I left a thirty-year career for an idea I could not yet explain. For about a year I had nothing to show for it, and two questions I could not answer.
The 136th Canton Fair, Guangzhou, China, October 2024. I went looking for a product to sell. I came home with none.
A Trade Fair in China
In October 2024 I walked around the Canton Fair in Guangzhou looking for something to sell.
The Canton Fair is the biggest trade show in China, and it is enormous. The halls go on and on. Also, everything was cheap. Lamps, tools, kitchen things, packaging. I took photos and wrote down prices. For a few hours I felt like a man with a plan.
But then I checked the minimum order quantity. Every good price came with a number I could not fund.
So I flew home with nothing to show.
Ten months before this
Ten months earlier I had been Head of Content and Creative Services at ABS-CBN, one of the biggest media companies in the Philippines. Thirty years in one company. The kind of salary you do not walk away from without people asking why.
Instead, I was walking a trade fair in China, hoping a product would tell me what to do next.
What I Had Actually Left For
First, the facts. I retired early in December 2023, and the hardest part of that was not the work I left behind. It was the word people stopped calling me.
I told people I was going to write, and maybe teach later on. That was true. It was not the whole story. What I really had was an idea I could not yet explain to anyone, including myself.
In 2024 I was a CQ Fellow under Dr. David Livermore, one of twenty chosen out of 377 applicants around the world. CQ stands for cultural intelligence, the skill of working well with people whose habits and assumptions are not yours. On paper that sounds like a plan.
Still, it did not feel like one. All year I kept asking myself the same thing. Is this my next chapter, or am I just delaying the answer?
The Year of Trying Doors
Meanwhile, I had not cracked the code.
I knew that a story changes when it crosses a border. I had watched it happen for thirty years at The Filipino Channel, the service that carries Filipino programmes to viewers overseas. But knowing something and being able to hand it to another person are two different things. I had pieces. But I did not have a framework.
So I tried other doors.
First I tried dropshipping. It did not click.
I studied online arbitrage. The mechanics made sense. But I could not see myself doing it for the next ten years.
Then China, and the minimum order quantity, and the flight home.
The Two Questions at Night
In between the attempts came the part nobody posts about.
The first question was about money. Will I ever earn as much again?
Here is the strange part. By then I did not need to.
For most of my working life that salary had names attached to it. My parents. School fees for nieces and nephews, one batch after another, the way many Filipino families do. Every payday, the money went down a list.
My parents died in 2020. By the time I retired in December 2023, the last of the students I was helping had already finished. The list was empty.
Still, I lay awake doing the arithmetic. A monthly salary teaches your body a rhythm. It arrives, the bills go out, you sleep. Take that away and the counting goes on by itself, even when there is nothing left to count.
The second question was harder, and I asked it in Filipino, the way you ask yourself things when nobody else is listening. Tama ba ito. Was this right.
In short, was it right to leave something solid for something with no shape yet?
That question does not visit you in meetings. It visits you at night, in a quiet condo, with no title in front of your name.
Three in the Morning
I had started writing the book in March 2024. For months it moved slowly. Then it stopped moving at all.
There was a stretch when I could not look at it. Nauumay na ako. I was sick of my own manuscript, so I left it alone and let it sit.
At the time I thought I was wasting months. I was not. The work kept growing while I was not watching it.
But something changed in December 2024.
I began waking at three in the morning. Not from worry. Instead, from ideas. They came faster than I could type, and they came in order, which had never happened to me before. I would write until the sky turned grey, then sleep a little, then read for the rest of the day.
That went on until April 2025. In all, five months.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave this a name. He called it flow, the state where the work carries you and you stop noticing the hour. I had read about it years ago. I had never lived inside it for five months.
So by the end of April I had a first draft.
Counting from the first page in March 2024 to the finished book in November 2025, the whole thing took twenty months. Only five of those were the three in the morning months. Several of the others were months when I did not write a single word.
Two answers from David
Then I sent it to David Livermore.
He came back with good words, and with a list of revisions.
Both mattered. In short, the good words told me the idea was real. The revisions told me it was not finished.
My Maiden Conference
Around the same time I started seeing calls for papers.
I almost did not apply.
A call for papers is a strange thing for a man who spent three decades in television. In a company, your title speaks before you do. In an academic room, nobody knows you, and nobody cares what you used to run. And under all of that sat the plainest doubt of all. Kaya ko ba. Can I even do this.
I applied anyway. The first was the Graduate Conference at the Asian Center of the University of the Philippines, the country’s national university, on its Diliman campus in Quezon City. My maiden conference.
It was a small room. Graduate students and teachers from my own programme. Nobody outside it had heard of the framework. I had written it down. I had not yet seen it work.
Then it worked.
Not perfectly. But people listened, and then they asked real questions. Nobody looked confused in the way that tells you an idea is broken. I walked out of Diliman carrying something I had not walked in with. It was not applause. It was the beginning of confidence.
Then the Replies Started Coming
Tokyo. Hanoi. Manila. London. A news summit in the Netherlands. Davao. Los Baños. A hospital in Los Angeles. San Antonio, Texas. Pittsburgh. Santa Monica.
I would open my email and find another yes. Nagulat ako. I was surprised. Then I was surprised again. After a while the surprise settled into something steadier.
Confidence is not one decision. It is built in rooms, one at a time. Diliman gave me the first brick. Every conference after it added another.
Out of the country
Three weeks later I flew to Hanoi in Vietnam for a conference of researchers who study families and household money. Not media people. The trip was paid for in full by the Office of International Linkages of the University of the Philippines, through a travel grant. I want to say that plainly. Without that grant I would not have been in the room at all.
In August the work came home, to Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City, for a conference on ecology and education. In September it went to London, to SOAS University of London, for a conference on Philippine studies. My first conference in Europe.
A newsroom, not a lecture hall
The next day it moved again. A global news summit was meeting in the Netherlands and I joined from London. That room was not academic at all. These were working journalists with stories due the same day.
The rooms that agreed with me
October was Davao and Los Baños. The sociologists met at Ateneo de Davao University in the southern Philippines. The speech communication scholars met at the University of the Philippines Los Baños, an agricultural campus about two hours south of Manila.
Why the easy rooms fooled me
Those two rooms were kind to me. I could name a television show, a station, a year, and people already knew what I meant. I never had to explain why a scene mattered. We grew up watching the same programmes.
The two rooms that changed the work
To begin with, the first was a hospital.
On 28 October 2025 I spent an afternoon at Cedars-Sinai, a large hospital in Los Angeles, with health workers and managers. Still, nobody there told stories for a living. But the idea held. Two nurses from two countries handing over a patient at the end of a shift is the same problem as a scene that works in Manila and dies in Madrid. Someone is carrying meaning across a line, and something is going missing.
That afternoon is why the CIS Bamboo Framework became the C3 Bamboo Framework. Culture, Communication, Connection. I had to admit that what I had already published was smaller than what I actually had.
The second was San Antonio, in Texas, two weeks after the hospital.
My panel had a paper on the rubble left after conflict in Asia, and a paper on cremation books in old Siam, the old name for Thailand. Nothing I said could lean on a shared childhood in front of the same television. In Los Baños I could name a show and the room finished my sentence. So in Texas I had nothing to lean on.
In short, that was the real test. If an idea only works with people who already know your country, it is not a framework. It is a shared memory.
Where it went after that
The book came out in Santa Monica, California, in November 2025. Then it came home to Ateneo de Manila in July 2026. And in February 2026 I went back to the ABS-CBN building in Quezon City, where I had worked for about thirty years, this time as an invited speaker.
What a Year with Nothing to Show Taught Me
Looking back, the regrets were not a detour. They were the road.
Before, I used to think you find your path and then you walk it. For me it happened the other way. I walked, badly, and in the wrong direction more than once, and the path formed behind me.
Dropshipping did not work. Similarly, arbitrage did not fit. The Canton Fair sent me home with nothing to show. Even so, every one of those was information. Each one told me what I was not.
The money question, answered
Now, the money question.
So far, I have not matched what I used to earn. For a long time I thought that was the measure, because for thirty years it had been.
But the list was already empty when I walked out the door.
Nobody was waiting on my payday. No tuition was due. In other words, I was not afraid of failing anyone. I was afraid of being a man who used to earn that much.
That is not responsibility. That is pride. It took me a while to tell them apart.
What is on the list now is four dogs.
So what I needed was not that number. It was to be happy with the work in front of me. Of course, I know how that sounds. I would not have believed it either, standing in a trade fair in Guangzhou with no capital and no plan.
Meanwhile, the opportunities are beginning to knock. Conferences, forums, masterclasses, and, above all, a book that goes out ahead of me into rooms I have not entered yet.
Next, November 2026 is a webinar with Media Associates International, in front of writers, editors, and publishers from four continents. Finally, February 2027 is Auckland, New Zealand, for the 2027 International Philippine Studies Conference.
Back to Guangzhou
I still think about that trade fair.
I went there to find something to sell. I came home thinking I had failed, because I could not fund a single minimum order.
But I was not wrong about the instinct. I was only wrong about the product.
Because I am still in the business of selling. What I carry now does not sit in a container and does not come with a minimum order quantity.
I sell a way to make a story land in a country that did not make it. I sell a method that helps a Filipino working abroad be understood at work, and be trusted there. And I sell a framework that lets a company or a university speak across a border without losing what it is.
Those things travel light. Nothing to declare. No capital to raise. Best of all, the stock never runs out. It grows every time I hand it to someone.
The man walking those aisles in Guangzhou in October 2024 was already carrying it. He simply had not written it down yet.
If you have left something safe and you are in the part where nothing has taken shape yet, I will not tell you it is comfortable. I will tell you it counts. A year with nothing to show is still a year of choosing.