OPINION: I built my life on pretending I was twice as good as I really was

By striving to be who I pretended to be, I eventually became that person.

I was five years old when I first begged my mother to send me to school.

As the youngest of eight children, I was bored. My siblings were all in school, while I was stuck at home reading comics and watching movies in Betamax theaters.

My mother had already taught me to read, write, and do basic mathematics. But we couldn’t afford the only preparatory school on our island of Laoang, Northern Samar. The public elementary school wouldn’t accept me either. I was too young.

At six, I tried again. My mother told the teacher, a distant relative, that I was already seven and that my birth certificate would follow.

I got in and finished Grade One as first honor. For years, I remained at the top of my class, naturally growing up believing I was exceptionally intelligent.

Then we moved to Manila in 1988.

Suddenly, I wasn’t even an honor student. I discovered that I was simply a big fish in a very small pond.

In high school, I worked my way back up, eventually graduating as salutatorian. But I also discovered how ordinary my intelligence could be.

At the National Secondary Schools Press Conference (NSSPC), a student from Philippine Science High School casually described a schoolmate who scored 97 on the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) as stupid.

I scored 97. It was the highest score among students in my batch at my school.

That conversation stayed with me.

At the University of Santo Tomas, I encountered even more brilliant people. I worked hard, joined the campus paper, and eventually became managing editor. Again, second in command.

I began accepting something about myself: I was intelligent, certainly, but nowhere near as brilliant as I once believed.

Then, at 21, I started my own public relations business.

Because I was unusually young, some clients assumed I had graduated summa cum laude. I corrected them, but they interpreted my denials as false humility.

The truth? I hadn’t even graduated cum laude. I missed it by a few decimal points.

Eventually, I stopped arguing with their assumptions. And that was when I discovered a principle that would shape my life.

What if I deliberately projected myself as twice the person I actually was?

If my real capacity was 50 out of 100, why not project 100? Even if people eventually believed I was worth only 75, that would still be considerably more than my original 50.

So I started setting goals twice as ambitious as my abilities seemed to justify. I failed repeatedly, but perhaps two or three times out of ten, I succeeded beyond my own expectations.

And because I knew I wasn’t always the smartest person in the room, I compensated by working twice as hard.

That became my advantage.

Over the years, I’ve accomplished things that others consider remarkable, groundbreaking, or innovative. But behind those achievements was rarely extraordinary intelligence. More often, it was extraordinary effort, persistence, and an almost unreasonable willingness to attempt things beyond my perceived abilities.

Today, people sometimes assume I’m more intelligent, accomplished, or successful than I really am. I know my limitations, and I remain conscious of how much I still don’t know.

Sometimes I wonder whether I genuinely lacked the intelligence and talent I admired in others, or whether I simply underestimated myself all along.

Perhaps I worked so hard at becoming the person I was pretending to be that, somewhere along the way, I actually became him.

And perhaps that is the point of projecting yourself as twice the person you believe you are. It isn’t about fooling other people into believing you’re extraordinary. It’s about challenging yourself to become extraordinary enough to justify what they believe.

Because sometimes, the person you’re pretending to be is simply the person you haven’t become yet.

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