My First Project

I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was living through was a failure in alignment. I built every system, including irrigation, food production, protection for the herds, while my brother operated within them. I was designing the infrastructure that made everything else possible, yet no one ever defined who owned what or how value would be measured. I assumed my contribution was understood because it was foundational. It wasn’t. In modern terms, I was operating without stakeholder alignment or a clearly defined scope, and that made everything I did feel invisible.

When the time came to present our offerings, I believed the outcome would reflect total contribution. Instead, I walked into what was essentially a performance review with no criteria. My brother brought a single, visible result. I brought a system. El favored him, and I was left trying to understand why. That’s when it became clear: success had never been defined. I had optimized for long-term value; he had optimized for immediate visibility. No one told us which mattered. That’s the danger: when metrics aren’t clear, people don’t fail because they lack effort; they fail because they’re solving different problems.

I tried to get answers. I asked questions - about the decision, about my work, about what mattered, but there was no feedback, no explanation, no transparency. That silence created something worse than rejection: it created assumptions. I filled in the gaps myself, and every answer I came up with made the situation feel more unjust. What I needed was a feedback loop, a conversation, some form of retrospective. What I got was nothing. And in that vacuum, frustration turned into anger.

Looking back, the failure wasn’t just in the work, it was in the lack of structure around it. No governance, no escalation path, no way to address risk before it became something uncontrollable. I carried the weight of the system, but I had no outlet when it started to break. And when it finally did, it didn’t fail quietly; it collapsed completely. That’s the lesson I carry now: effort alone doesn’t protect a project. Without alignment, communication, and a way to manage the human side of the work, even the strongest systems will eventually fall apart.