From plan A to plan C

The detail that had been resonating for two weeks: a REAPRA candidate spent eight months in the process and walked out ▸ 45:57. So in today’s meeting he asked the direct question, honestly, how long? The honest answer: minimum around ten months, and from his own contact, “yo demoré un año” ▸ 46:54. He’d understood roughly three months of Intensive Foundation Design plus three of visa process ▸ 48:22, a phase with no passing metric, just the vibe of whoever runs it ▸ 46:27. He thanked her for the honesty and demoted the program in the same breath, and the ask-to-focus-100%-for-a-year framing earned Julia’s one-word audit, “es una secta” ▸ 48:51.

The teaching is expectation management, and the best statement of it came hours earlier from a sushi counter: Andrés tells arriving customers the wait might be 30 minutes and asks if that works, and they either stay content or leave informed ▸ 47:37. His recommendation to REAPRA was exactly that: publish ten, not three ▸ 47:59.

la expectativa mal puesta cobra más caro que la espera misma →

The deeper reason a year of waiting is unpayable is momentum. Right now he’s in speedrun mode, wanting to eat the world, and enthusiasm is itself a perishable opportunity: “cuando uno quiere hacer algo, uno tiene que aprovecharlo” ▸ 49:14. The counter-example he liked from the Girdley program the same day: they refuse to bench a candidate while the matching team assembles, because parking talent is how you lose it ▸ 44:31. So the program that once sat behind an orange flag and a clause between two handshakes slides from plan A to plan C ▸ 49:55, still worth the introspection, no longer worth the year…