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When the waiting felt like a punishment
When I was preparing for an academic admission application, there were many things I needed to prepare and provide. While some only required hours to fulfill, others needed days. And if I hadn’t anticipated surprises, I might have missed the deadline altogether because some items took about four months to finish, specifically the ones that… Read more
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Letter no. 50
Dear reader from the future, How do you celebrate birthdays? Is buying stuff for gifts still a thing? Maybe after listening to many episodes of The Minimalists and reading The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here, I think about all the stuff I have accumulated over… Read more
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Late-night musings #30
We can’t be certain what the future would be for each of us because like in regression analysis, there’s always this there’s always this error term—that unexplained variance, the residual that you can’t quantify beforehand like you do with your variables. It’s built into the model itself, an acknowledgment that not everything fits neatly into… Read more
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A frightening degree of corruption
Something shifted in me when I came of age. Probably because my interest in current affairs has grown, the blatant corruption in the Philippines now troubles me beyond belief in a way it never did before. Watching the Katakot-takot na Kurakot (Alarming Corruption) documentary series made greed and human evil all too real to me because they are my experienced… Read more
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We are travelers here
I like being in the airport because all the people here have a place to go. Everyone is moving. Everyone is active. And even when we are waiting on uncomfortable benches, on cold floors, and in busy shops, we are waiting only for a season. We all wait with purpose—a departure time, a gate number,… Read more
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Why trust works
The best leadership lesson I’ve learned? It starts with trust. When you trust that your team can deliver their responsibilities, they will learn to trust themselves to do what they can, and even more by demonstrating accountability and initiative. They’ll surprise you. They’ll surprise themselves. Micromanagement only stifles creativity because it calls for a rigid… Read more
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Nobody wins: watching a war from afar
It’s easy to dabble in issues we see online just after seeing a small part of the whole. We were trained to be quick to respond to breaking news without stepping back and thinking deeply about the deeper whys. In 2023, while I was still glowing from being newlywed—married just four months—news broke out about… Read more
jessa
Everyday Stories, Lived
jessa 