Thank you very much for continuing here after all the morning.
And, congratulations!
Because you are 15 minutes away
to discover how the future can condition our present.
And how to build something in our lives
and then deconstruct it,
it can be the only and true way to build something
really worthwhile in our lives.
And look, as we’ve been here together all morning,
I believe that we have earned the trust
to share with you a question
that I’ve been wanting to do all my life
in the elevator to a neighbor,
or in the waiting room of the dentist’s office.
And the question is: what will the salmon think?
(Laughter)
It’s the typical question, right?
No I’m serious. Fix.
What will the salmon think?
The adult salmon, full,
at the height of his life, which is in the ocean,
and to which suddenly one day, a call arrives,
a vital, tremendous need to take a trip,
to take you to a river that is perhaps hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.
A river that perhaps only has that notion of where it can be.
A river that has to go because it has a vital need to perform.
As well.
I would like us to travel together in the next 15 minutes
at three very specific moments of that trip,
and use it to justify my belief
that the future can condition the present.
You think? We start the trip?
Let’s go to the number one moment:
This I love to call him “The call of the jungle”.
It’s that moment when the salmon suddenly says:
“Wow, I have to go there.”
“I have led a phenomenal life and lead a good life,
but I have to go there. “
It reminds me, to a large extent, of these things that
sometimes we have spent as a child or young people
when suddenly something happened in your life and you said:
“I already have it!”
I want to be an athlete, or I want to be a firefighter,
or doctor, or veterinarian or rock star.
What life force emanated from there, right?
Well, here I would like to share with you
a personal story
I had the luck and the privilege
to raise me in a wonderful little town
of the northern mountain range of Madrid.
A town called Fuentes Viejas.
Memories that I have precious from childhood
is always surrounded by dogs, always.
In fact, I remember that on Fridays,
when they picked us up from school and took us to Fuentes Viejas,
before arriving I was already anticipating:
“Oh, the dogs, I’m going to see Rol, Cuqui, Zach”,
to the dogs we had there.
And since we were in the middle of nature,
Sometimes, when we arrived, the dogs were not there.
For sometimes they had gone to the stream or the pine forest,
or the more rogues had gone to the next village
to find brides.
Then, when it came, the first thing I did if they were not
It was whistling and whistling, saying his name, it began:
(Click) “Come on, Cuqui, Role.”
Hey, and when they arrived, it was a mass bath.
I will never be able to forget those moments of happiness
of squatting, jumping, licking, kissing.
Well, those of you who have dogs know how these reunions sound, right?
Another memory I have of childhood
was to spend many hours drawing the human anatomy.
The digestive system, the circulatory system.
And I also keep another memory
I think it’s a lie that I’m going to share here, now, but …
It gives me a bit of shame, but I’m going to do it.
At that time, well, we went down to the stream
to hunt frogs with the slingshot, which is the weapon we had.
Then one day,
We decided to dissect one of the frogs.
I do not know how old we would be.
Maybe 10 years.
Then we took the frog, we went up to the little room with my friends,
We were going to start the dissection
– you can imagine the solemnity of the moment –
and look, I do not remember, I guess we would have a knife, I do not know.
The thing is, I remember perfectly
Everyone at the table, super serious.
Skin.
Muscle.
Wow! The abdomen!
Then, of course, I drew a lot and was supposed to be the expert.
What is this?
Stomach.
And that? The intestine.
And that?
Silence, they look at me and I say: “The spleen”.
Then, my friend Chesco, with the clamp he had in his hand,
Touch the presumed spleen and it sounds: click, click, click.
Do you know what it was?
The stone, with which we had killed the frog with the slingshot.
(Laughter)
Wonderful lesson that I learned, which is:
There are moments in life that we miss
the opportunity to have been silent.
But good
With those lights and shades for and against,
yes I remember there was a moment in my life
in which I looked to the future
and conditioned, of course, my present.
And it was a day when I thought:
Hears,
with what I like dogs and what I like about medicine,
If I could live surrounded by dogs and medicine,
Would not he be the happiest person in the world?
And I said: “Wow, yes!”
It was not about being the best,
it was about responding to a vital need for self-realization.
And then that day came forever in my head
the irresistible need, like salmon, to be a veterinarian.
And making that decision conditioned, of course,
all the decisions I made next.
And he gave me in my life
more than 30 years of fullness and enjoyment
that he probably would not have had if he had not made that decision
and I could have traveled to the future.
But, friends,
we turn to the second moment of the salmon journey,
in which not everything that shines is gold.
The salmon starts the trip, everything goes great,
has followed the call of the jungle,
enter the river
and sometimes it encounters totally unexpected events.
For example…
they have built a dam and can not go back.
Or, what do I know, the river is polluted,
or jump in the waterfall
and he sees that his intimate friend is eaten by a bear.
Or it is him who is bitten by the bear and leaves him badly injured.
As well.
How it happens to salmon happens to us in life.
The time of our life is the same
in which we echo the call of the jungle,
What is more than likely is that everyone, at some point,
Life is good for us and sends us to the canvas.
But here we can also use the trip to the future
to condition our present.
And here I would love to share with you another part of my trip.
That boy
who had decided to study Veterinary managed to finish the race,
He was able to finish his clinic,
He was able to travel to several countries and enjoy the profession a lot.
Until there came a time when your clinic grew so much,
who found the last of his shoe:
I was not ready to direct people
and then I suffered a permanent conflict with employees, with clients,
and his success had become a super painful trap.
Also, at that time,
I had already been dragging a sports injury for more than five years.
I was never an elite athlete, but,
Sport was always a fundamental part of my life.
I suppose like many of you who are here that you do sport.
Doing it helps you to be a better person and also takes away,
It helps you cleanse yourself of many of the bad things we carry.
Well, I had not played sports for five years.
And in the middle of that hell happened the death of my father.
And it was super painful.
Then, in those I was.
And I remember a particularly hard day.
I was in the indoor pool in Guadalajara,
it was a day,
of these gray, dark, rainy winter days,
and I had a churro, of these cork that you put on your waist,
and I was doing the running motion again
because after so many years without sports,
every time I tried to do it
or had fasciitis,
or breakage of fibers or myositis,
all those things that end in -itis and that hurt so much.
They hurt both physically and spiritually.
It was that day, and if the day was gray, my mood was even more gray.
Then nothing.
I simply said: “I can not do it anymore, it does not make sense”, and I left.
Or I was going to leave.
I grabbed the ladder to get out
and then I said to myself, “Hey, do not leave.”
Already caught, huh ?, to get out. Do not leave.
Because maybe one day you run a marathon
and if you do, you’ll come back here,
and you will remember this decision to stay.
He had never run, he had only run behind a ball
or playing football, or tennis or racquetball.
And I stayed, and I forgot forever.
And about six years later,
a kilometer from entering the finish line of the Madrid marathon,
this image that I had forgotten about suddenly came to my head
with a force, so strong, so overwhelming,
that if I had not been ashamed I would have burst into tears right there.
But it was overwhelming because I thought:
“Cool, this you could imagine.”
What I would not have dared to imagine,
and I can never give you enough thanks to my wife is that,
Without wanting to, he let go of my children’s hand
and he let them jump the fence and enter the last 50 meters,
or 20 meters of the marathon, holding my hand.
This is the wonderful gift that they made me
and it is one of the best medals that I can ever hang in my life.
They had seen me so many years agonize with the injury
I think that this is also a good testimony that I left in my life:
“Hey, it does not matter how low we are,
If you look at the future and look at it with optimism,
sure you will find strength to take steps today
towards that desired future. “
And this brings us to the third moment of the trip.
This has its crumb, to see if it sounds.
The salmon started the trip because where it was
It was fine but I needed to do something else.
But there comes a time in the trip where the salmon says:
“And now, what, this is hard, this is not what I expected.”
The salmon is stuck:
nor is it where it was before,
nor is it right where it is now.
To go where you want to go you have to get rid of things
but he does not want to get rid of those things, and he’s …
Do you hear this feeling of traffic jam in life,
of, “and me, what do I do?”
“Change of work or no change of work?”
Or … “I have this conversation with my boss,
Do I put the points on the i’s once or not? “
“I accept this call and I change my country, but what do I do with my family?”
Do you sound these seas of doubt?
How they hurt! true?
Well, here it has allowed me
Ana, a person I know, a great friend,
Tell part of your story
because I think it can help us understand
how the future can also condition our present
even in these moments.
Look, when I met Ana,
Ana was, and is, the owner of a veterinary hospital
in an important city of Spain.
And to Ana, as to other business owners,
something had happened to him, and that is
I had a hospital that was killing her, literally.
It had been done, I do not know if it was big, but it was painful.
And Ana had many mornings that looked in the mirror and said:
“But is this the life I wanted to take?
Is this the life I want to take? Does this make sense?
For this was my call from the jungle? “
Ana had already tried, as she loves movies,
she saw one day a movie in which the protagonist of it
He spent time in his company
and part of his time was also spent in some vineyards he had.
And that image had served as a vision
of the desired future and she called it Tuscany.
Since I had a small house in the village,
every time I had to make decisions, she thought:
“Hey, will this take me to Tuscany?”
And in a way, in a way, it helped him make decisions.
But it was not working for him.
And then the following happened:
We were in a congress for veterinarians in the United States
and to the Spanish delegation
They had invited us to visit clinics in the Tampa area.
We entered a hospital.
And, do you know this that at all times there are several realities,
And the one in which you pay attention becomes your own reality?
Years ago I would have entered that hospital with other eyes
but already then I lived and thought like ‘coach’,
and when I went into that hospital
instead of looking at the facilities, I looked at the people,
and I could see the owner, the owner of a hospital
with this gray, sad look,
this person who is empty.
I was talking with her for a while, she told me her story
and immediately I knew Ana had to talk to this person.
They were talking.
After a while I saw that both were crying.
That conversation with Ana made her travel to the future,
because their stories were so similar.
The only thing they had was ten years apart.
Ana could see in this person’s story
the future to which he was going if he did not start taking action
in those things that I had been letting go for so many years.
And to Ana, it was a wonderful thing
because the contrast of Tuscany and Tampa
made him move tab
in fields in which I had been avoiding it for years.
Ana started being in the conversations of her friends,
instead of being the person who complains and laments all day,
the person who starts giving good advice
and encourages others to take action in their life.
And it’s not that they ate partridges, like in the story, right?
The important thing about Ana’s story,
and for which I love telling this testimony,
it’s because Ana took the reins of her life
and then decided those things that I wanted to do today,
and could travel to the future and say:
“This brings me to Tuscany, I’m going for it.”
“This brings me to Tampa, I stop it.”
Dear friends of mine, I think that in life,
if we look to the future I am totally convinced
that we will find strength and light and clarity
to get on the wagon that touches us,
be because we echo
of the call that at some point we feel in life,
that we can feel the call in many moments
and in many different disciplines in our life.
Be because at a certain moment we touch bottom,
because we have personal crises,
or our families, to the people we love most.
I’m sure that even in the worst of times,
if we imagine that one day that will happen,
we can ask ourselves:
“What will I do today so that later in the future
I feel proud of the things that depend on me now. “
And of course, when we’re stuck,
I think Ana can help us with her Tuscany and her Tampa
to build the life we want to lead.
And I think thinking like that
although it can be called naive,
it is a wonderful gift
and it is that it returns the baton of our lives to our hand,
and it gives us the possibility of creating such music with our life,
that the day we are no longer here our melody continues.
Many thanks.
(Applause)
”
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