The Montinola family and FEU Tech administrators invited me to give a commencement speech for the graduating class of FEU Tech. I dislike talking about myself, so I chose to share four frameworks that have been helpful to me in this rollercoaster era. I hope each student picks up at least one that is useful to them.

I am sharing the speech here so that the graduates—and other interested readers—can follow the links and read more about the ideas of Barbara Oakley, George Polya, John Boyd, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Humanity stands on each other’s shoulders.

To the FEU Tech administration, faculty, and staff: thank you for having me.

Dear parents, grandparents, titos, titas, friends, and mentors of our young graduates: you are our heroes. And to the Class of 2026—all 900 of you, across Civil, Computer, Electrical, Electronics, and Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, and Multimedia Arts—congratulations. This is your day.

You are crossing one of the biggest milestones there is in life. I loved seeing your smiling faces cross the stage today to claim your diplomas.

I’m honored to be speaking to you today. This is actually my first commencement speech, so I asked a mentor of mine for advice going in. He said, “KISS: keep it simple, smart, and most importantly, keep it short.” I’ll try my best.

When I zoom out, my career has really been about two things. First, training and teaching: people, machine learning models, and now AI agents. Second, making the best decisions I can in situations with incomplete information, because that’s most of what the job of entrepreneurship actually is: chaos, and never quite enough data.

Technology changes everything quickly. When I started my career in 2010, data science was incredibly new. Then it went through a phase where uso talaga—everyone wanted one. Now we’re in the era of AI agents. Tomorrow it might be the quantum era.

So what I want to give you today are three-plus-one frameworks for success and happiness that will stand the test of time.

These ideas are meant to help in a chaotic working world, where you will be asked to make tough decisions on short timelines and with incomplete information.

You are about to enter a genuinely strange labor market. The advice from people ten or twenty years ahead of you doesn’t apply anymore. These frameworks aren’t meant to tell you what to think. They’re meant to show you how to think. They are durable. I still use them in my career, and I hope they help you in yours.

Framework one: Learn how to learn

Everyone will tell you that you should be a lifelong learner. What I want to add is that learning itself is a skill.

The specific skills you learned here will change. Most will be outdated in five years. I’m sure they didn’t teach FoxPro or the LAMP stack to the software development students. Who knows if we will still be using Python in five years?

The real skill isn’t what you know today. It’s how fast you can learn the next thing.

In my career, I learned most of what I use today after graduating. I learned Python after graduating. I learned neural network methods after graduating. I learned geospatial analytics after graduating. I learned big data architecture on the job. I learned management—how to run a company, how to grow a company—and I had to do a lot of that outside a classroom.

What makes me a successful technology entrepreneur is that I have a great system for continuous learning.

Let me introduce you to Barbara Oakley. She’s an engineer who became one of the best-known educators on how learning works.

One of her central ideas is chunking.

When you first learn something, it exists as a collection of disconnected ideas. Through understanding, practice, and recall, you start binding those ideas together into what Oakley calls a chunk: a mental pattern you can recognize and use almost automatically.

That’s why memorizing disconnected facts is such a weak learning strategy. You can cram and hold ideas long enough for finals, but you forget them almost immediately after the test because they were never connected to your mental structure.

When you learn something new, the goal is to build connections to what you already know.

For every new bit of information, ask yourself: What does this connect to? What does it resemble? When would I use it? How is it different from something I already know?

Think of your knowledge like a tree. The more branches you already have, the more places there are to attach something new.

Keep growing the tree of your mind.

Framework two: Polya’s four-step method

The second framework is for solving hard problems you’ve never encountered before, and it comes from George Polya.

Polya was a Hungarian mathematician who lived from 1887 to 1985. In 1945, he wrote How to Solve It, which became one of the most influential books on how people actually think through problems. Its influence reaches far beyond mathematics.

Here are his four steps:

1. Understand the problem. Restate it in your own words. Identify exactly what you’re being asked to do.
2. Devise a plan. Ask if you’ve solved something similar before. Break the problem into smaller parts. Try working backward from the answer. Or simplify the problem first, and solve the simple version.
3. Carry out the plan. Verify each step as you go.
4. Look back and reflect. Ask what else could have worked.

Polya also left us a toolkit for getting unstuck. Analogy: has anyone solved something like this before? Decomposition: can I break it into smaller pieces? Working backward: what would the answer have to look like, and can I get there from the end? Auxiliary elements: could a diagram, a label, or an intermediate goal make the problem easier to see?

When you’re stuck, don’t just push harder. Go back to these four steps.

Let me give you a tip. There are very few original problems in this world. Most problems have been solved by someone else already. I’m not successful because I’m the smartest person in the room. I’m successful because I know how to look up related literature on arXiv—that’s A-R-X-I-V, for those of you on your phones—and I know how to phone a smarter friend who has solved that problem before.

Using this method has helped my team win competitions against global giants, even as a small startup.

Framework three: OODA

Framework three is for operating when you need to make quick decisions with incomplete information.

Imagine you’re running a startup. You can’t have a three-year plan. You don’t even know what happens in the next two days. A client could disappear. A competitor could ship first. A new AI model could make half your product obsolete overnight.

What do you do?

This framework didn’t come from business school. It came from a fighter pilot. John Boyd was in the U.S. Air Force. He asked why some pilots kept winning dogfights, even in worse planes.

His answer was the OODA loop: Observe → Orient → Decide → Act.

This system helps you learn and adapt as fast as the environment changes.

• Observe: Gather signals from reality. What is happening? What changed? What results are you getting?
• Orient: Interpret those signals using your mental models, experience, assumptions, and context. This is the most important stage. It determines what you think the situation actually means.
• Decide: Choose a course of action.
• Act: Execute it, and generate new information.

Then the loop starts again. The loop is the whole point. After you act, keep collecting information. Observe again so you can orient again, decide again, and act again.

Here’s why this matters to you specifically.

You are graduating into a world of cheap intelligence. You can rent a very capable AI analyst for a few pesos an hour.

This is a gift. It’s also easy to waste.

You can waste it by asking AI to decide for you. That skips Orient and Decide. You end up moving fast in a direction you never actually chose and don’t understand.

Let AI help you Observe faster. Let it help you Orient from more angles. But you keep the Decide. And, of course, you are the ones Acting.

Now I’ve shared three frameworks on how to be successful. Let’s get to the plus-one.

The plus-one: Love, peace, and gratitude

The plus-one is love, peace, and gratitude. If you forget the other three frameworks, remember this one.

Let me introduce you to a Vietnamese Zen monk and teacher named Thich Nhat Hanh.

He has two lines I think about often. The first: “Happiness is available. Please help yourself to it.” The second: “Many people think excitement is happiness… True happiness is based on peace.”

He lived through the Vietnam War. He rebuilt bombed villages over and over again. He buried his friends and his students, and yet he still believed in peace and happiness.

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. At the end of his life, the people who knew him all said the same thing: he was one of the most peaceful, most grateful people they had ever met.

Success is not happiness. I’ll say that again: success is not happiness.

You can be very successful and very unhappy at the same time. I’ve seen this many times. I know people in their 30s who run multibillion-dollar technology companies. I know engineers who joined OpenAI early and are now millionaires. You might think, surely they must all be happy. Many of them aren’t.

What actually holds people up is relationships. In work, we call this “playing long-term games with long-term people.” In life, we call it building a community and caring for your family.

In my life, when things were tough, my friends and family supported me unconditionally. When times were good, they celebrated with me, and they were genuinely happy for me.

Look around this room. Your family. Your teachers. Everyone who came to PICC today. They are celebrating with you right now. Your happiness is their happiness.

Invest in your relationships as seriously as you invest in your career. Invest in your own peace on purpose. Don’t wait until the career part is “handled.”

One idea to carry forward

Learn how to learn. Use Polya’s four steps when you’re stuck. Run a tight OODA loop. And underneath all of it, invest in love, peace, and gratitude.

Let me ask you to take one moment to think about your loved ones and feel your appreciation for them. Close your eyes and picture their faces.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Now open your eyes. Hold that feeling in your hearts as you go out there into the world.

Congratulations, Class of 2026. Give yourself and your loved ones one more big round of applause.

Read further

• Learning How to Learn, Barbara Oakley
• George Pólya and his 1945 book, How to Solve It
• The OODA loop and John Boyd
• Thich Nhat Hanh: a biography

Delivered at the FEU Tech commencement exercises, Philippine International Convention Center, Manila, September 2026.