Climb high enough in a career and a strange thing happens: the summit stops feeling like an achievement and starts feeling like a place you could fall from. Most people never say that part out loud. Joseph Gonzales will.
At 52, he runs marketing for Tamkeen Intl for Home Appliance, one of the largest electronics retailers in Saudi Arabia, with more than 50 standalone stores across the Kingdom. His days are a churn of budgets, promotions, market analysis, visual merchandising, product launches, and campaigns that roll out nationwide through every advertising channel available. It is a big job. It took him 31 years to get here. And it nearly cost him the ability to see it.
Thirty-one years, one rung at a time
Joseph landed in the Kingdom in 1995 and started at the bottom—section supervisor, then showroom supervisor by 1998. What followed reads like a ladder with no skipped rungs: store manager at Sony, operations manager across a string of electronics firms, then finally into marketing leadership. Since January 2021, he has held the marketing manager post at Tamkeen.
He is candid that none of it came easy. “The journey was not easy and it took a lot of courage to overcome all challenges and competitions,” he shares with TGFM. He points, too, to a quieter difficulty most Filipino professionals abroad will recognize—being measured differently than Western and European colleagues. Not on ability, he clarifies, but on “social and political treatment where we as Asians treated less.”
He left home in the first place for the reason many do: to test himself. “At first to explore myself working outside my comfort zone away from family, friends and environment,” he recalls. The plan was to prove something. What he didn’t expect was to stay three decades and build an entire life.
When success became the danger
Here is where his story turns, and where he refuses to flinch.
The competition, the politics, the long climb—none of it was the thing that nearly broke him. “The biggest challenge I face is within me,” he says. Achievement piled on achievement until the winning itself became intoxicating. “I was overwhelmed and went to the point of drowning on success and abuse it,” he admits. He stopped noticing what it was costing him. His health, above all.
The bill came due in the harshest way. He was diagnosed with diabetic ketoacidosis, a condition that took the sight in his left eye and left the right severely diminished. The marketing manager who spends his working life on displays, visuals, and how products catch the eye now navigates a world he can barely see.
He does not dress this up. “I am struggling till this time,” he says. But the sentence doesn’t end there. What pulls him forward is the decision to rebuild—”my eagerness to stand up again and renew myself physically and spiritually gave me reason to pursue in collecting back all my broken pieces in me.”
What he wants his kababayans to hear
Ask him what he appreciates about the work now and the answer has shifted from ambition to gratitude. He values the trust his company places in his proposals, and the satisfaction of a campaign that lands—”the success of every event planned.” The wins still matter. They just no longer own him.
That change in perspective shapes the advice he offers other Filipinos abroad, and he delivers it like a man who learned each line the hard way. Draw your purpose, he says, put a time frame on your dreams, and work them. Serve your family first. When you can, extend your hand to others. And—said with the weight of someone who ignored it once—”take care of your health.”
His faith runs underneath all of it. Seek God’s protection day in and day out, he urges, and don’t be afraid of what hasn’t come yet. Be positive.
The finish line is finally in view. Three of his four children complete college this school year; the fourth is just starting. He wants to see that youngest one through before he closes the overseas chapter and goes home for good.
He has spent 31 years learning what wealth can and cannot buy. “Regardless how big you made wealth,” he says, “it does not give you peace and harmony if it will not be spent righteously.” A man who once nearly drowned in his own success now measures it differently—not by what he has gathered, but by what he can still stand up and give.
