who is alex isidro?
Thank you for stopping by
I’m a dad, husband, engineer, YouTuber, and coach.
Drawing from my own journey of overcoming poverty, immigrating to the USA, eliminating $215,000 of bad debt alongside my wife, and successful solopreneurship journey over the last four years (through courses, consulting, and building YouTube channels), I share invaluable insights to help you unstuck yourself, find what you’re good at, focus, and monetize your wisdom.
My mission in life is to leave a lasting positive impact on the world.
my story: drive, resilience, gratitude and faith
I was born in the big and gray city of Lima, Peru. I grew up with my mom, grandma, and never met my dad.
My mom, grandma, and rest of my large family raised me with lots of love, personal responsibility, and always told me that if I ever wanted to leave the financial struggle we experienced during my childhood and teenage years (we always worried about money), then I would have to grow up and go to school.
They always encouraged me to educate myself and learn something that could help me become independent and provide for myself and future family.
During the first 10 years of my life, things we going well; I was going to school, I had friends, a family, I worked here and there to help my mom buy groceries, but overall, I have beautiful memories from those times.
However, my life changed forever in February of 2000. My mom, who suffered from asthma and had physical challenges, had respiratory complications one night and suddenly passed.
My world fell apart.
I didn’t know what the future would hold, and to be honest, I felt completely lost. My grandma was slowly getting sicker with diabetes, and my biological dad was nowhere to be found, and even he showed up at this time in my life, I’m not sure if going with him would have done any good.
Fortunately, I had a large family, and when my mom passed, they all came together to help me heal over the years, and get back on my feet, providing me with the tools I needed to keep developing and educating myself.
My God-parents, who were living in the United States and had been by my side ever since I was born, decided to adopt me and bring me to live with them and their family when they found out my situation.
This was the first big blessing and break I had in life, for which I will be forever grateful.
However, the next six years of my life (the time the adoption took the be processed) entailed living in different homes with different people including both family and friends.
During this time, there were countless of times where I felt lonely, and now looking back, I believe this led me to start frequenting gangs, and getting into street altercations.
The lack of family structure and day-to-day guidance usually provided by one’s parents was missing from my life, to the point that I started replacing that void with friends and groups of people who “felt like family“ and did things together, had things in common, and who had the same purpose (hint: it was not a good purpose).
I didn’t know at the time, but I was heading down the wrong path.
life in the usa and attending college
At the age of 17, my life changed forever when my God-parents brought me to the United States.
God gave me a new family with parents, siblings, and even beautiful nephews at the time (now nieces too!). He knew I needed some structure, guidance, and discipline after the first couple of astray teenage years! And that’s exactly what I got once I came to the USA.
I must say my adaptation process wasn’t all smooth, but things did start looking up immediately.
In the beginning, “my English wasn’t very good looking,” but I eventually adapted to the new culture and mindset, and took advantage of the opportunities I encountered; in employment and education.
With the money struggles I experienced during my childhood and now teen years, I was relentless putting myself through college to the point I even held four part-time jobs simultaneously just to make enough cash to afford my tuition and books.
I was DETERMINED!
It was a very busy time with lots of hard, grinding wok, and I am now grateful for all the opportunities and all the individuals from whom I learned many invaluable lessons that helped me be the person I am today (of course, specially my family).
In 2012, all the hard work paid off and I finally graduated with my mechanical engineering degree from Virginia Tech, one of the top schools in Virginia, and around the USA for my major.
Life was amazing and felt on top of the world. My parents, siblings, and everyone that saw me grow up and overcome challenges were all proud of me.
Finally, I had reached the pinnacle of the mountain I started climbing when I got into elementary school at five years old.
life after college and my quarter life crisis
A few years after college, I went through a phase where I was confused and wondered what else life had to offer.
I had just gotten my Mechanical Engineering degree, had a great job, and I had a lot of free time, which made me wonder “what’s next?”
Later on I found out that this time was somewhat common amongst people my age (at that time), and some even referred to it as a “quarter life” crisis.
I think of it more in terms of a self-discovery phase, which I believe every single one of us goes through at some point in life. Some go through it in their 20s, and others in their 40s or 50s.
Anyway, this phase lasted a couple of years, and my natural curiosity pushed me to explore many interests; I wanted to speak multiple languages, I wanted to be a guitarist, I wanted to be a fitness coach and motivator, I wanted to be a blogger, I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I wanted to be a YouTuber…blah blah blah.
I am grateful to say that I went for it all, which sounds nice, but going through that phase was frustrating (and if you’ve ever had multiple interests, you know it can be frustrating as well).
Why?
Well, because the limiting factor is time. It’s not possible to excel in all of your interests. One, or many, or all of them will suffer the lack of laser focus you need to put on each one in order to be good at it. And if you don’t put the time in, the results will show.
Looking back, I jumped from one thing to another too quickly, nothing ended up happening and I kept spinning my wheels (at least on the surface). I experienced frustration, my confidence took a toll, I was being impatient, and all because I was half-assing things.
As time went on, deep down I now know that this phase was extremely important because I started the never-ending process of getting to know myself. I started paying attention to my personality; what I did and didn’t like (what I should improve), what motivated me, what made me think deeply, what made me angry, what stressed me out, what brought me joy, what made me lazy, what energized me, etc.
As I matured and evolved throughout the years, I started exploring my interest for psychology, philosophy, all of which helped me increase my self awareness, tolerance, empathy, the value of a meaningful life and relationships, and overall helped me see a totally different side of life which I had never considered in the past.
I never had a mentor, and so I relied on books and older people from whom I learned to detect the good traits, and apply them to my life as necessary.
It was a great experience and I am very grateful I went through that phase.
my engineering career
In parallel to all of this happening in my personal life, I kept working as an engineer on the field, helping achieve important missions, supporting high profile individuals, and aiding in and leading very expensive projects with many zeros on their price tag.
I’ve gotten my hands dirty with project management, contract management, risk management, technical engineering work, research and development, and even on-site port engineering.
You could say my background is very diverse, and this has helped me bring a new perspective to every project I am assigned. My background has also helps me relate to my coaching clients, who all come from different backgrounds, both from engineering, and overall, the corporate world.
Overcoming $215K of debt and my journey to financial stability
My wife and I got married in 2017, and after lots of degrees, beers, partying and traveling, we found ourselves in a deep hole worth -$215,000.
Yes, we were in $215,000 of debt, which included personal loans, credit cards, and yes, student loans.
I will spare you the details of this giant obstacle we needed to overcome in order to start a family, buy a house, get a bigger place, etc., but let me just share that it was a (very) stressful, anxious time and the future was uncertain.
After realizing our situation, laying out a plan, executing on the plan, and with lots of focus and discipline, we finally got rid of everything.
We learned to budget, to track our expenses and income, we worked many side hustles to make more money, and many other personal finance tools and techniques that helped us ditch the living paycheck to paycheck life and put ourselves in a great position for financial success and freedom.
If you want a summary, you can watch the following video of what we went through and how we overcame it.
Despite our challenges, we (and you) are not defined by the past
I am sharing this because I want you to know that life will punch you in the face. Hard. Many times.
But no matter how hard it hits you, remember that the only way out is through. I also want you to know that you are not defined by the difficulties you encounter in life, and if you need help, don’t be afraid to reach out.
We all have our stories, struggles, and never-ending internal battles. That’s just all part of life.
But the key is to learn from our mistakes, overcome the difficulties we find in our way, and keep moving forward towards our dreams, vision, and goals.
The poverty, grief, loneliness, confusion, and broke-ness (financially) I experienced in life helped me forge an exceptional mental fortitude and resilience, which have helped me get to where I am today.
And through my work here on this website and YouTube channel, I want to help and show you that no matter how rough things get, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel, and that as long as you work hard, take chances, are resilient and remain positive, you too can overcome your struggles, heal, and make your life meaningful and successful one step at a time.
Inspired by the one and only Dr. Jordan Peterson, let’s leave the world a better place than when we arrived.
We are going for more, and cheers to success, wealth, and happiness.
Much love,
Alex