The Power of Images

I believe in the power of images that allow you to picture your own future and that spark wishes strong enough to shape your own reality. I remember as a child arriving in Buenos Aires to spend a few days during summer school break. It was a beautiful summer night and my father was driving the car to enter the city through Avenida Leandro N. Alem, where the emblematic IBM building has been located since 1983. I cannot say how old I was, but I was just tall enough to fit on my knees in the back of the car, with my arms on the back of the seat to look through the rear window. Every time we would visit a new city I would assume this position because I was able to watch the sky, count the street lights and stare at big tall buildings.

This was the setting for one of my earliest and most vivid memories. While we were slowly passing the IBM building I looked up and got caught by its impressive architecture. How was such a building even possible?! A few stories from its base the structure got thinner. It was as if a giant had squeezed that section of the building. How could all the floors above that section be supported by such a thin structure?! How could the elevators pass through it?! When my gaze reached the top sign everything made sense. Only a company like IBM could have its offices in such a building. And while I was looking at that image I thought to myself, “Someday, I will work here.” It was the power of that image that forged a big part of my life.

I was just a kid from Cinco Saltos, a small town of 15,000 in the Argentinean Patagonia. It was a farmer’s town and the only other industry besides growing apples, pears, peaches and grapes was a chemical company. This company was so important to the economy of Cinco Saltos that the only high school where chemical technicians were trained in the region was right in our town. All you could hope for was to get good grades and start working there as soon as you finished high school. When I got out of primary school I decided to go there even though it meant more mathematics, physics and chemistry, and one more year than in any of the other high schools. But I did it because I thought that a technical high school would better prepare me for a science and technology career.

By the end of high school, I had decided to pursue an engineering major, and in college, I specialized in Business Management Decision Support Systems. I discovered that I liked to communicate complex information technology concepts in simple ways so every organization could understand, implement and benefit from them. This mix of a nerd with communication skills turned out to be a highly sought after combination, so as a senior, I was offered an internship at IBM, where I started my professional career as an IT Specialist.

In the end, all my career choices aligned to make that image of myself working at IBM a reality. It was the power of that image that took me back to the same building that had impressed me as kid. Other images like this one have made lasting impressions along my life. For example, when I saw an human rights activist giving a speech that moved me, I knew that I wanted to be able to step on a stage to speak and inspire people. Or when I saw a successful business executive in a movie stepping in and out of planes to travel around the world, I knew that I wanted to have a job that would allowed me to travel like that.

This is why I believe in the power of images. Because images can inspire all your personal and professional accomplishments. Images can give you strength and hope when you have depleted your own. And ultimately images like these brought me to try and inspire you with the story of a kid who, impressed by the image of a curious building, turned a wish into a reality.