Alexis “Lex” Ledesma certainly knows how to keep busy. The 46-year-old describes himself as a “writer, restaurateur, entrepreneur, academic, school administrator, professor and house flipper.” He is, in other words, a man who likes to start and finish as many things as he can.
Maybe part of it was because of the constant moving. Ledesma’s father was a civil engineer who would buy houses before renovating and selling them. This is now known as “flipping houses.”
Ledesma lived in 19 houses growing up. “I have moved around quite a lot myself since I continued in the same line of business and sometimes live in the houses before I resell them. Since I got married in 2012, we have lived in four homes,” he says.
Ledesma claims he can sleep through any noise. “We would always be living in the houses while they were being constructed,” he recalls. “Usually, my parents would finish just one room. Once done, we would all move in and complete the rest of the house while we were already living there.”
The constant construction is only part of the plan, as Ledesma has often been called a “serial entrepreneur,” as he has run, among others, the iconic 24/7 Whistlestop restaurants, the innovative The One School, the prestigious School of Fashion and the Arts, and Nami Resort on Boracay.
The interesting thing is that he claims he didn’t set out to do all that. “I am not a fan of planning,” he says. “The best things in my life were happy accidents.”
He says he does not have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but owns up to having ADHD tendencies. “I sometimes wish I could just do one thing and do it well—to go deep instead of wide,” he says ruefully. “My mind and my life are generally unstructured. I do not follow the instructions of others well. I am nocturnal. Thus, I would probably fail miserably as an employee.”
—KYLE QUISMUNDO
Loving to learn
A lot of this can be seen in his academic journey as well. “I was terrible at Math and still am,” he confesses. “When I look at numbers, they seem to get easily jumbled in my head. Since everyone in my clan was an engineer or architect and I am the only male child, this was what was expected of me. Thus, college, for me, was a living hell.” Yet he graduated from De La Salle University in 1996 with a BS in Civil Engineering and a gold medal for Most Outstanding Thesis. Then he earned his Master’s degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University in 1999.
But the big deal was his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of the Philippines (UP) in 2019. “I was always interested in Psychology,” he says. “I didn’t pursue a Ph.D. for career growth. It was my gift to myself. I spent eight years learning what I was fascinated by because, despite my lack of academic prowess, I am a person that thoroughly loves to learn.”
The latest addition to Ledesma’s ever-evolving resume is “author.” Earlier this year, he self-published “Finding Freedom Inside: Survival Stories of Growth and Rebirth.”
The book, he says, “is the outcome of my 10 years of volunteering at New Bilibid Prison and eight years of graduate-level psychology at UP Diliman. Thus, every paper in every class I ever took to become a Ph.D. was directed toward my prison work. Visiting prison transformed me in the deepest of ways.”
Yet that 2020 book is not even his newest. That would be the just-released “Reset: 100 Ways to Rewire Your Mindset for the Post-COVID World: Lessons from the Greatest Psychologists” (self-published, 2020, 470 pages).
“On my 47th day of the quarantine, I woke up in a frenzy, after only three hours of restless sleep,” he writes in his prologue. “I had come to a stark realization: It is never going to be the same.”
In “Reset,” he discusses 100 of the most influential psychological experiments in history. “My goal, therefore, was to do all the heavy lifting for you, summarizing the main conclusions of each experiment so they are as easy as possible to read and understand. Also, I have added tips after each narration; to bring the theoretical learning down to a more practical dimension—especially as this book aspires to give you the tools needed to face our post-COVID world.”
Big heart
Ledesma took to writing the book like he does all his projects: full-on. It took him five weeks to write, edit and design the cover himself. “During this period, that was literally all I did. It was like one long happy, but manic, episode,” he says.
“Reset” is essentially a hefty, helpful greatest-hits compilation of the history of clinical psychology (Ledesma’s Ph.D. minor) indeed made more accessible. Because the experiments cover so much ground, your mileage will vary depending on which topics you’re interested in.
His personal touch comes in his explaining the value of that specific set of experiments in the post-COVID world. He then adds a short piece of advice full of anecdotes that’s reader-friendly and somewhat of the self-help variety.
Of all the lessons learned while writing the book, he says the most important one is the ability to reset: “Pain is inevitable. It is part of life. Trauma experts often recommend that we run to the pain and embrace it lest we ignore it and then the monster just grows. Now we are all experiencing hardship. Yet, there are mechanisms we can use to grow our pain tolerance so that we no longer need to run from pain.
“A big heart can handle many heartbreaks and still be OK,” he says. “The goal, therefore, isn’t to run from heartbreak and live a life avoiding pain. Instead, we should grow ourselves so we can handle all the trouble which will surely come our way. Once COVID-19 is over, another thing will surely strike. Sometimes it’s on a global level but other times it’s happening just to you. Regardless, we have to be equipped and ready for the next patch of quicksand that we may find ourselves sinking into.”
Available in Kindle and paperback from Amazon.com.