Google. Yes, there was a garage. It was in Menlo Park, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented it for $1,700 a month. They were PhD students at Stanford University, one of the best research institutions on the planet, where they had used the university’s computing infrastructure to develop the algorithm that would become Google Search. Their first major investor was Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who wrote them a $100,000 check after a brief demo on a Stanford professor’s porch, before the company was even incorporated.

That’s not a garage story. That’s a Stanford-plus-Silicon-Valley-plus-world-class-network story.

Amazon. Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton University, one of the most prestigious schools in the United States. He worked his way up to vice president at D.E. Shaw, a Wall Street hedge fund. When he decided to launch Amazon, his parents, Jackie and Mike Bezos, invested $245,573 in the company. In today’s dollars, that’s roughly half a million. Bezos himself warned them there was a 70% chance they’d never see that money again. They bet on their son anyway.

That’s not just money. That’s a family with resources, trust, and the willingness to risk a small fortune on someone they believed in. Most families on earth don’t have that option.

Bill Gates. He attended Lakeside School in Seattle, one of the first schools in the entire country to have a computer terminal, back in 1968, when almost nobody had access to one. His father was one of the most prominent attorneys in the city. He dropped out of Harvard, not a local community college. And by the time he left, he was already deeply connected to a network of wealthy, ambitious peers who would become his earliest collaborators and supporters.

Gates is brilliant. He worked incredibly hard. But the story that says he was “just a nerdy kid” erases the extraordinary context that made his path possible.

Before I go further, let me be clear about something: I genuinely admire the founders behind these companies. They are smart, driven, and they have built things that changed the world. My argument is not against them.

My argument is against the incomplete story.

Because when we erase context, when we cut out the family support, the geography, the access to capital, the networks, the education, the timing, we don’t just distort history. We create impossible benchmarks for everyone who doesn’t share that context. And then we blame them for not reaching those benchmarks.

I’m far from the first person to notice this. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers was one of the books that changed how I see success stories. Gladwell showed that Gates had accumulated thousands of hours of computer practice before most people in the world even knew what a computer was, not because he was more disciplined, but because he happened to attend one of the few schools that had one. Opportunity met effort, and the result looked like pure genius.

That book was a spark for my own thinking. But I’ve come to believe the question goes even deeper than opportunity plus effort. The question is: what story do we keep telling about success, and what does that story cost us?

Because the half-story doesn’t just misinform, it isolates. It teaches people that if they can’t replicate the result, the failure must be theirs alone.

Context is not a footnote

I was born and raised in Pereira, Colombia. I know what a garage looks like there. And I can tell you: a garage in Pereira is not a garage in Silicon Valley.

In Silicon Valley, that garage comes with proximity to Stanford, access to venture capital, a culture that celebrates technological risk-taking, legal infrastructure designed for startups, and English as the native language for global communication. In Pereira, a garage comes with limited university access, virtually no venture capital, inconsistent internet, and a language that requires you to learn a second one before you can even enter the global conversation.

The same is true for every other dimension of these stories. Princeton is not a local university. A family that can invest a quarter of a million dollars is not the same as a family with no savings. A school that had a computer in 1968 is not every school.

None of this means that smart, ambitious kids don’t exist everywhere; they absolutely do. But talent without context is a seed without soil. And pretending the soil doesn’t matter is one of the most damaging things the self-made myth does.

So here’s what I’ve learned, both from the research and from my own life: seeing the full story doesn’t diminish anyone’s achievement. It actually makes it richer.

When I stopped telling my half-story, when I started acknowledging my parents’ support, my mentors’ guidance, the communities that opened doors for me, the timing that made some of my bets pay off, I didn’t feel smaller. I felt more connected. More grateful. More honest.

And I understood something I wish I’d understood earlier: the most powerful thing you can do is not just tell your full story. It’s to become part of someone else’s.

That’s what being community-made means.

That’s what WeMade is about.

Un abrazo and until next month,

Andrés F. Giraldo B.

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One day in late 2023, after my morning meditation, I was heading to get coffee with my wife when I opened Instagram. The first thing I saw was a quote by someone I deeply admire, organizational psychologist Adam Grant. It read approximately:

“Promoting yourself is usually a lack of humility, but promoting your ideas is often an act of generosity.”

That sentence hit me like a spark in the dark.

For years, I had hesitated to share my ideas publicly. I’d written private end-of-year reflections for two decades, and I often shared thoughts with close friends, but I never put them out into the world. Not because I lacked conviction, but because I wasn’t sure my ideas were worth sharing more broadly. I didn’t want to become a social media influencer. Not because I don’t respect them, but because I’m wired differently. I typically prefer sharing other people’s ideas rather than my own. And if I’m honest, I feared being judged by people I admire, even those I barely know. A fear that makes little logical sense, but exists nonetheless.

But in that moment, Adam’s words felt like permission.

While we drank our coffee, I told my wife, Cata, “I’ve made a decision. I’m going to write a book.” She smiled and said, “It’s going to be hard, but I’m with you.” That was all I needed.

Even that sentence, “that was all I needed,” proves the very point this newsletter exists to make. It wasn’t just me making a decision. It was a quote from a thinker I admire, a morning ritual I learned from a mentor, a wife who said yes, and a lifetime of conversations, books, and communities that brought me to that kitchen table.

Nothing about that moment was self-made. And this newsletter is about why nothing ever is.

Where I Come From

I was born in Pereira, Colombia, in the heart of the coffee region, one of the most biodiverse places on earth with a complex, often painful history. I’m the youngest of three brothers, born into a middle-upper-class family in a city where more than 95% of the population was Catholic.

Pereira is a small city that most people outside Colombia have never heard of. But it taught me something I’ve never fully encountered anywhere else.

The airport, the stadium, the main hospital, the highway, even the city zoo, were not built by the government. They were built by the people. Brick by brick. Family by family. Through a tradition called convite, where entire communities came together, each contributing according to their abilities. Some organized fundraising events. Others prepared food for workers. Many provided manual labor, carrying materials in human chains that stretched for kilometers. Children and elderly people contributed what they could.

That spirit shaped me before I had the language to describe it. It planted a seed that took decades to fully grow: the idea that we build everything that matters together.

At 30, I moved to Los Angeles without speaking English. I enrolled at USC to learn the language, sitting in classrooms alongside teenagers and young adults. This was especially hard on my ego. I had been quite well known and successful in Colombia, so I naively thought the transition wouldn’t be difficult. I was wrong.

But that humbling experience also opened my eyes. Living in the United States exposed me to the full power of American individualistic mythology while simultaneously revealing the extraordinary collective infrastructure that makes American individualism possible. World-class universities funded by generations of public investment. Transportation systems connecting cities to global markets. Legal and financial systems that protect property rights. Innovation ecosystems that turn individual ideas into scalable businesses. Immigration policies that attract talent from around the world.

The paradox of American culture is that it celebrates individual achievement while depending on some of the most sophisticated collective infrastructure in human history.

Over the years, I’ve built communities, co-founded KADA (a network of Latin American leaders whose name comes from an indigenous Colombian word meaning “to weave”), given over 390 talks around the world, and connected with thinkers and doers through TED, Modern Elder Academy, and countless other spaces that changed me. I married Cata. We had our daughter, Celeste, after years of trying, our greatest dream realized.

And through all of it, I carried a growing frustration. A quiet anger at the stories we keep telling about success. Stories that are incomplete at best, and damaging at worst.

The Myth They Sold Us

We are constantly told stories of “self-made” billionaires and heroes. These narratives are seductive, clean, and powerful. They flatter the ego and feed our hunger for control. But they have a history that most people celebrating them have never bothered to learn.

The phrase “self-made” gained real political power on February 2, 1842, when Senator Henry Clay stood before the U.S. Senate and praised American men who had raised themselves from humble beginnings to positions of wealth and influence. His timing wasn’t accidental. This was the era of Manifest Destiny, westward expansion, and the Industrial Revolution. America needed a mythology that justified its growing inequalities and celebrated its emerging capitalist system. The “self-made man” was the perfect story: it made success seem purely meritocratic while ignoring the systemic forces that actually powered the economy.

Even then, smart people saw through it. By 1897, John D. Rockefeller was mocking the term in a letter to his son. He shared a story about a man bragging at a Philadelphia bar: “He’s a self-made millionaire.” Another patron replied, “Yeah, he inherited 20 million dollars and now he’s down to just one.”

Rockefeller got the joke. Wealth, even in the 19th century, was never truly self-made.

Yet the myth didn’t just survive. It spread worldwide. Today it lives on magazine covers, in LinkedIn bios, at startup conferences, and in presidential campaigns. It traveled from Washington to Wall Street to Silicon Valley and all the way to Pereira, Colombia, where a young entrepreneur absorbed it without ever questioning where it came from.

That young entrepreneur was me.

And here is what the myth actually costs us. It makes us believe that success is purely individual, which means failure must be purely individual too. It kills gratitude, because if you built everything alone, you don’t owe anyone anything. It fuels loneliness, because asking for help feels like admitting weakness. And at scale, it shapes political systems that punish people for needing support and reward people for pretending they never did.

The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory declared loneliness and social isolation an epidemic, with health effects comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the logical outcome of a culture that worships the lone hero and forgets the community that made the hero possible.

The Dream: A New Myth

I’ve carried this idea for a long time, alongside a mix of anger, sadness, frustration, and confusion. As an entrepreneur and an optimistic person, I’ve often felt overwhelmed by the toxic positivity and half-truths we tell about success. The phrase “If I did it, anyone can” makes my blood boil. It ignores complexity. It erases context. It’s easy to say from privilege.

But I’m not interested in just tearing a myth down. I want to help build a new one.

What if we replaced “self-made” with “community-made”? Not as a slogan, but as a lens for seeing the world more honestly. A way of acknowledging that behind every achievement is a web of family, place, mentors, friends, books, timing, and systems that made it possible.

This isn’t about diminishing individual effort. I’ve worked hard. I’ve taken risks. I’ve lost sleep and money and certainty. That’s all real. But effort alone was never sufficient. It never is, for anyone.

Indigenous cultures have known this for centuries. The Zulu greeting Sawubona means “I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being.” The Ubuntu philosophy teaches “I am because you are.” These are not sentimental ideas. They are descriptions of how human beings actually work.

I believe we need myths that honor both individual drive and collective support. Stories that celebrate ambition while fostering connection. Narratives that inspire achievement while telling the truth about how achievement actually happens.

Today, I’m proud to say: I am community-made. I always have been. And I believe you are too.

That’s why I’m writing a book about the myth of Self-Made and how we can move from that to a Community-Made. I also want to explain why nobody succeeds Alone. And this newsletter, WeMade, is where the ideas get built.

What to Expect

Once a month, I’ll publish a new essay here. Each one will blend personal story, research, and cultural analysis to explore a different dimension of how we actually rise.

Some of the questions we’ll tackle:

Why do myths shape us so powerfully, and how can we build better ones? How does place shape who we become? What role do family, mentors, and friendships play in every success story? Why has “self-made” been weaponized politically, and who benefits from the lie? What does the science of human connection tell us about the cost of going it alone?

This is not self-help. It’s not motivational content. It’s not light reading. WeMade goes deep, respects the reader, and trusts you to draw your own conclusions.

The book is in progress. By reading this newsletter, you get to watch the thinking evolve, challenge the ideas, and shape them. The medium is the message: WeMade is itself community-made.

If you’ve ever felt that “self-made” didn’t quite describe your story, you’re in the right place.

Welcome to WeMade.