You do not have to be a leader to play bigger. You do not have to own a business, manage hundreds of people, or have an ambitious ten-year plan. You do not even have to know exactly what a bigger life looks like.
Sometimes you simply need to discover that another life is possible.
I learned this long before I had words like strategy, opportunity, or personal development. I learned it from books inside balikbayan boxes.
The books showed me a world I could not see
When I was in high school, our relatives regularly sent us balikbayan boxes. What I often received were books.
Many of them were about salespeople. The stories fascinated me because they described people who became highly successful by learning how to understand customers, answer objections, communicate ideas, and sell something valuable. Some were shown receiving awards in tuxedos. They were earning amounts of money I could hardly imagine.
I could not relate to the millions of dollars, but one idea stayed with me. A salesperson could become one of the poorest people in the world or one of the richest. Where you started did not completely decide where you could go.
Many of the people in those stories had not started rich. They had learned how to bring something useful to somebody who needed it. They did not even have to manufacture everything they sold. Somebody else could create the product or service. Their contribution was understanding what people needed, connecting them with something valuable, and becoming very good at doing that.
For a teenager like me, that was a very big idea because the world I could see around me was much smaller.
Life in the slums was simply life
I grew up in an informal-settler community, and I want to be careful when I say that because people sometimes tell stories about poverty as though everybody living there wakes up each morning desperate to escape.
That was not my experience.
Life in the slums was not prison. People were not bad. They worked, raised families, tried to earn decent livelihoods, laughed, argued, helped one another, and survived. When that is the world around you, it does not necessarily feel extraordinary. It is simply life.
Some families had been there for thirty, forty, fifty years. One generation came after another and often very little changed. When something has always been true around you, it can begin to feel like destiny.
Deep inside me, there was probably something saying, I don’t want my whole life to look like this. But what exactly should it look like? I could not tell you.
You can only imagine from what you have seen.
That is why those books mattered. They showed me realities that did not exist in the world immediately around me. They did not give me a plan, and they did not magically change my circumstances, but they allowed me to see that other lives were real.
At first, those possibilities felt almost like heaven. I believed they existed somewhere. I simply had not been there.
Then I began entering other worlds
When I entered the seminary, I began seeing things I had rarely seen before. There were people who supported seminarians, and some of them lived in very large homes. I remember visiting places such as La Vista near Katipunan and entering houses unlike anything I had known growing up.
Something happens when you enter another person’s world. Your perspective stretches.
I met people who had much more money than we had, but they were also good people. They were generous. Some were helping support seminarians. That mattered to me because it showed me that earning a lot of money and being a decent, generous human being were not opposites.
Again, I did not suddenly become wealthy because I had entered a large house. But my picture of reality became larger. There were ways of living I had not seen before, and the people living those lives were not creatures from another planet.
I did not know I was playing a small game
Years later, I became a teacher. My salary was around ₱6,000 to ₱8,000 a month.
Looking backward, somebody might say, “You were playing too small.”
I would not say that.
Eight thousand pesos was bigger than zero. I had not been earning anything before that, so ₱8,000 was an opportunity. I worked hard for it. I taught perhaps eight to ten subjects during the day and another three in the evening. I even reinvested some of what I earned into graduate school.
I was tired, yes. But I did not walk around thinking, This life is too small for me. It was the life I knew.
Then something happened that made me move.
Our school evaluated teachers, and according to the evaluation I was among the top teachers. Students appreciated my classes. But summer came, and I learned I would not be given summer teaching loads.
In that private school, no summer classes meant no salary for two months. The available loads were given to teachers management believed needed the income more. I understood the reasoning, but I simply did not feel good about the system.
So I looked elsewhere.
One former co-teacher told me another school had an opening. I applied, and I did not know how much they were paying. If they had offered ₱10,000, I probably would have accepted it. If they had offered ₱12,000, I would have been very happy.
They offered ₱18,000.
Not ₱10,000. Not ₱12,000. Not ₱14,000.
Eighteen thousand pesos.
And instead of carrying all those teaching loads, I would teach only about three classes. There were more benefits too.
I had not developed some brilliant plan to double my income. I got pissed off and moved.
That move changed my horizon.
Sometimes you need to move before you can see
I could call the ₱18,000 job a lucky break, and in one sense it was. Another school eventually accepted me too, but their offer was closer to ₱12,000. I happened to accept the better opportunity first.
But luck did not come knocking while I stayed exactly where I was.
I moved.
That distinction has become important to me because we often imagine progress this way: first, see the opportunity; then make the plan; then move toward it.
Life does not always work in that order.
Sometimes you move because something is no longer working. Then the movement allows you to see something you could not see before.
That is one reason I keep returning to the idea of Move First. We often want certainty before movement, but sometimes movement is what gives us the information.
You cannot always see the next horizon from where you are standing now.
You can work very hard in a small game
This also changed how I think about hard work.
At the first school, I was working extremely hard. More subjects. More hours. More exhaustion. But there was a ceiling built into that environment.
I could become an even more hardworking teacher and still remain inside the same economic structure.
The move to another school changed more than my salary. I met different students. Many came from wealthy families. I met parents I would never otherwise have met. I visited different places. My network expanded. I saw more ways people worked, earned, built businesses, and lived.
The planet had not changed.
My view of it had.
Two people can live in the same city and still inhabit very different worlds of possibility. One person knows an opportunity exists; another person has never heard of it. One person sees a normal career path; another sees something impossible. One person sees a platform; another sees only a hobby.
That is why I no longer think playing bigger is simply about having bigger goals.
Sometimes the first step is seeing a bigger field.
Playing bigger does not mean rejecting where you came from
I do not need to despise the community where I grew up in order to want something different. I do not need to say that the people who stayed there lacked ambition.
People act from the realities they can see, the responsibilities they carry, the opportunities they know, and the risks they believe they can afford.
I know because I did too.
Playing bigger does not begin with judging your present life. It begins with becoming curious about what else might be possible.
Read something outside your usual world. Enter another room. Talk to somebody whose work you do not understand. Apply for something even when you do not know exactly what it will lead to. Learn how people in another industry create value. Visit another place. Publish something. Teach something. Offer something useful. Create a small project.
Sometimes one small move changes what you can see.
And once you see differently, you can choose differently.
You do not have to change everything
Playing bigger does not always mean quitting your job.
If you are a teacher, perhaps teaching is exactly what you should continue doing. But the classroom may not be the only place where your teaching has value.
Today, teachers can create lessons online. They can make videos. They can tutor. They can design teaching resources. They can write guides. They can build communities. They can teach people thousands of kilometers away.
The skill may remain the same. The platform changes.
And sometimes changing the platform changes the game.
That is one reason I believe in creating your own stage. You do not always have to wait for somebody to discover your talent, give you a promotion, invite you, or decide that you are ready.
You can start making your contribution visible. You can begin showing what you know. You can create something another person can use.
Scammers do not own possibility
There is another reason many people hesitate to talk about bigger possibilities.
We have seen too many fake gurus.
People promise millions overnight. They sell fantasies. They make ordinary opportunities sound effortless. They pretend everybody who follows five steps will become rich.
I do not believe that.
But I also refuse to conclude that because some people exaggerate opportunities, opportunities do not exist.
Fake gurus do not own possibility.
There are people creating extraordinary lives through useful work. There are people who started with almost nothing and built something valuable. There are teachers who discovered larger platforms, employees who became entrepreneurs, writers who created audiences, and ordinary people who learned skills, met different people, entered new markets, and found opportunities they could not previously imagine.
I know because some of those things have happened to me.
Not all at once. Not because I had everything figured out.
I kept moving into worlds I had not seen before.
You do not have to be special to play bigger
Marriage made me think about this differently too.
When I was younger, many things never entered my dreams because I was thinking only about myself. When I had a family, the question became larger.
What kind of life could we create? What opportunities could become available to them? What could I build that I had never imagined building when I was younger?
Responsibility can enlarge ambition.
Not ambition in the sense of needing to become famous or richer than everybody else. Ambition in the sense of refusing to assume that today’s circumstances are the full measure of tomorrow’s possibilities.
And perhaps that is what I wish somebody had been able to tell the younger me more clearly:
You do not have to be special to play bigger.
There are realities you cannot see yet. They are not imaginary. They are already ordinary realities for somebody else.
They could become real for you too.
Move and let the horizon change
So do not begin by asking yourself to dream ten times bigger.
Look around.
What world do you know? What possibilities have become normal to you simply because they are the possibilities you see every day?
Then ask another question:
What might exist beyond what I currently know?
You do not have to believe every promise. You do not have to gamble everything. You do not have to abandon the life you have today.
Make one move that gives you a different view.
Read the book. Enter the room. Send the application. Meet the person. Visit the place. Create the project. Publish your work. Find the platform.
Move first.
Then look again.
The bigger opportunity may not be visible from where you are standing.
Sometimes you have to move before the horizon appears.
And perhaps one day, something you write, build, teach, or share will do for another person what those balikbayan-box books once did for me.
It will show them a world they could not yet see.
And they will realize:
I can play bigger too.
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