Break the cycle

Angel Mendez has the ability to withstand and press on. Not only a mental state, this core character trait allows him to manage stress and put the people around him at ease.

“My brother and I always spoke about what we call ‘the cycle’, a kind of cycle of poor. We’ve always wanted to break that cycle for the Mendez family…

I don’t want to be the guy that tells my kids, ‘what I could’ve done…’ — I want to tell them how I did it.”

If you’ve met Angel, you can probably hear his laugh- full and genuine; pretty funny in itself. It often feels best when punctuating the end of a sentence describing the madness of the day: a truck’s broken down, the delivery is late, the rest of the day’s schedule has descended into chaos. The laugh, smile, shake of the head- it doesn’t feel trivializing, it feels grounding. A shared understanding of “man, this is crazy, can you believe it?”

And then you fix it. And then you move on. Or, as Angel would say: onward and upward.