Seven years later, Adrian reflects on SPICES

Written in June 2019

I received SPICES during the round of “Beta Testing” with a cohort of high school students in a program called MAPS 4 College. It was different than I ever expected.

Our MAPS sessions, hosted with a pilot cohort of around 20 high school students, existed to give us the resources we needed to learn components of the SAT and ACT tests, and several practice sessions where we learned from each other through lectures and practice problems.

After our test prep sessions were over around 2013, MAPS began to evolve into a collection of Socratic Seminars analyzing our perspectives, ambitions, and overall life goals. This, without me knowing it, was my first taste of the SPICES platform.

Topics I remember being discussed in these sessions included:

• What a happy and fulfilling life is, and how we could start to prepare ourselves for living one

• What our life ambitions were, and how we could start to establish paths to achieve them

• Effective leadership tactics – our internal and external motivations for achieving our ambitions

• Many of the racial, social, and economic hardships that impeded upward mobility in our Latinx community, as well as the differences and similarities between the cultures we all came from.

• Ways we could use our ambitions to impact other people positively

At first, I was confused as to why a college prep course would dedicate time to talking about subjects which had nothing to do with the ACT or SAT. Now I see what Sarai was doing: She was setting us up to ask what life we wanted to pave for ourselves once we got to college, and beyond.

I feel the biggest mistake people (especially my age) make is charging down career or life paths without careful consideration of their personal ambitions, happiness, and legacies. They hear talk of good money or stability, and barrel down pathways hoping they’ll like the lives they end up with. This, I feel, is why so many people look at themselves when they’re 30 and find themselves unhappy. They’ve climbed to the top of a mountain they never wanted to stand on.

SPICES, on the other hand, is a set of guidelines that moves away from this classic trap. The platform begins with an analysis of the heart and soul of your personal ambition, and ends with giving you the strategies you need to maximize your ability to achieve what you strive for.

How do I know that it works?

I’m one of its early benefiters.

When I was six, I identified my personal ambition to be a filmmaker. I knew that the purpose of my life was to entertain and challenge people through cinematic art.

I had several people, teachers and parents, tell me that becoming a filmmaker would lead to stress and financial difficulty. I was told to avoid the route completely and go into engineering or computer science. At 14, I was almost considering giving up on my ambition and agreeing with many of these adults around me who told me to give up. Why would they lie, after all?

Then I encountered SPICES.

Through SPICES, I gained the courage to follow an atypical life path, and through the teachings of the program, was able to harness my personal strengths to make a film career happen for myself. I have no formal ties to the film industry. My Dad is a dishwasher, my mother is a homemaker.

After helping start a drama class in my high school’s lackluster educational curriculum, I was accepted to attend school for Film and TV Production at the USC School of Cinematic Arts on full scholarship. It’s the most expensive and selective film school in the country.

I went through 4 years of intense production curriculum, entrusting that my love of impacting people through art and adoration of the film medium would pull through, and it has!

Since graduating from USC’s Film School in 2018, I have worked for Fox Sports West, Los Angeles Metro, The National Association for Latinx Independent Producers, Fine Brother Entertainment, and countless other independent ventures. I’ve sound designed several shorts and a feature film, and acted as cinematographer on three independent feature films and several shorts and music videos.

My personal directorial work, largely in documentary, has been shown in festivals around the country, and I’m privileged to say that I am now making a living doing what I love in a career field I want to be in.

And I’m just getting started. I live to entertain and provoke thought in people through my art.

SPICES helped me realize that. SPICES helped make that into a reality. Sarai’s insights will get you far. Trust me.