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MARCH 2026
Why I Chose Finance
I did not choose finance because I love spreadsheets. I chose it because finance is the language that every business in the world speaks, and I wanted to be fluent. Before I ever stepped into a classroom at the University of Miami, I was already fascinated by the mechanics of how money moves — how companies grow, how investments compound, and how a single financial decision can alter the trajectory of an entire organization. Finance felt less like a subject and more like a lens through which everything else made sense. The moment that solidified my decision happened long before I declared my major. I was reading about Warren Buffett — not the inspirational quotes that circulate on Instagram, but the actual annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. What struck me was how clearly he explained the relationship between price and value. He did not talk about stocks like lottery tickets. He talked about them like businesses — because that is what they are. Each share represents a fractional ownership of a real company with real revenues, real employees, and real problems to solve. That reframing changed how I thought about finance entirely. It was not about numbers. It was about understanding the story behind the numbers. At the University of Miami, my coursework has deepened that understanding in ways I did not anticipate. Financial accounting taught me how to read the health of a company the way a doctor reads vital signs. Corporate finance taught me how decisions about debt, equity, and capital structure shape a company's future. Investments taught me how markets price risk and why the relationship between risk and return is not just a textbook concept but a daily reality for anyone managing capital. Every class has reinforced the same lesson: finance is not about memorizing formulas. It is about developing the judgment to apply the right framework to the right problem at the right time. What I find most compelling about finance is its universality. Every industry — technology, healthcare, real estate, luxury goods, entertainment — runs on financial decisions. A startup founder deciding whether to raise venture capital or bootstrap is making a finance decision. A family choosing between renting and buying a home is making a finance decision. A CEO determining whether to acquire a competitor or invest in organic growth is making a finance decision. Understanding finance does not lock me into one career path. It gives me the foundation to operate in almost any field I choose. That flexibility matters to me because my goals extend beyond a traditional finance career. I want to build businesses. I want to invest in real estate. I want to eventually create my own investment firm. Finance is not the destination — it is the infrastructure that supports everything else I plan to build. Without understanding how to analyze a deal, structure an investment, or evaluate risk, none of those ambitions would be grounded in anything real. Finance gives me the analytical backbone to pursue entrepreneurship with confidence rather than guesswork. I am also drawn to finance because it rewards the qualities I value most: discipline, analytical thinking, and patience. The best investors are not the ones who chase trends or react emotionally to headlines. They are the ones who develop a thesis, stress-test it against the data, and have the patience to let it play out over time. That process mirrors how I try to approach everything in my life — with a plan, with rigor, and with the understanding that long-term results require short-term sacrifice. My interest in luxury brands, particularly Ferrari, has also influenced how I think about finance. Ferrari is not just a car company. It is one of the most disciplined brands in the world. They deliberately limit production to maintain exclusivity. They price their products to reflect scarcity and craftsmanship rather than market share. Their financial model is built on the principle that less can be more — that controlled growth preserves brand equity in ways that aggressive expansion destroys. Studying brands like Ferrari through a financial lens has taught me that the most interesting business decisions are rarely about maximizing short-term revenue. They are about building long-term value. I chose finance because it combines everything that excites me: strategy, analysis, problem-solving, and the ability to create something meaningful from informed decisions. It is the foundation I am building my future on, and I am more convinced every semester that it was the right choice.
FEBRUARY 2026
Lessons Entrepreneurship Has Taught Me
You do not need permission to start. That is the first lesson entrepreneurship taught me, and it remains the most important. For most of my life, I operated under the assumption that you needed to reach a certain level — a certain age, degree, bank balance, or title — before you were qualified to build something. Entrepreneurship dismantled that assumption completely. The only qualification required to start is the willingness to begin before you feel ready. I became interested in entrepreneurship not because I had a specific business idea but because I was drawn to the mindset. Entrepreneurs see problems differently. Where most people see inconvenience, entrepreneurs see opportunity. Where most people see risk, entrepreneurs see calculated bets with asymmetric upside. That way of thinking resonated with me long before I understood the mechanics of actually building a business. I wanted to be the kind of person who creates value rather than waiting for someone else to create a position for me to fill. One of the earliest lessons I learned was that ideas are worth almost nothing without execution. Everyone has ideas. The person who wins is not the one with the best idea — it is the one who does the work to bring an idea to life. I have seen brilliant concepts die because no one was willing to do the unglamorous work of building them. I have also seen average ideas succeed spectacularly because someone committed to executing them with relentless consistency. That taught me to stop romanticizing the planning phase and start prioritizing action. Entrepreneurship also taught me the value of failure as education. Every mistake contains information. A marketing campaign that does not convert teaches you what your audience does not respond to. A product that does not sell teaches you that the market did not want what you thought it wanted. A partnership that falls apart teaches you what to look for in the next one. The entrepreneurs I admire most are not the ones who avoided failure — they are the ones who failed faster, extracted the lesson, and pivoted before the failure became permanent. Another lesson that has stuck with me is the importance of understanding your customer deeply enough that your solution feels obvious. Most businesses fail not because the product is bad but because the founder never truly understood the problem they were solving. The best entrepreneurs spend more time listening than talking. They observe behavior instead of assuming preferences. They test ideas in the real world instead of debating them in conference rooms. That customer-first mentality is something I try to apply not just to business concepts but to how I approach every project and relationship. Time management is another skill that entrepreneurship forces you to develop. When you are building something, there is always more to do than there is time to do it. Learning to prioritize ruthlessly — to identify the one or two things that will move the needle today and ignore everything else — has been one of the most practical skills I have gained. It applies to school, to personal projects, and to life in general. Not everything that feels urgent is actually important, and not everything that feels important needs to happen right now. Perhaps the most profound lesson entrepreneurship has taught me is about identity. When your name is attached to what you build, the quality of that work becomes a reflection of who you are. There is no boss to blame, no committee to hide behind, no corporate structure to absorb your mistakes. You own everything — the wins and the losses. That level of accountability is terrifying and liberating in equal measure. It has made me more thoughtful about what I commit to, more intentional about how I show up, and more honest about my strengths and weaknesses. I am still early in my entrepreneurial journey. I have not built a company yet, and I have not generated my first dollar from a venture I created. But the lessons I have absorbed from studying entrepreneurship, reading about founders, and attempting small projects on my own have already changed how I think about my career, my goals, and my potential. Entrepreneurship is not just a career path. It is a way of engaging with the world — and once you start thinking like an entrepreneur, you cannot go back to thinking any other way.
JANUARY 2026
How Discipline Shapes Long-Term Success
Motivation gets you started. Discipline keeps you going when motivation disappears — and it always disappears. That distinction is something I wish I had understood earlier, because for years I confused the two. I thought the feeling of excitement I got from setting a new goal was the same energy that would carry me through achieving it. It is not. Motivation is an emotion. Discipline is a decision. And the people who build meaningful things over time are the ones who show up consistently regardless of how they feel on any given day. I started thinking seriously about discipline when I noticed a pattern in my own life. I would start something with tremendous energy — a workout plan, a study schedule, a personal project — and within a few weeks, the energy would fade. Not because the goal stopped mattering, but because the initial excitement wore off and what remained was the actual work. The repetitive, unglamorous, nobody-is-watching kind of work that does not produce Instagram-worthy results but quietly compounds into something significant over months and years. Discipline is what happens in the gap between setting a goal and achieving it. That gap is where most people quit. They quit not because they lack talent or intelligence but because they lack the ability to tolerate boredom, discomfort, and delayed gratification. The workout stops being fun after the first month. The textbook stops being interesting after the first chapter. The business plan stops feeling exciting after the first round of rejection. Discipline is the skill of continuing anyway — not because you feel like it, but because you decided to. One of the frameworks that has helped me build discipline is the concept of systems over goals. Goals are important — they give you direction. But systems are what actually produce results. A goal is "I want to get an A in this course." A system is "I will study for two hours every day at the same time in the same place." The goal is the destination. The system is the vehicle. Without the system, the goal is just a wish. I have found that when I focus on building reliable systems, the goals tend to take care of themselves. Finance has reinforced this lesson in ways I did not expect. Investing, at its core, is an exercise in disciplined behavior over long time horizons. The data consistently shows that the investors who perform best are not the ones who make the most dramatic moves — they are the ones who develop a strategy and stick to it through market cycles. They do not panic during downturns. They do not chase trends during rallies. They maintain their discipline when everyone around them is losing theirs. That principle applies far beyond financial markets. I have also noticed that discipline has a compounding effect that mirrors compound interest. Small, consistent actions do not produce visible results immediately. But over time, they accumulate into something that looks dramatic to outside observers. The person who reads for thirty minutes every day does not seem to be doing anything remarkable on any given Tuesday. But after a year, they have read dozens of books and fundamentally expanded their knowledge base. The person who works out consistently for three years does not look like they made a dramatic transformation on any single day — but the cumulative result is undeniable. One of the hardest parts of discipline is accepting that results are delayed. We live in a culture that celebrates instant outcomes — viral moments, overnight success stories, rapid transformations. The reality is that most worthwhile achievements take years of quiet, consistent effort that nobody sees. Learning to be comfortable with that invisibility is itself a discipline. It requires the confidence to trust the process even when you cannot yet see the evidence that the process is working. I am not a perfectly disciplined person. I have days where I do not follow my own systems. I have moments where motivation disappears and I have to actively choose to keep going rather than feeling pulled forward naturally. But the difference between who I am now and who I was a few years ago is that I no longer expect discipline to feel good. I expect it to feel like a choice — sometimes a difficult one — and I make that choice anyway. Because the alternative is waking up in five years having wished I had started today. And that alternative is unacceptable.