I Learned to Lead So I Could Choose Not To. Battalion commander. Runway producer. Newspaper director. And then, deliberately, a lean team of one. What mastering leadership taught me about where my time is actually worth the most.
There is a kind of professional advice that treats going solo as settling, as what you do when you cannot build a team. My path was the opposite. I led at scale early and often, was good at it, and used what I learned to make a deliberate choice about where my time creates the most value. This is how that happened.
In an earlier post I described my work wiring as Scientist primary, Sage shadow, with Warrior as my Anti, the kind of work that costs me the most. A reader who knows me might push back on that, and they would have a point. I have led a battalion of more than five hundred cadets. I have produced runway shows. I have run a brand marketing department at one of the largest newspapers in Texas. That does not look like someone whose heaviest lift is leading groups.
Here is the resolution to that apparent contradiction, and it is the whole point of this entry: I learned to lead at scale, became genuinely good at it, and used exactly that experience to figure out where my time is most valuable. The lean model I run today is not a retreat from leadership. It is a decision made by someone who knows precisely what leading at scale costs and what it returns.
To explain that, I have to start in a JROTC building in La Joya, Texas.
The Coyote Battalion
and a Clear Ladder
I went to a feeder campus into La Joya High School in the Rio Grande Valley, deep South Texas, the part of the state that feels like the northern edge of Mexico. My freshman year I joined JROTC, the Coyote Battalion, because I had seen my cousin perform with the unarmed drill team. She came to my middle school and did a choreographed exhibition routine, and something about the precision of it stuck with me.
What I found in JROTC was the thing my brain responds to most strongly: a completely transparent system. In ROTC, you can see exactly where you stand and exactly what it takes to rise. The rank structure is a visible ladder. The requirements are explicit. There is no guessing about how to advance, there is only the question of whether you will do the work. For someone wired to solve clearly defined problems, that clarity was a gift. I climbed.
Freshman year I joined the armed drill team. Sophomore year I went deeper. The summer before junior year, I thought I was about to become armed drill team commander. The senior slated for it had taken a job and could not commit to the practice schedule. So I did what I always do when I see the path: I started early. I organized the whole thing over the summer, built the plans, prepared to lead.
And then the position went to someone else.
I did all the organizing work and did not get the title that year. I had to wait. That is worth remembering, because it is what makes everything that came later a choice rather than a consolation.
I did not quit. I rose to platoon leader, became an officer in my company, and waited for the next year.
Lieutenant Colonel,
Battalion Commander
My senior year, I earned it outright: Cadet Lieutenant Colonel, Battalion Commander of a unit of more than five hundred cadets. That year we passed our formal inspection and regained our Gold Star status. We took second place in the Western Region for armed exhibition. And every Friday, we marched the entire battalion from the JROTC building to the football stadium, and I helped call the cadence that moved five hundred people forward in step.
I did not get there alone, and I did not get there unchallenged. My fiercest competition for the top command position was a cadet named Dianey Villarreal, and she deserves to be named here. We were neck and neck the entire way. She was relentless, disciplined, and excellent. The thing that ultimately gave me the edge was partly circumstance, she spent a semester at a different high school, and partly a razor-thin academic margin. On any other timeline, the commander could just as easily have been her.
I have come to believe that behind every strong leader is an even stronger person pushing them to be better. For me, in that year, it was Dianey. The standard I held myself to existed because she was right there, matching it, forcing me to be sharper than I would have been without her. Naming her is not a courtesy. It is accuracy. The command was as much a product of her pressure as my effort.
That year taught me the actual mechanics of leading a large organization. Not the theory, the real thing. How to motivate a group when the morning is cold and the march is long. How to hold a standard of excellence across company commanders, drill teams, color guard, and every cadet beneath them. How to steer five hundred people toward a shared goal and make them want to get there. I was seventeen years old and I was genuinely, measurably good at it.
And here is the part that matters for the rest of this story: doing it that well, that young, gave me something most people do not get until much later. A clear, firsthand, unromantic understanding of exactly what large-scale leadership requires and exactly what it costs.
From the Drill Field
to the Runway
Right before I left high school, two models I knew, along with a friend named Daisy, invited me to come along to a session at Missy's Modeling Studio. The two who pulled me in had their reasons for thinking I might fit in there. I went, mostly out of curiosity.
What happened next is the clearest evidence I have that the JROTC experience was never really about the military. By that fall, I was organizing all of the male models, coordinating practice schedules, outfits, the general logistics of getting a group of people to show up prepared and aligned. It felt completely natural. Because it was the same work I had just spent four years mastering, pointed at a completely different target.
Then Missy asked me to help choreograph. And that is where something new showed up that the battalion had only hinted at. I got deep into music mixing for the shows. I started building runway productions from a vision in my head, seeing the whole thing before it existed, then assembling models, music, choreography, and timing until what was in front of me matched what I had imagined.
The battalion taught me to lead and organize. The runway taught me that the reason I love leading and organizing is that it lets me build something I can see in my head and bring into the world. The leadership was never the point. The creation was.
I did that for about three years, from 2006 until I graduated college at twenty-one in the fall of 2009. A military leadership framework, applied to fashion production, in South Texas. If you want to understand how my brain actually works, that sentence is a better answer than any personality assessment.
Dallas, Verizon,
and a Dying Industry
Right after college, I packed my car and moved to Dallas to take a job with Verizon Telecom. I moved through Verizon Business and got recruited into Verizon Wireless. Stable, corporate, a clear ladder again, the kind of environment I knew how to climb.
Then a vendor I worked with mentioned an open marketing manager position at Al Dia, the Spanish-language newspaper of The Dallas Morning News. Everyone thought I was crazy. This was the height of print is dying, technology is the future. I was a contractor at Verizon with no guaranteed permanent position, and I chose to leap into the newspaper business, an industry the entire world had written off.
I took it because it was community-based, and the community was mine.
I grew up in the 956, the Valley, where everyone speaks Spanish. But I knew it informally, what we might call bocho, casual and imperfect. Business Spanish is a different animal, full of complex vocabulary I had never had to produce. So I challenged myself and practiced until I could operate professionally in it. The cultural fluency I am sometimes credited with was not simply inherited. Part of it I had to deliberately build.
I started at Al Dia and kept rising. I took on events, then more verticals, and worked my way up to Director of Brand Marketing, a role I held from 2015 through 2017. I ran subscription campaigns across the Dallas area, including for The New York Times and The Washington Post. The industry everyone told me was dead is where I built the deepest professional foundation I have.
The Same Move,
Every Single Time
Step back far enough and every chapter is the same three-beat move. It is so consistent that once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Battalion commander: entered JROTC, read the ladder, ended up reshaping the standard of an entire battalion. Runway producer: entered as a model, learned the studio, ended up producing the shows. Newspaper: entered as a marketing manager, learned the business, ended up directing brand across multiple verticals and national subscription campaigns.
The leadership was always real. But it was never the destination. It was the vehicle. What I was actually doing every time was the Scientist move, read the system, followed by the Sage and creator move: build something within it that other people could see, understand, and follow.
Why I Went Lean
On Purpose
When I started my own agencies, I had a team of contractors. I could build and lead one, I had been doing versions of that since I was seventeen. But running the team was not where my value was concentrated. It was where my time was getting consumed.
So I made a deliberate decision. I went lean. Not because I could not lead a team, but because I finally understood, from two decades of leading them, exactly what a team costs in the currency that matters most to me: my attention, my energy, and the hours I have available for the work only I can do.
The lean model is a precise configuration. I extend my leverage through AI and automation rather than headcount. I use nearshore partners for execution. And I reserve my own time for the part of the work that is genuinely mine, the diagnosis, the strategy, the insight that a client cannot get anywhere else. That is the Scientist and the Sage operating at full capacity, unburdened by the Warrior overhead of managing an organization.
This only works as a philosophy because I earned the right to it. If I had never led at scale, I prefer to work lean would just be avoidance dressed up as strategy. But I commanded the battalion. I produced the shows. I ran the department. Going lean is not the path I took because I could not do the other thing. It is the path I chose because I did the other thing, did it well, and learned exactly what it was worth.
I lead by example now. By building the thing, laying the foundation, and creating work that others can follow. Sometimes the most valuable form of leadership is not gathering people behind you. It is going first, paving the way, and proving the path is walkable. That is the kind of leadership that fits how I am actually wired, and it took commanding five hundred cadets to understand that about myself.
What the Whole Arc
Comes Down To
The lesson in the file is not go solo or build a team. It is something more useful and more personal: you cannot make a real choice about how you work until you have actually done the thing you are choosing against.
I know going lean is right for me because I know, in my body, what leading at scale feels like, the cold Friday mornings calling cadence, the standard held across an entire battalion, the department steered through a dying industry. I am not guessing about the road not taken. I have walked it. That is what makes the current path a decision instead of a default.
Most advice about how to structure your work is given by people who only ever did it one way. The most valuable career insight I have is that you should earn your preferences by testing them against their opposite. Lead something big at least once. Then, if you choose to go lean, you will know it is a choice, and you will be able to defend it with the quiet confidence of someone who is not wondering what they missed.
I learned to lead so I could choose not to. And the choosing, made from experience instead of fear, is the most valuable leadership decision I have ever made.
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