The Bridge Builder

In 2020, I thought the world was falling apart. We all did.

We were in the depths of the pandemic, everyone afraid, no one certain of what came next. To make sense of it, I started writing. The book became Fck It, Let's Pivot: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Surviving and Thriving a Crisis*, and I interviewed people all over the world about how they were weathering the storm. Nearly three hundred pages later, I was ready to publish, and then the doubt hit. Who would read this? I wasn't an influencer. I had no brand, no website, no courses, no high-performing social media. I was an executive and part-time entrepreneur who'd wandered into a handful of businesses, holding a chaotic mind and a manuscript, needing help to turn it into something people could trust.

That's when I discovered the world of virtual assistants. There were so many talented people across the globe who knew exactly how to do what I couldn't. I was lucky enough to find one I trusted, and what began as an employer and employee arrangement slowly became a partnership.

A year or so later, I was traveling in the Philippines for a fashion event in Quezon province, scouting Davao, Manila, and Cebu to open a BPO and call center. JM said to me, why don't you check out Iloilo? I had no idea where that was. Did they even have paved roads? I'm not proud of the ignorance, but it's true. My wife and I hopped a flight to see for ourselves, and when we landed, there was this big bear of a man waiting for us at the airport. I'd been talking with him for over a year by then, as my virtual assistant, and he was far bigger and taller than I'd pictured. But what I noticed most wasn't his size. It was the size of his heart. He is one of the kindest, wisest, gentlest people I have ever known, and standing in that airport I understood I'd found not just a business partner but a brother.

From there we built Zilla Media. And over the years, as I came to know the challenges he'd survived and the man behind the warm, quiet smile, I realized his story was one the whole industry needed to hear. He prefers to stay behind the scenes and let me be the face of our company. This once, I want to turn the light on him.

Ask JM who he is when the work is quiet and no one is watching, and he'll tell you he loves his own company.

"Not seeking any external validation except from myself," he says. "Being alone doesn't necessarily mean being lonely. Solitude is the very definition of who I am outside work." It would be easy to mistake that for coldness, but it's the opposite. The same man who needs no audience also lights up connecting with people on a deeper level, sharing what he's learned. "I used to see my old self in these people," he says. He simply isn't chasing company. He's at peace without it, which is a rarer thing than it sounds, and it's the foundation everything else in him is built on.

His path to that peace ran straight through five years he'd like back.

He grew up a creative in a family that pointed him toward medicine, and the cost of bending to that pressure was steep. "It cost me five years of my college education, forcing myself to take courses that don't really interest me. I actually hated going to school." Video games became his outlet, a refuge from family problems, and eventually he stopped attending altogether. He went to work for a construction company instead, because he refused to be a freeloader at home, sometimes waking at three in the morning for a six-hour round trip to the job site. As an introvert, he told me, he was too afraid to even answer a phone call. He pushed himself to do it anyway.

Then he got sick, in and out of bed for months, and one night while doomscrolling he came across a reel, a compilation of the regrets people voice on their deathbeds. One line went through him like a blade. A dying man saying: How I wished I pursued what I really wanted. Art. JM imagined himself in that bed, at the end, and something in him said no. "I have to change my life. I can't be content about who and what I am right now."

He told his family he was going back to school, and this time he detonated. Dean's lister every trimester. Chess champion. Student council president. He graduated with a GPA that qualified him for magna cum laude, on a makeshift stage at home because the pandemic had arrived, celebrating with the family he'd once retreated from. "For me," he shrugs, "those are just a bunch of titles." The point was never the honors. The point was that he'd chosen his own life while there was still time to choose it.

There is a discipline JM practices every morning, and when he described it to me I understood where his generosity comes from.

His family has given to the town of Miagao for fifty-four years, feeding programs and school projects, a legacy that began before he was born. What that taught him he distills into a daily ritual. "I tell myself every day that I open two gifts," he says, and the gifts change. Sometimes they're his eyes, so he can see the people in need. Sometimes his arms, to carry a piece of someone else's burden. Sometimes his hands, to grab hold of a person drowning in their thoughts; sometimes his feet, to walk alongside people as an equal.

The perspective it's given him is total. "I used to think about what things I could spend on, food I could eat, places I could go, because I had the resources. But now I just appreciate everything I have." He used to love the sight and sound of rain for its coziness; now he thinks of the people living under the bridge in it. He used to be content to stay home; now he makes himself walk outside, for the sake of people who may not have legs to walk at all. Then he said the line I haven't stopped thinking about. "My struggles are someone else's dreams. So I have no right to complain."

His drive to provide for his family, he's careful to say, is self-imposed, asked of him by no one. "I want my mom to retire as she is getting old. I don't want to regret not spending quality time with her and the family when they are still able to."

Every person in JM's story who shaped him did it by example, and none more than his late aunt.

She felt more like an elder sister than an aunt, he says, their conversations "always jam-packed with knowledge, value and substance." She was a breadwinner with an excellent career in international media, and she modeled something JM had never seen before: a woman who could work and travel anywhere in the world without sitting in an office eight or nine hours a day. "That freedom is what I aimed for, and that's why I am very successful in my freelancer career." She was, in his words, the OG virtual assistant, the proof that the life he wanted existed.

When she passed, he was present for the discovery of it, and later carried the urn of her ashes. What he carries still is a single phrase of hers, the thing she said whenever life broke against her: It is what it is. To him it isn't resignation; it's focus. "She was too busy worrying about the solution rather than being reactive." Holding her ashes, he understood it fully. "Life is just too short to stress about the things we can't control, but rather focus on the things we can."

JM knows how fragile a life is, because he has nearly lost two, and the first one he would have traded his own to keep.

His mother is the foundation of everything he is. His aunt was character development, he told me, but his upbringing came from his mother. There were years he hated how she scolded him, the tough love, the short temper, and there is a particular grace in how he understands it now: he is grateful she raised him exactly that way. She taught him his attitude, his values, the traits he lives by. His father taught him commerce, the entrepreneurial energy, how to negotiate and barter his way up, and that foundation matters. But it was his mother who built the man.

He grew up in a broken home, and as a teenager he was forced to become the man of the house before he had any idea how. That is its own quiet cruelty, handing a boy a role he cannot yet fill and asking him to fill it anyway. When his mother's health broke and he saw her lie in a hospital bed "with eyes that are just tired of life," it shattered him. "I would rather just exchange situations with her," he says. "I was tearlessly crying and didn't know what to make of the situation as a teenager." He was eighteen, the age when young men are only beginning to become who they are, and he was in freefall.

The circumstances of those years would have derailed almost anyone. JM pauses for a moment to recall the memory as if to say, he buried it so deep that it almost slipped out of existence. But trauma has an interesting way of coming back with a more mature perspective. His mother and him were renting a place in Iloilo City where he was supposed to be studying, and financial trouble meant the rent went unpaid or at the very least “There were stretches with no electricity, weeks in the dark." he says. He was lost in that period, a young man trying to find himself while his life came apart around him, trying to study through a crisis that had no bottom. Life is hard in the Philippines so when rent is due, rent is due. Their landlord was strict and left no leeway on that rule. One day the doors were simply padlocked, their belongings still inside. Attempts to open the door were useless as the clanging of the padlock against the door sounded like an ominous drum of desperation. The door never opened for them ever again. They never got their things back. The belongings, the photos, the shoes, all of it gone, memories from those years that exist now only because he still carries them.

As he opens up a vulnerable time in his life, he recalls another memory that holds the whole weight of that season. The two of them were walking through a mall, and out of nowhere his mother said quietly, “I just want to sleep” Not sleep for the night. Sleep forever. For a child to hear that from his mother is almost unbearable, and JM felt every ounce of her pain, because he was, in his words, an extension of her, mirroring whatever she felt. But he was a child, and he did not have the words to console her. He has them now.

As we share a heartfelt moment, I ask him “If you could say one thing to her about those years, what would it be?" In a calm and caring tone he wanted her to know that he was present, that he remembered, that he noticed, that he never neglected a moment of what she carried. It is what he wishes he had told her then, and what he would tell her now: "Mom, you were not alone. I was there. I was with you."

To ease the burden on his mother, he moved back to Miagao and cut his expenses to the bone. And through all of it, his mother kept moving forward. That is the thing he wants understood. Her resiliency is what kept him going as well.

The second life JM nearly lost was his own, a near-death experience and a thirty-day hospital stay after an intestinal blockage. Survival rearranged his sense of everything. "First thing you know, you can be enjoying eating, spending time with friends, going places, and in a quick snap everything can go south. You only get one solid chance in life." He describes what he got back with a gamer's grin: a free revive card, like Monopoly's Get Out of Jail Free.

Through all of it, faith held him. "It gave me hope. It made me feel like there's no greater force out there that can knock me down, knowing God is beside me." It also right-sized his troubles against the suffering of others, which is why gratitude has become his native language, gratitude for family and friends and opportunity, for being able to wake up, to walk, to drive, to live, and gratitude, too, for the burdens he does not carry.

JM built an entire career serving companies around the world without a traditional path to any of it.

"Not just North America but the whole world," he corrects me, when I frame it too narrowly. His classroom was the open internet. "If people only understood how to be resourceful, how to abuse Google search, how to learn from publicly available platforms, it's impossible to fail. With the right mindset, clarity on your WHY, and the grit to keep pushing when things get hard, you are bound to succeed." Everything he earns comes from skills school never gave him, assembled from hours of research, online courses, podcasts, and above all real experience.

He never really saw himself as mere support, either. The leadership was there in college, in the student council presidency. "I've always had this creative vision, and when I see it clearly, I act on it and make it happen." He leads the way he wishes he'd been taught, delegating to a team's strengths while building up their weaknesses, rotating people between leading and following so everyone grows. And on the question roiling his whole industry, whether Al will replace people like him, he is calm and precise. He uses Al to move faster, but the thing he offers can't be automated. "You said it. Uniquely human. Al couldn't process human emotions. It doesn't empathize with the person prompting it. It doesn't share real-life experiences and create that rapport to make the connection deeper and more meaningful."

Ask JM what he's building toward, and the introvert who loves his own company turns out to have the most expansive vision in the room.

What he wants to fix is a single word: access. "Access to quality and modern education. Access to resources to help fund the people who want to learn how to thrive in the modern age. Access for schools to share future-proof materials. Access for government and private business to hire qualified, skillful, world-standard individuals." It's the education-disruption dream he and I have chased together since the beginning, and it's why the community we're building matters so much to him, a place where virtual professionals "can be heard, can listen, can learn from, and can teach. They have a voice."

When I once asked him to name his life after a movie, he chose Wall-E, the small, solitary machine who finds something worth saving and shares it until the whole community thrives. Fitting, for a man who needs no audience and yet wants to lift everyone around him. And when he describes the world he's trying to help build, he reaches, without knowing it, for the exact word this magazine is named after.

"I am building a bridge of opportunities," he told me, "or I would say a boulevard of opportunities, between local talents and the international business community. No more individuals leaving the country just to provide for their families. No more worrying about access to quality education. No more scamming or ghosting clients, no more delayed payrolls, no more undervalued talents." A world of trust, security, and properly valued work, for the people who have earned it and rarely receive it.

I think back to that airport in Iloilo, to the year I'd spent trusting a voice before I ever saw the face, to the big bear of a man whose heart was the biggest thing about him. Our partnership began exactly the way JM wants the whole industry to work: a stranger across the world, taken on faith, who became a brother. That trust built two companies and a friendship I'd stake anything on. It's the same trust he now wants to hand to every virtual professional and every business willing to reach across the distance. He is the quietest person I know, and he has spent his life opening two gifts every morning so that other people might walk. If you want proof that this profession can be built on trust, I don't have to point you to a study. I can just point you to my partner.

It is what it is, his aunt used to say. In JM's hands, it became something more like this: it is what you choose to build.

JM Acuña is a brand and visual designer, creative strategist, philosopher teddy bear and co-founder of Zilla Media. He is a founding contributor to BLVD and one of the reasons why I decided to live in the Philippines.