Helping People Design Their Future

My mother left her home when she was ten years old so she could work as a maid to afford food for herself. She was pregnant with me when she was fourteen. I grew up in extreme poverty in northeast Brazil. The school I attended claims online that they have drinkable water and electricity—because even now, over a decade later, that remains a significant issue in the place where we came from. Nevertheless, my mom became a successful business owner, despite having completed only the third grade. Statistically, I wasn’t supposed to attend one of the best universities in Brazil, immigrate to the USA, earn an engineering degree, start a business and sell it for a profit, or become a manager at Texas Instruments with just one year of experience. Yet here I am at 27 years of age, with the freedom to choose what I want to do next. The secret to my success lies in having a clear vision of what I wanted my future to look like, coupled with a plan to achieve it. Confidence is essential when pursuing any goal, and nothing instills more confidence than a robust plan. When I decided to move to the USA—a country I believed would enable me to achieve the unimaginable—everyone, including my family, friends, and professors, was against it. At Texas Instruments, I had the opportunity to learn the tools and techniques that make the world’s most automated, complex, and sophisticated manufacturing processes possible. What if everyone could implement those same levels of process improvement techniques, data aggregation, statistical analysis, and automation in their own lives? There seems to be a lack of an intuitive and interactive platform to guide people from point A to point B in achieving their goals—similar to how Google Maps analyzes historical traffic patterns over time. Only 8% of people achieve their New Year’s goals, primarily because they don’t know what it takes to reach them or what success looks like. *How* you do things matters, and having a process is essential. Understanding how things are done and focusing on *improving* them for a specific goal will determine the success of the outcomes. My vision for this platform is that it will emphasize not only the successes achieved but also the failure modes and lessons learned. Improvements in these areas will lead to significant innovations. I believe that success is never accidental, and the future is more a matter of design than chance. That’s why I will build a platform to help people **design their future** and **learn from others’ experiences**. This platform will be developed on foundations of integrity, substance, and curiosity—free from the commercialization of data, clickbait, ads, and distractions. “Technology is supposed to *increase* our mastery over nature and *reduce* the role of chance in our lives.” - Peter Thiel. [Original: August 15, 2022](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/helping-people-design-future-eduarda-ferreira/?trackingId=nmRKswxwQbKe8Bxo4ItIgw%3D%3D)

By Eduarda Ferreira