Painful Truths

Years ago, a criticism changed my life.

I want to share this story because not everyone has had the bittersweet blessing of a cold bucket of water thrown over them like that. Somehow we have been trained to reject criticism on the spot. We even sort it into “constructive” and “destructive,” when in truth, much of its value depends on how we receive it and what we choose to do with it.

In my case, the criticism felt cruel. It was also completely true. Let me tell you about it.

One day I was chatting with my friend and brother, Jonathan Solis, about an idea, and that is when he dropped the bomb. He mentioned that “someone” (I never found out who) had said this about me when they heard about my project: “Ah, David Azofeifa… great at starting things.”

I was speechless. Hurt. Angry. But as the days passed, I slowly began to admit that this person was absolutely right.

As I reflected, one unpleasant truth after another came back to me. The first was my abandoned university studies. In 1995 I enrolled in Computer Engineering at the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (TEC), in Cartago. But my immaturity, mixed with the distance and the fog of Cartago, got the better of me. I tried to transfer my IT studies to the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR), where I had also taken a run at Economics. In the end I chose to work, and over the years I could never pull away from the paycheck. It only got worse when I took on massive debts through foolish decisions. But that is a whole other story and testimony.

Then I remembered everything else I had abandoned: family, emotional, spiritual, friendships, ideas. One of them was the incredible CRISTO.NET project, born in a conversation with my dear friend Boris Cabezas and kept alive only by the life-saving intervention of my friend Walter Quesada. What memories.

When I married Melissa in 2009, I was still carrying the weight of everything I had left unfinished. There I was, with no degree, married to a woman holding a master’s in Aesthetic Operative Dentistry. Then one day she said something that changed my life: “David, why don’t you go back to school? Since I’m a professor at Universidad Latina de Costa Rica (U Latina), you’d get a 40% scholarship.”

I did not think twice. I had wanted this for years, and now the person I loved most in the world was handing me her vote of confidence.

I will never forget the day I walked back into TEC to request my transcripts so I could transfer my credits to U Latina. Every square meter, every building, every hallway of that place screamed at me that I was a failure. It felt as though the entire campus was mocking me. It was a devastating experience, one I would not wish on anyone.

And that was the beginning of my restoration. In 2010 I started studying Information Technology for Business Management (my wife still teases me about how ridiculously long the name of my degree is), and I graduated in December 2016. Imagine my joy. Even though I was one of the oldest graduates at the ceremony, I had finally done it.

I immediately enrolled in a master’s program in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, which I finished in October 2018. It felt like I had finally redeemed the lost time. Those degrees opened the doors to my “promised land” career: the company I had dreamed of working for my whole life, Microsoft.

Why am I sharing all of this? Because I know many of you carry unfulfilled dreams. Because I know receiving criticism is never easy. Because I understand that not all of us have faced the same hurdles. Because I know some of you have quietly resigned yourselves to the idea that your time has passed, tangled up in circumstances that drained your resources, your energy, and your priorities.

And because some of you need to hear that there is still hope, that it is not too late to shake off what your circumstances and your past keep telling you.

And because I have come to believe that absolutely everything, good and bad, that has happened in my life is meant to be shared. It carries lessons that were never just for me.

I am extending a hand because I, too, had people along the way who helped me move forward. If you want to talk about old dreams and abandoned projects, let’s chat. If no one believes in your ideas anymore, or you feel like your time has run out, let’s talk. Speaking from personal experience: not everything is lost!