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When I started to teach at Universidad Central de Venezuela, it was because of a professor that trusted in my capacity and gave me a platform to express myself, spread my ideas and teach at my Alma Mater at a moment where university education in Venezuela is going through its worse crisis.

When I started teaching a couple of years ago, I must recognize that I was an idealist, I believed in the educational system that formed me as a physician and gave me an MBA even though that that very system failed me over and over again after graduating and entering the work market.

Egos, envy, betrayal, deceit, rackets, professional fees, tax returns, and corruption passed in front of my eyes and the only thing that kept me standing firm amongst the runs was the education, values, beliefs, aptitudes, and attitudes that my family instilled in me.

As a right wing student in a liberal campus such as the one at Universidad Central de Venezuela I had the idea that somehow the educational system failed and defrauded several generations of students. As a professor, I finally understood why when I looked at how teacher union politics behaved.
I started working at a failed system and decided to try and change it from within and I found myself with more support by fellow colleagues than resistance because they too realized how corrupt the system is.

The whole university structure is in completely ankylosedand in a sort of persistent vegetative state.

The lie that baby boomers created

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When we were kids, we were told that going to college to become doctors, or lawyers or business executives would make us great and build a future for us, but it just turns out that in the present dispensation, (not only in Venezuela but also the rest of the world), the academic status quo were the executioners of our Republics and our dreams.
The world of my parents and yours was over, it was transformed, this is not a drama like the movies in which the aliens invade us with spaceships to annihilate them, simply the world changed and we have to renew and adapt to survive, the tradition serves us to have a link with what preceded us but it is impossible to turn back the clock hands.

We must adapt to the circumstances. And that's what I did.

My life in the University

I own this image =D "The Cloud Shepherd" by Jean Arp, Ciudad Universitaria, Caracas, Venezuela
Very few things that I learned at Universidad Central de Venezuela, other than doing a proper physical examination and filling a chart have been useful for me in my professional life. My family gave me all their support and I graduated without being held back in any course, I didn't do it alone, I did with help of many people whom I thank eternally.

I don't mean to say or imply that we shouldn't pursue a university education, quite the opposite, we must try to better ourselves and seek a career or a trade, and stop parasitizing our parents or the state in hopes of getting a handout.

University taught me to think and discriminate.

Thanks to my attention deficit disorder, I spent most of my time in classrooms solving sudoku puzzles, playing with my Nintendo DS while I was supposedly learning glomerular filtration rates, cardiac failure, and the mechanisms of action of anti-neoplasic drugs.

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I payed attention to the classes I really cared about, and the courses and subjects that bored me...I just forced myself to learn them to survive and not falling behind.
So amongst video games, political campus activism (Right wing, of course), parties, vices, women and hundreds of gallons of alcohol I managed to graduate and bam!, I became an MD.

By the moment the Diploma was put in my hands, I realized I couldn't understand a single paper without spending hours rereading it, I realized I didn't had the ability to comprehend complicated and dense textbooks, and my grades drove away the possibility of being competitive for grad school position abroad.

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I felt I cheated myself and I felt the educational system didn't taught me how to think or act.
I found later that instead of blaming others, I had to blame myself for it, and this thing was a matter of building up some character, and that the will to thrive is within me and nobody else.

My distracted brain cared very little for abstract concepts and the such until by serendipity I had the opportunity to change.

So I decided to be responsible and earn some money, I came to terms that I do not want to be a product of my environment, I wanted my environment to be a product of me, of what I do, and of what I am.

So I changed the way I dressed, the way I acted, I took responsibility for my actions and took charge of my life. I stopped talking to a lot of people, I made a lot of people angry (mainly bookies and lowlives) and made a lot of good friends and enemies in the process.

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I learned how to write my thoughts and as I did, I started to question whether the educational system is broken or not. Or was it just me, and that something was broken within me. Or that maybe my situation was a combination of both factors.

If there's something that my career gave me that I cherish was a tool called the "scientific method". It changed my weltanschaaung (worldview), my humor transformed, my personality changed, and frankly, very few people can cope with me, but that taught me to discern between the bullshit in life and the real things out there.

I can't say that I haven't gone through hardships because being the stubborn prick that I am got me into a lot of trouble. We all have our own tragedies, I learned on my own to deal with my demons and I used my best to seek to cheat the system and transform it into something that worked for me.

So far, it's been good, and it's been worth it. I teach and my students like me and thank me for the things I teach them.
I met a beautiful woman, fell in love with her, married her and I'm happily married. I can't say that I'm at a hard stop because I can rely on her, my family and my wits.

My parents gave me everything. Values. And I live in a dynamic world with a thirst for knowledge.

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My idea of success

The values that were instilled in me by my family are pivotal to me today, but when I was a dumb student at the university I didn’t realize that.
My success took its time to arrive, and the rewards of that success also took their time.

For many people, the idea of success is being somewhere, that is not my case.
My idea of success isn’t a place, nor possessions, nor my worn jeans or my pair of vintage adidas.
Success isn’t my house either.

My idea of success is a season, and seasons come and go, with peaks and valleys.

We were taught the idea that if we studied a career we would have a future, or at least a good job.

When I graduated, life and reality came at me, fast, hitting me in the face like a hard brass knuckle. I didn’t get upset like the “occupy wall street crowd”, I didn’t put on a Che Guevara t-shirt and raged against the system. I decided to infiltrate the system and make it work for me.

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I became a public employee at the Ministry of Health, doing eight hours a day in an office dealing with the public health system and I realized that the State doesn’t have the solutions nor the answers for my personal ambitions. I witnessed the bad faith that drives government officials first hand and I was sick of it.

Silently I made my way through public office ranks at the Ministry and then I decided to quit and move on to the private sector. So I chose to work for insurance companies, and shortly after, the insurance sector was nationalized and I became a freelance consultant in health insurance and witnessed the corruption once again.

My generation was witness and victim to crisis

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My generation had to witness 9/11, the attacks at the Atocha station, the 7/7 attacks at Tavistock Square, the 2008 financial collapse, the April Events in Venezuela, hyperinflation, diaspora, seeing parents lose their job, see what the government and Wall Street do to pensions, and having to deal with the fact that the government sentenced my generation to live with my parents.
Banks and financial institutions systematically deny loans to my generation, and we’ve seen how a university education isn’t a guarantee of success.

My generation had to deal with the hard fact that you have to deal with life as it is handed to you, that the world and its technology is a very dynamic world and we had to learn it the hard way.

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My generation is an internet generation:
There’s no other time in which human beings have been so exposed to so much information.

Instead of making a profit out of it, we instead spend our lives in our smartphones, showing people what we ear, or liking the last pair of stillettos that Kim Kardashian bought with the hopes that someone, somewhere in the world would care about this meaningless fact and hit the like button in our social networks.

Looking for validation in the form of pixels and internet data has substituted personal achievements.

The richness of technology has turned into trans humanism and men are choosing sex robot dolls instead of finding a good woman and raising a family.

Human interaction declined into internet data thanks to university education in which allegedly we invest, only to find ourselves sunk into a pile of eternal debt created by a ponzi scheme that exploits and dehumanizes us, taking away the simple things of life.

We are evolutionary hardwired to create patterns, and we owe that to our brain, a specific part called the medulla oblongata, this structure is there to help us preserve energy by making us act automatically when we perform certain tasks. When a man has a stroke, or suffers some brain trauma, if the medulla oblongata is affected, the body turns into an entity that just breaths and lacks life.

Thats the biological reason why you check constantly your social networks, by automatism. So thanks evolution.

Routines aren’t hateful per se, human beings enjoy routine because it provides us with structure so we don’t go wandering around by the steppes like our ancestors in order to survive.

The hateful thing about routines is that it forces us to make decisions to solve the same problems that we face day after day: "What tie matches this suit?" or "Which shoes should I put on?"

Meaningless things that take minutes day after day and if you add them all up, you find that you’ve lost entire years of your life dedicating precious time to superfluous things that really don’t have that much of an impact in what you are, or what you’re passing on to your legacy after you’re dead.

If we learn to solve our day to day problems with permanent solutions, those problems dissapear and you’ll have more time to focus on the things that you care about: your life, your wife, your family and kids, your future, your legacy and the possibility of transcendence. This simplifies your life and makes problems go away from your head.

My key to success was doing things my way, it's been hard and quite a ride, but I liked it, so I wanted to share this with you.

Living a simple life sure isn’t cheap. Specially in Venezuela, but it is the optimal way of standing firm amongst the ruins.

If you manage to identify what’s important and throw away everything else, you’ll notice how your life improves drastically, you’ll learn and develop a drive because you’ll be capable of achieving your goals in order to face the savagery and decadence that western civilization is immersed.

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Thank you for reading my post.
You can follow me on Twitter, I personally do some coaching and if you're interested you can email me at albertozambrano.emprendimiento at gmail.com
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