You are who you tell the world you are

I’m going to let you in on a secret.

I wasn’t paid for my work at START Lisbon.

I don’t say this as some controversy where I was wrongfully unpaid for my labor; I tell you this because I successfully made everyone from the outside believe that a volunteer gig was my actual job.

Over the duration of my role as Head of Events at a student-run organization—a club, if we’re removing self-aggrandizing formalities—I had several people reach out to me on LinkedIn asking to collaborate. It was only deep into calls or meetings with these individuals when the truth would be revealed. In some of these cases, it wasn’t until after the full execution of our joint events or partnership establishments that I would be met with bewildered realization:

They would refer to my “job” or ask about our “budget,” to which I would then explain that it was voluntary work, with an official budget of a mere three-hundred-some euros. We were a non-profit operating off of anticipated, uninsured revenue from ticket sales, relying on partners to cover in-kind donations and provide event spaces.

I watched a video this week from a personal branding coach who expressed that “You don’t find yourself, you create yourself. You are in the driver’s seat.” This perfectly encapsulates everything I’ve learned over the years since restarting my life abroad.

I don’t come from a particularly privileged background, in the sense that no one in my family has followed a path anywhere similar to mine. Only one of my immediate family members has permanently left the state of Iowa, no one has studied either of the fields I hold degrees in, and my parents work standard jobs—my mom is a librarian and my dad is in retirement planning.

There was no one who had served as the example for the life I envisioned, so I had to carve it out for myself.

At age 18, I was doing deep research on the visa process for the Netherlands, laying out and collecting all of the documents I needed from my parents for the application, sorting out Federal Student Aid for an international university, and scheduling the necessary appointments. I quickly became a legal expert in student immigration.

My mentor at the time, Dave Gould, who was my teacher-turned-peer as I acted as his Teacher’s Assistant for his “Life Design” course at the University of Iowa, gave me the courage I needed through it all.

I can vividly recall each of our Zoom calls where he simply let me rant and listened. Deeply. I expressed my doubts, my fears, my struggles, and several times, let myself fall into tears as I navigated a path I desperately wanted, but didn’t yet trust myself to handle.

He saw my potential and strength before I could believe in it myself. From my written reflections in the course and through our personal relationship, he had the gift of distilling the core of my person. He never dismissed the real concerns I had and the risk of it not being the experience that I had hoped for. Instead, he acknowledged them, held space for my worries, and helped me choose a life where taking risks meant living on my own terms.

“The worst case scenario,” he would reassure me, “is that you don’t like it, and you move back home with open arms. At least then you can say, ‘I tried this, it wasn’t for me, but at least I gave it a shot.’”

The risk, then, didn’t seem so scary.

Every choice along the way was one of my own discovery and commitment.

This continues to be true, and has evolved into other domains of my life.

After having done an Erasmus+ exchange semester in Lisbon, I decided I wanted to return to Portugal to pursue my master’s. When I made this call, I went into it with the intention to completely reshape my professional identity into one that would support my career ambitions. Pivoting from political science into tech management required more than a change in coursework—it meant actively building and curating my presence online.

Enter LinkedIn:

Once I joined START, I had the perfect opportunity to publicize the work that I was doing in events. I took myself seriously, regularly sharing original promotional material, updates, and highlights from my experiences.

“Regularly” is the key word here. I made myself visible, both by posting and engaging with founders, event organizers, and industry experts online. I never once downplayed my role, or the scale and polish of our events.

After some time, the direct messages started trickling in. People were noticing the impact and reach that I had access to through START, and they wanted to be connected to it. They booked calls with me and, together, we coordinated new partnerships and events.

One of these events was an Investor-Founder Happy Hour with Nuria Garcia, an entrepreneur who helps founders define and share their unique stories to online audiences. She was traveling from Chicago to Europe to organize her first international events for Meet More Doers, her community for action-oriented individuals.

We immediately bonded by virtue of our ambitious personalities and say-yes attitudes. The evening brought such an impressive group of people together, many of whom had only just recently moved to Lisbon to pursue their own startup ideas.

Following the event, Nuria and I went out for dinner. I had already disclosed to her in our organizing calls that START didn’t have a budget to contribute to a bar tab, but the question came up again.

“So what is your overall budget like?”
And then: “How much do you get paid to do this?”

I must have chuckled a bit.

“I don’t get paid to do this. I was elected into my role, and I do this as part of an entirely student-run initiative.”

She admitted she’d assumed I was a paid professional, purely because of how I presented the organization and my work on LinkedIn.

This didn’t shock me at all; it was precisely what I was aiming for.

Nuria wasn’t the only one to believe this either—the same assumption was raised by a couple of other entrepreneurs in the Creative Tech space, the regional coordinators of the Startup World Cup, and funny enough, even in passing conversation with my ex who I ran into on the street.

Fortunately, Nuria is a master of intentional personal branding. She’s exceptional at aligning with the right people and owning her narrative early, generating public momentum while projects are still in motion. She’s someone we should all be taking notes from, and anyone would be fortunate to hear her story first-hand.

Our conversation was validation that I wasn’t being deceptive, but rather positioning my vision publicly before the final results could materialize. If anything, it proved that the signal often drives the outcome—not the other way around.

If you take just one thing away from this reading, let it be this:

Success doesn’t build your identity.

When you get clear on what you want and intentionally own your narrative, the right opportunities have a way of catching up to you.

After all, you are who you tell the world you are.