When No One Is Coming to Save You
Abe found himself staring at a twenty-foot-long, wine-purple wall in his new house. After his wife scratched the peeling paint all the way down to the drywall, hiring someone to fix it would have pushed the job to $15,000. Instead of writing a check, Abe handed his wife a putty knife. For two weeks, they scraped, mudded, and sanded the wall well into the early morning hours.
Back in his native Peru, where full-time domestic help was affordable and common, he never would have picked up a tool. A handyman would have handled it for pennies. But moving to the United States meant making a conscious trade: surrendering the pampered, fully-staffed life of Lima for radical self-reliance. It meant escaping the "social costs" of his old life, where maintaining a certain appearance—wearing Brooks Brothers, nice shoes, and the right watches—was an unspoken requirement of his class. In the U.S., he found the freedom to reinvent himself, working from home, buying his clothes at Costco, and walking his daughter to school without the crushing stress of Lima traffic. The American Dream, for Abe, became a tangible exchange of conveniences for profound personal freedom and peace.
Abe’s willingness to embrace this friction traces back to a terrifying wake-up call at age twenty-five. He was making a meager $800 a month when his first son was born, and the C-section alone cost $3,000. Staring at that impossible math, a stark realization hit him: "nobody's gonna come to save you". He had to summon his own talents to dig himself out. He realized that to survive, "what I like is not the priority. It's my objective". Even though he loved his early marketing job, he left it to negotiate a salary three times his worth, eventually paving the way to an MBA at Cornell and a thriving career.
This pragmatic worldview was heavily influenced by his father, a self-taught man who once moved to Spain with a hundred dollars in his pocket to build his own path. From him, Abe internalized the 80/20 rule: you will spend eighty percent of your life doing grueling, unglamorous work to earn the twenty percent you truly love. Abe likens it to his passion for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Nobody inherently loves being choked by sweating men in kimonos three times a week, but the subsequent clarity of mind and physical strength transform the suffering into an acquired taste. "Learning how to love the things you don't like," he argues, is the ultimate key to success.
Today, as a sales leader navigating the artificial intelligence boom at Salesforce, Abe applies this grounded perspective to technology. While others panic over AI replacing human jobs, Abe recognizes its limits. He points out that an algorithm might be able to process ten thousand different inventory SKUs for chicken, but it is entirely probabilistic and lacks the contextual meaning behind the data. AI has data, but humans have context. Abe still remembers I once gifted him a simple pair of chopsticks—a quiet, unrecorded gesture that solidified a decade of trust. No machine can replicate the unspoken context of human relationships, because you cannot shortcut authentic connection any more than you can shortcut hard work.
Which brings him back to the purple wall. When the paint finally dried, the finish might have been only ninety to ninety-five percent as perfect as a professional's. But the pride of ownership was absolute. "I felt so proud," Abe recalled. "I felt like, oh my God, I can do this". He doesn't look toward a distant, friction-free future; as he notes, "my ideal situation of life is now". He understands that dessert only tastes sweet because of the savory meal that preceded it. The hard days, the $800-a-month panics, the grueling mat sessions, and the midnight sanding are not detours from the good life. They are the very things that make it real.
MEET THE GUEST
Abelardo "Abe" Aramburu is a Lima-born, South Florida-based enterprise sales leader whose fifteen-year career has moved through consumer goods marketing, enterprise technology, and now data and AI — anchored throughout by a conviction he teaches his own oldest son: the sooner you realize nobody is coming to save you, the sooner you start summoning your own talents to get yourself where you want to go.
Abe was born and raised in Lima, Peru, where he was educated at Markham College before earning a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad de Lima. He went on to complete a Master's in Marketing at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and, in 2013, moved to the United States to earn an MBA from Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, where he served as AMBA Chair for Diversity and Inclusion. Balancing the MBA with a young son back home in Peru was, as he tells it, a decision that only became possible because his sister called him one evening and refused to let him give up on it.
His early career was built in consumer packaged goods across Latin America — product and brand roles at QROMA, Alicorp, and Empresas Andrómaco — followed by a post-MBA stint as Assistant Brand Manager at Reckitt Benckiser in New Jersey. Recognizing that enterprise technology offered a structurally different trajectory, he made a deliberate pivot into tech, joining IBM for six and a half years across client solutions and territory sales, followed by nearly two years as Associate Director at Kyndryl, leading cloud migration and digital transformation work across the region.
In late 2023, Abe joined Salesforce Tableau in South Florida, where a series of quick promotions took him from Account Executive to Regional Sales Director for Analytics CBU LATAM, the role he holds today. He now leads the analytics business across Latin America, has spoken at the Agentforce Tour in Puerto Rico on AI-powered sales tooling, and is actively building AI-augmented workflows for himself and his team — because, as he puts it, the gap between AI-enabled and non-AI-enabled professionals will define the next decade, and he intends to be on the right side of it.
Outside of work, Abe trains Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu three times a week — a practice he describes with characteristic candor as something he simultaneously loves and doesn't, but which teaches him the discipline his career runs on: learning to love what you don't like, in his view, the actual precondition for getting anywhere worth going. He is currently teaching himself Portuguese through weekly lessons with a professor in Peru, in preparation for working more closely with his Brazilian teams.
Abe Aramburu was a guest on Talk to JANE, where he spoke about the American Dream from an immigrant's honest vantage point, the discipline of learning to love work you don't naturally love, and why — whether the challenge is navigating a new country, negotiating a career pivot, or preparing for the AI wave — the same first principle applies: nobody is coming to save you, and that realization is the beginning of everything.
