“I think the biggest piece of wisdom that I have gotten from learning is that we all have a gift and the gift is to be shared...”
I’m born and raised San Diego. I’m a first generation, half of my family is from Cedar Rapids, Iowa and the other half is from Guanajuato, Mexico.
What do you do for a living?
A couple of things that I do, I’m a kids MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) coach. I teach kids MMA and Jiu Jitsu. I’m also a server… at night, that’s my night job. So, during the day, I will usually go and teach the kids class from 4 to 5 pm. I have about thirty kids aged five to about twelve and teach them the arts, how to carry themselves, how to slowly go into a situation that they don’t necessarily feel comfortable but give them the tools help them enable them to feel comfortable. I watch their progression on that as kids grow up. That’s something that I like to do that I definitely feel like it is in the line of philanthropy work because I don’t make as much money as I do as my night job working as a server. But it’s one of the things that is very rewarding for me and it pays me more in the sense of giving back.
Where do you want to see your life go to… or what do you want to do in life?
What I want to do in life is I want to impact people. I want to be remembered for something. I really don’t have any goals of my own as far as like… as far as… like I don’t ever want there to be a statue made over myself. I want the impact to be from all these kids that I coach throughout the years and that impact, leaving that footprint on the world. Cause at the end of the day, I’m here for maybe, like, eighty years, if I am healthy… so it’s not really about me, it about all of us collectively.
So, in your life, what piece of advice or wisdom you think everyone should know about?
I think the biggest piece of wisdom that I have gotten from learning is that we all have a gift and the gift is to be shared. It’s definitely not something that should be held within ourselves. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot… like, maybe I should not coach as much and focus on… like, right now, I don’t even have a vehicle to get to work so I take the bus to get to work but I understand he bigger picture of it. I understand that I wasn’t given the opportunity to have a big house that my parents to give to me. I used to eat off of the kitchen floor cause we didn’t have a table. Now that we have a house, we have all of these things, I just know the dedication and the hard work that it takes to acquire all this. I know the humanity that you have to have in order to just continue to pursue, to continue to do what you need to do and find your gift… and really just share that with the world. Like me as a server, I’m that type of person who… I’ll run all the way to the back to cut you an orange to garnish your drink. That’s the kind of person I am, and it goes back and forth between me and the kids. I would climb mountains for these little ones. Like I said, it’s for the bigger picture.
San Diego, California. August 2019.
