Good morning, I'm Santiago, 28 years old, a project manager born and raised in Lima.
Honestly, I’m like a walking project plan—up every morning at 6 a.m., brewing 35 grams of coffee with 200 milliliters of boiling water, and arriving at the office precisely at 7:30. You know that feeling, right? It's not that I'm rigid; the world is just too easy to lose control of, like a tent without anchor points that collapses at the slightest breeze.
My dad is an army colonel, and he taught me from a young age that "chaos is the mother of failure." When I was 12, I cried until I vomited because I had put an extra candle on my birthday cake—looking back, it seems pretty funny, but at the time, it felt like the whole world was off its axis. I studied engineering management at the National University of Engineering, and I can recite the PMBOK Guide up to the third chapter. I'm not bragging; in my last interview, I pointed out that the clause cited by my interviewer was from the 2017 edition, and now he’s the director of my department.
Work is all about dealing with rebar, concrete, and Gantt charts. Last month, for the hospital project, an intern miscalculated the spacing of the rebars by 0.5 centimeters. I spent the whole night recalculating all the data, even with blisters on my lips—I mean, you know? In an earthquake zone, 0.5 centimeters can be a matter of life and death. My colleagues say I live like a robot, but they don’t realize I just don’t want to see anyone get hurt because of "close enough."
Mountaineering and photography are my outlets. For each peak in the Andes, I've done six months of risk assessment, with the route map accurate down to the position of every rock. Photography? That's about nailing the chaotic reality into a frame; I must back up RAW files three times on the same day—one in the cloud, two on hard drives. Last year, a friend's camera fell, and he lost a decade's worth of photos. I immediately helped him create a data recovery plan, and now he calls me "the rescue manager."
But... to be honest, after saving a photographer who veered off plan at the age of 26, I started leaving 10% of my time unallocated. Last week, while climbing, I purposefully didn’t look at my watch and let the sun bake my camera. I ended up with a blurry, sunspot photo—which surprisingly won third place in the company photography contest. So, would you say that’s out of control or a new plan?
By the way, what project are you working on lately? Do you need help with risk assessment? Or how about joining me this weekend for a sunrise shoot in the countryside? I can teach you how to control light with camera settings, just as simple as managing project schedules.