Life

I am Daniel Enrique Buitrago Moreno. I like "Daniel," while "Enrique" was simply my mom's tribute to her grandfather Enrique. I don't have a TV in my bedroom, I shower with cold water, and my favorite sport isn't soccer. I was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in September 1985. I am currently married — happily married (in the Catholic church) — since December 2016. My wife is Sandra Rubio and we have two children: Antonella and Juan Pablo. My wife and my children are without a doubt the number one priority in my life. My family isn't perfect and I know it never will be. However, even if it sounds cliché, I live for and because of them; they are the reason I get up every morning trying to focus on what I can control, to build, little by little, day after day, a long, quality life by their side. I say "trying," because surely, like many people, I also worry frequently about what I cannot control. Clearly, the main motivation in my life is my family, however, I have other motivations such as sports, friendship, technology, investing, music, travel, languages, books, meditation, and personal growth.

The reason family is the center of my life is easy to understand. My dad, Antonio — known as "Toño" — passed away in an accident just a few days after turning 35, a little before I turned seven; and my mom, Amparo — known as "Amparito" — passed away at age 38 due to cancer, a couple of months after my 11th birthday. My dad's death was sudden: he had a fatal accident on the night of the third Friday of June 1992, and his burial was on the Sunday of that week (Father's Day in 1992). My mom suffered from a cancer that was detected in early 1996; she had surgery in the middle of that year and even went back to work, however, she died in the early morning of the first Saturday of October 1996 after a strong metastasis. I didn't get the chance to say goodbye to my dad, and at that moment I didn't even understand what "dying" meant. I was about to start understanding it. My mom did get the chance to say goodbye to me the night before she died: she had me sit by her bed and spoke to me with an impressive calm and serenity (which wasn't very usual, since she was super sensitive and emotional), while I cried nonstop because I knew I was seeing her for the last time. By that point I already fully understood what "death" meant. What I remember most from her words was that she wished for me to become a good man, and the importance of education. Despite the physical absence of my parents, I had the fortune of growing up within a family alongside my uncle Carlos, my aunt Claudia, and my cousins Carlos, Julián, and María Alejandra. Within a few days I went from being my mom's only child to becoming the "older brother" of a family of four children. It was a very difficult situation, but I also know how fortunate I was. I shared 13 years of my life with them (from 1996 to 2008), even more than the 11 years I spent with my mom and the seven with my dad. Today, the center of my life is my own family: Sandra, Antonella, and Juan Pablo. It might not be entirely healthy, but my focus on my immediate family sometimes makes me isolate myself somewhat from the rest of the world; however, my extended family has also been important throughout my life: my sister Natalia, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, Sandra's family, and even my childhood nanny. Being a father is, for me, the greatest opportunity that God and life have given me: it's the opportunity to watch my children grow up (which my parents didn't get), and it's the opportunity for my children to watch their parents grow old (which I didn't get). I have no certainty that I will get to watch my children grow up and that my children will get to watch me grow old, but I live my life with the hope that it will be so, trying to focus on what I can control.

I love exercising daily, and although I no longer play volleyball (the sport that, from childhood, taught me the discipline I put into practice every day thanks to my coach), I go to the gym early in the mornings and do yoga at night before bed. I played volleyball in school during high school starting in 1997, partly during college, and for a few years already during my working life until 2014. I've kept up the exercise habit (whether gym, functional training, or TRX) since 2013, however, I only got into yoga as late as the end of 2024. I never really felt drawn to yoga, but I came to this practice by coincidence while searching for stretching videos on YouTube to deal with a knee issue (a consequence of volleyball). I realized that through stretching, controlled breathing, and mental serenity, I could generate a superior sense of well-being in my daily life, better sleep quality, and reduced stress. For me, exercise, beyond generating physical well-being, is a means that generates well-being for me in general terms, especially mentally.

Those who know me know that I'm a shy and reserved person. I have few friends, but the few I have know that we're really friends even if we're not in touch very often. I believe in the saying that "friends are the family you choose." It sounds great in English: "brother from another mother" and "sister from another mister." The best friends I have in life came from my time at Colegio San Viator, and with some of them we shared, at the time, a love for volleyball. More than two decades have passed since we graduated from school, and I still enjoy every chance we get to spend time together, even though each of us now has a life heading down very different paths.

Since childhood I've always been drawn to technology, to the point that I chose Electronic Engineering as my profession, and I have practiced it since 2008 in the fields of networking and telecommunications. Since 2011 I've been in the Cisco ecosystem, initially working at partners and, since February 2022, directly at Cisco. All these years I've worked on implementation and presales of Cisco technology solutions for corporate clients. I'm fortunate to have achieved one of the most prestigious certifications in the industry: CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert). This is an exam that, beyond measuring technical knowledge, measures the ability to withstand the pressure of carrying out the design, implementation, and troubleshooting of a technology project in just eight hours. It wasn't until January 2015 that I achieved this certification, after three attempts (each with its respective trip to the United States to take the exam) and after a little over 1,000 hours of study and practice. Working at Cisco since 2022 has opened my mind — for example, it was at Cisco where, for the first time in my life, I achieved a non-Cisco certification (in this case from AWS, Amazon Web Services), and it was also at Cisco where I discovered my love for languages. With the popularity of Artificial Intelligence in recent years following the launch of ChatGPT (Generative AI) in late 2022, I've become quite interested in applying this type of technology to make not only my work environment easier, but also my personal one. A bit late, toward the end of 2025, I found a Colombian company dedicated to process automation and education around Artificial Intelligence. It's through them that my interest has developed — not in understanding how AI models are created and how, through linear regressions, the next word in a text string can be predicted, but in how to truly take advantage of AI to make our lives simpler, and to be able to focus on what generates the most value, both personally and professionally. Today, little by little, I'm putting the use of AI into practice — for example, to make it easier to manage documents for matters related to family medicine (appointments, orders, prescriptions, exams) through the use of a personal AI agent (OpenClaw). My medium-term goal is to use the concept of Vibe Coding (generating software through natural language instructions) to produce an application that becomes the "Operating System" for families, through which their fundamental elements (medicine, housing, finances, education, transportation, among others) can be managed.

Starting in 2018 I began having the idea of starting my own business, which became a reality in early 2020. On Friday, March 20, 2020, the company was formally established, and that very weekend the COVID-19 quarantine began. In general terms, the company offered WiFi for homes. That is, by then, the vast majority already had WiFi internet at home, but only a few had it working well. My company was focused on selling a solution to that problem. The year 2020 and the famous COVID-19 pandemic created the need for me to look for other sources of income in addition to my salary as an employee. Precisely the pandemic and the quarantine made many people value the importance of having good WiFi at home for work, academic, and entertainment purposes, obviously. The company had decent sales during the first few months (for a venture just launched into the market), however, many potential customers didn't see value in paying to solve something their Internet provider should theoretically resolve. The company was liquidated a year after its founding, in March 2021. During an "existential crisis" in my work environment during the COVID-19 era, I became obsessed with finding other income alternatives (including my venture) and arrived at the topics of investing and Trading. Without being very conscious of it, I had already ventured into investing since 2014 through Voluntary Pension Funds, with which I had a very good experience at first and a very bad one during and after the pandemic (due to how the investments were affected, especially in real estate funds). Due to my interest in investing and Trading, especially starting in 2020, I ended up trying many alternatives without much strategy and without long-term thinking. Around that time I took a basic course where I learned how to go long (that is, a purchase that "bets" on an asset's price rising), go short (that is, a sale that "bets" on the price falling), the types of orders through which buy or sell operations can be carried out (e.g., market order, limit order), and technical analysis (which is the way of analyzing an asset through a chart that represents its price behavior over time, typically through what's known as "Japanese candlesticks"). I became obsessed at that time with the mindset of looking for short-term Trading alternatives that would let me replace the monthly income I earned through my salary. Looking back at the story in retrospect, I now realize that my mistake at the time was keeping my focus on the search for immediate results. That focus led me to try short-term Trading techniques like Scalping (trades lasting a few minutes), Day Trading (trades opened and closed within the same day), Swing Trading (trades lasting a few days), and I even tried Trading "robots" (algorithms that carry out buy and sell operations automatically). I not only tried different Trading techniques, but I also experimented with different types of assets such as stocks, ETFs, cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.), futures (S&P500, Nasdaq, oil), options (on stocks and ETFs), and in 2023 I even ended up trading CFDs. In 2021 I paid for an investment recommendation from a "well-known" U.S. company and invested long-term in several stocks, but in emerging companies, without an established business and reputation yet, and worse, companies I neither knew nor understood. As expected, the performance of this investment portfolio after five years hasn't been good. Although I've had considerable losses in this world of investing, I've also gained, and although it hasn't been as much as what I've lost, the most important thing is that I've learned what works for me: making long-term investments in fully established companies that I know and understand, with a recognized brand and that generate proven value through their sales. There are clearly very successful people in the world who live off Trading and speculation, however, that's not what works for me, and that's why in May 2025 I decided to leave Trading behind after 5 years of trying. It's during 2025 that life led me to start consuming content from a Colombian company that offers personal finance education services. I had known about this company for a few years, however, it wasn't until that moment that their long-term thinking message began to resonate deeply with me. Through podcasts, books, free webinars, and paid courses, the co-founders of this company (a young married couple with three children) have become my main mentors today. They don't just teach personal finance, but also personal growth, mindset, productivity, and much more. It's hard to put into words the impressive value they bring, not only to their students, but to anyone who consumes their free content. Today I'm in the process of restructuring my long-term investment portfolio, with the certainty that, through discipline, I will achieve security, independence, and financial freedom (in that order), which will allow me to have a good quality of life without depending on a government pension. The things that truly matter in life necessarily take time.

I really like listening to music and even dancing. I love concerts. My favorite genre is rock, and although I have a favorite band, I'm not a huge fan or aficionado. I also like listening to different genres, and I simply perceive music as a way of enhancing my moods (happiness, sadness, focus) at moments when I prefer a song over silence (which I also enjoy). Another thing I immensely enjoy in life is traveling. I left the country for the first time at age 28, and although "late," I've had the fortune of getting to know several countries in different regions of the world. My wife and I love Europe for its lovely old cities, different languages, good transportation systems, and spectacular food. The farthest country we've been to is India, and the least popular destination we've visited is Moorea, an island in French Polynesia (Tahiti). Paradoxically, the only South American country I've been to so far (besides Colombia) is Peru. We definitely have a lot left to travel and discover (including within Colombia). It was also "late" in life that I realized my love for languages. As a Colombian, my first language is Spanish. Although since I was a small child I always had an interest in English, I began learning it more formally and intensively at age 11 when I started high school at San Viator, the school I transferred to after my mom's passing. It's clear that English is an important requirement in today's world, especially in the workplace and in business. Speaking of work, it was during 2022 that I joined Cisco, and in the middle of that year I decided to start learning a third language at age 37: Brazilian Portuguese. I took Portuguese classes twice a week for two and a half years. This decision was made for two reasons: one, because I'm in the process of obtaining Portuguese nationality through Sephardic origin, which means Portugal could be a life option if things don't work out in Colombia; and two, because in my role at Cisco at the time there was a lot of interaction with Brazilian colleagues. After feeling that I already had a sufficiently fluent level of Portuguese, at age 39, toward the end of 2024, I started taking Italian classes, also twice a week. The decision to learn Italian is because of my children: both study at an Italian school in Bogotá, and I hope to be able to "keep up" with the language. Today I can hold fluent conversations in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. I'm still in the process with Italian and hope to also achieve fluency, and perhaps continue with French and, why not, German afterward.

There are several things that have come "late" into my life, such as my love for travel, languages, and yoga. Toward the end of 2024, at 39 years old, I realized I had several books that had been given to me or that I had bought — some of them even given to me or bought several years earlier — and I hadn't even bothered to check whether those books had anything to offer me. Little by little I started reading some of those books and began identifying similar life lessons, even coming from books with different approaches and authors. Today I'm still not a great reader, however, I'm trying to build the habit of reading because I've realized it's something that relaxes me, inspires me, motivates me, and helps me grow as a person. Books are the most cost-effective way to have mentors on topics that interest you. Through books I arrived at the topic of meditation toward the end of 2025, at 40 years old. I currently practice passive meditation based on controlled breathing in sync with countdowns, in two daily sessions of 5 to 10 minutes (at the start and end of the day). On the spiritual side, it's important to mention that I believe in God, I'm Catholic, and I practice prayer as a method of spiritual connection with God. I feel that meditation helps me balance both my mental and spiritual state, and just like prayer and yoga, it helps me even more with stress management and increasing my sense of well-being. Regarding the mental and spiritual side, over the past few weeks I've been trying to practice gratitude daily. Gratitude both for the good things I have in life, and also for the difficult or not-so-good things. The positive side of difficulties and challenges is that they have the potential to teach us much more than the easy things. How are we going to know what happiness is if we've never felt sadness? This whole topic of reading and meditation has led me to ask myself a lot about my personal growth and my life purpose. And when I talk about personal growth, I'm not talking exclusively about growth on a physical, intellectual, and professional level. I'm referring to how to be a better person in general, including other topics I perhaps hadn't explored before, like mindset. I feel the need today for constant learning that allows me to evolve physically, mentally, spiritually, and even socially. This brings me to talk about purpose.

When I think about purpose, a couple of books I've read relatively recently come to mind. One of them is a religious book that my aunts (my dad's sisters) gave me several years ago, and the other is a mindset book written by a successful American Trader, which I had bought several years earlier. Although they are books with very different authors and styles, both books share the topic of purpose in common. When I think about purpose, some career development exercises I've done at Cisco also come to mind, which include purpose as part of the reflection. As of today, my purpose is TO LIVE A LONG LIFE OF WELL-BEING AND PROSPERITY, BASED ON DISCIPLINE, RESILIENCE, AND SELF-CONFIDENCE, TO EMPOWER ESPECIALLY MY FAMILY BUT ALSO MY COMMUNITY AND THOSE I SERVE, SO THAT THEY MAY REACH THEIR FULLEST POTENTIAL.