You can't discuss the ocean with a frog — and most of the frogs have PhDs, run industries, or are the so-called experts
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There’s an old line: you can’t discuss the ocean with a frog. The frog only knows the pond. Fair enough — frogs are frogs.
The uncomfortable part is that most of the frogs have PhDs, run industries, or are the so-called experts. They’ve been validated so many times inside their pond that they mistake the pond for the world. And because they carry weight — titles, credentials, decades of being right about small things — their confident wrongness about the ocean does more damage than any regular person’s ignorance ever could.
That’s who this newsletter is not for. 🐸
The pattern that keeps this country stuck
I’ve spent years proposing things. The answer is almost always the same: “aterrízalo primero.” Land it first. Make it concrete. Show me it works — before you’re allowed to try it.
Think about that for a second. You can’t land something without experimenting. Experimenting is how you land things. Asking someone to prove it works before they’re allowed to try it is asking them to time-travel. It’s not a reasonable request. It’s a polite way of saying no.
And the people who say it loudest are usually the ones closest to you. Family. Friends. Colleagues who “just want to help.” They kill more good ideas than any enemy ever will, because they do it with love and you can’t fight love with logic. 🚩
This is caveman thinking. Not an insult — a description. A caveman keeps to what worked yesterday because yesterday he didn’t die. That’s a fine survival strategy in a cave. It’s a terrible strategy for a country trying to catch up 40 years in a decade.
I catch myself doing it too. We all do. The difference is whether you notice and course-correct, or whether you double down and get a PhD in it.
What I actually think, with no hedging
I know how to start fixing things. Not everything, not alone, not overnight — but concretely, with receipts.
Example, because grand statements are cheap: Guatemala could have a working national postal system in 18 months. Real addresses, real tracking, real integration with international carriers. It’s not a mystery — Estonia figured it out in the 90s and now an artisan in Tallinn ships to Tokyo from her kitchen. The technology is 20+ years old. The playbook is public. What’s missing isn’t the how. It’s the permission to try.
Multiply that by every domain — education, health, commerce, governance — and you get the shape of this newsletter. The information exists. The examples exist. The tools exist. What’s missing is people willing to read the fringe, connect the dots, and propose. Cavemen keep to the shallow end because it’s comfortable. We’re going to the edges on purpose.
Frontier knowledge, aterrizado en Guate. That’s the beat.
What you’ll get here
Short pieces, often. Longer ones when the topic earns it. Observation → analysis → proposal, mostly in that order. Sometimes just a link and a take. Sometimes a receipt of something obviously broken once you see it.
Four subjects I keep coming back to — the pillars:
- 🧪 How we learn — because school taught us to repeat, not to try
- 🛒 How we trade — because a country without real infrastructure (postal, payments, logistics) and without real communication culture stays poor on purpose
- 🧠 How we take care of our bodies and minds — because we do 20% prevention and 80% reaction, and the ratio should flip
- 🏛️ How we govern ourselves — because the rules were written by people optimizing for their pond
Around those, daily-ish notes, links, and observations. Some in English, some in Spanish, some Spanglish when it’s more fun that way. I write how I think.
Who this is for (and who it isn’t)
For: people who’d rather try something and be wrong than sit still and be safe. People who read the weird stuff on purpose. People who know that your worth is your network and act like it — sharing, asking, connecting, making organic things happen. Butterfly effects are real; they just need people willing to flap. People who want to not be afraid of dying.
Not for: anyone who needs every idea to be pre-approved by an authority before they’ll consider it. Anyone who’s here to hate. Anyone who confuses credentials with curiosity.
If a post makes you uncomfortable, that’s probably it working. If it makes you angry, unsubscribe — no drama, no hostages. The button will always be there.
I’ll send a lot of these. Some will be sharp, some will be half-baked on purpose (that’s how experiments work), some will be links to things smarter people made. If the volume is too much, filter or leave. Both are fine.
One thing before you go
La libertad se toma, no se pide. You don’t ask for freedom, you take it. That applies to countries, businesses, careers, and — most annoyingly — to the small daily permission we keep asking from people who were never qualified to grant it.
Sé cómo empezar a arreglar cosas. ¿Querés ver?
Subscribe. Or don’t. But if you’re still reading this far, you probably already know which frog you’re not.
🌊
NoFate is a lab that runs in public. Receipts and failures included.