The Day the Future Arrived

The future doesn’t always come gently. Sometimes, it crashes into our lives like a thunderclap—loud, uninvited, and irreversible. For me, the future arrived one ordinary day in 1967. I was just nine and a half years old when my father died from a brain aneurysm, and my life—my very sense of reality—was turned inside out.

Before that day, life was structured around a rhythm. My father, the head of our household, provided income and a deep, unspoken assurance. That security vanished instantly, and with it, my childhood as I had known it. In a single afternoon, I became the "little man of the house," a title no child wants, but one I carried with a gravity beyond my years. My mother, Patricia, was devastated. I could see it in her eyes—the anguish of losing her second husband, the man she had believed was her last shot at lasting happiness.

She had married him at 38, after a brief teenage marriage that had ended in disillusionment. With my father, there was hope. Companionship. Love. She never remarried after he passed. That says everything about the depth of her loss.

I remember the feeling of the Twilight Zone that settled in immediately. It was as if time had slowed, and I watched myself walk through the world from afar. Everything was surreal. But despite the numbness, there was no room to collapse emotionally. Not for a boy who now had to help hold his grieving mother together.

At school, the cruelty of children revealed itself in full force. “You come from a broken home,” they said. At first, I tried to explain: “No, my father didn’t leave. He died. He loved me.” But the taunts kept coming—meaner, more imaginative. “If he loved you, he would’ve fought to stay alive.”

Those words stung, and they stuck. They made me feel ashamed and even guilty, as if his death was my fault. As if I hadn’t been enough for him to stay.

But those moments—those dark, cutting moments—formed something inside me. A fire. A resolve. I began to understand that some people tear others down not because they’re strong but because it makes them feel strong. That was the first lesson the future taught me: the world can be cruel, and it’s up to you to build a shell of strength or risk being broken by it.

I worked on that shell every day. I made a silent vow: I would survive, and more than that, I would thrive.

At first, I turned to sports. Baseball was my passion. I played with intensity and dreamed of playing on my high school team. But when I didn’t make the team, another blow landed. It felt personal. Still, the future had more in store for me—it had direction, just not in the form I had first imagined.

I pivoted and leaned into academics. Every Sunday morning, I watched the political talk shows with a seriousness that most kids couldn’t understand. While others played, I listened—enthralled—to discussions on policy, markets, and geopolitics. William Simon, the U.S. Treasury Secretary under Jimmy Carter, stood out. He became my intellectual hero, and I decided then and there to become an economist.

We didn’t have much. My mother cleaned office buildings to pay the bills. But what we lacked in money, we made up for in perseverance. My mom, though hurting, never gave up. And watching her gave me an endurance model. We sold alcapurrias in the summer to help cover school clothes and my Catholic tuition. I would take them to the local baseball field, walk between games, and sell them from a cooler. Every sale mattered. Every dollar earned was a brick in the foundation of my future.

I worked. I studied. I pushed myself.

Eventually, I graduated high school and earned a BA in Finance. That wasn’t enough, so I kept going—a Master’s, then a Ph.D. in Economics. It was grueling. There were countless days when I felt overwhelmed, exhausted, and isolated. But the memory of my father and mother's strength powered me forward. Each diploma wasn’t just a credential but a tribute—a way of saying I didn’t let their sacrifices go to waste.

By the time I was named JPMorgan's Global Chief Economist, following my roles as a University Professor, Federal Reserve Economist, and a Senior Economist at Barclay's on a Bond Trading Floor, I had traveled a path that began on that mournful day in 1967. It was a journey forged through trauma, loss, grit, and tenacity.

But the future had one more seismic shift to deliver.

In 2008, I lost my mother. The woman who had given everything, who had carried me through my darkest years, was gone. Her death didn’t just leave a void—it pulled the rug out from under me. It was the second significant transformation in my life.

Losing a parent once is painful enough. Losing both… makes you feel untethered from the world, like a balloon snipped from its string. You become the oldest branch on your family tree. And that forces a kind of reckoning.

My mother had been the pillar of strength I leaned on. With her gone, I realized that everything she instilled in me—discipline, compassion, resilience—was now mine to carry forward. And take it I did.

Success, however, didn’t come without cost. People often ask me how I did it. They want the roadmap, the playbook. But they don’t always like the price tag.

Because here’s the truth: achieving your dreams costs something. It meant sacrificing fun, free time, and even health for me. It meant trading the joy of a carefree childhood for responsibility and the simplicity of youth for the complexity of ambition. The stress I endured in the corporate world—quarter after quarter, year after year—left marks on my body and soul.

When people ask for advice, I never say: “Just work hard, and good things will happen.” That’s only part of the truth.

I say this: Know what you want and what it costs. Then, decide if you're willing to pay the price.

True success requires more than effort. It demands sacrifice. The kind of sacrifice that not everyone is willing—or able—to make. And that’s okay. Not everyone needs to reach the top. But if you want that peak, understand that you’ll climb through snow and storm.

Michael Jordan didn’t become great by accident. He decided that the price of greatness—training, failure, criticism, pressure—was worth it. And he paid that price again and again.

I did, too. You can, as well. And while my success was infinitesimal compared to what success looks like for others --- it is how success looks for me. Success comes in different shapes and forms, but only for those willing to pay the heavy price of achieving it!

Looking back, I now see that the future I feared in 1967—the one that arrived so brutally—also made me. It wasn’t the future I initially imagined, but the one I got. And ultimately, it was the one I needed to grow into the person I became.

Losing my father ripped away the illusion of safety. Losing my mother forced me to become the very thing she had modeled—resilient, self-sufficient, committed. And through those losses, I learned one more truth: that grief, while devastating, can be the soil in which greatness grows.

If you're reading this and you've lost a parent or both, know this: it will hurt, sometimes forever. But that pain can also guide, push, and transform you.

The future doesn't always look kind. But it is full of possibilities.

You can shape it.

And in time, you may even come to see—just as I did—that the future doesn't take everything. Sometimes, it gives us exactly what we need to become the person we were meant to be!