There is a piece of advice almost every ambitious person hears at least once: pick a lane. Master one thing, the thinking goes, and the world will reward you for it. Stray too wide and you risk becoming the cautionary figure in an old proverb — a jack of all trades, master of none. Zyleeka Lee Pasaporte heard that warning her entire life. She simply refused to take it, and this year she built a business on the very trait everyone told her to fix.
The 35-year-old Filipina, now Founder and Creative Director of a digital studio she runs out of Sharjah, spent a decade in the UAE accumulating skills that looked, to almost everyone watching, like a person who couldn’t decide what she wanted to be. Nursing. Banking. Corsetry. Painting. Code. On a résumé, the list reads like restlessness. In her hands, it became a formula.
The zigzag that wasn’t
When she landed in Dubai in 2016, there was no grand entrance. Her first job was as an administrator at a mortgage consultancy, followed by a year in telesales at another firm. Then came seven years in corporate life — five as a Propositions Officer at RAKBANK, and just under two as Marketing Manager at RAKINSURANCE. Viewed in sequence, it can look like someone drifting from one thing to the next.
She sees it the opposite way. “On paper it looks like a zigzag,” she shares with TGFM. “Looking back, it was preparation for Zyleeka Lab’s inception. Banking taught governance. Nursing taught composure. Couture taught precision. Art taught connection. Code taught automation.”
That reframing didn’t come easily, and it didn’t come without cost. The labels stung. “People have called me a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ and ‘all over the place’ my whole life,” she recalls, “and it was rarely a compliment. It was a warning to pick a lane.”
She never picked one. Instead she treated her curiosity as a research project with herself as the subject, and 2026 became the year the experiment finally returned a result. She calls it her “Year of Becoming” — the year she registered her own startup as a Filipina in the UAE and launched Zyleeka Lab, a bespoke digital studio that builds websites and brand systems for businesses in days rather than months, accelerated by AI. “The thing people thought of as weakness,” she says, “became the thing I built a business on.”
The studio’s website — zyleeka.com — she designed, developed, and deployed herself. She’s blunt about why that matters. “That site is my proof of everything we sell.”
Every rejection is a redirection
The road out of the Philippines began not with ambition but with grief. Before the UAE, before any of the reinvention, there was a door that closed twice.
“I was heartbroken. Not because of a guy,” she clarifies, “but because the Philippine Army rejected my officership application, twice.” She grieved it, then she moved on, arriving at a conviction that would shape everything after: “Every rejection is a redirection.”
What’s notable is how she frames the leaving. This wasn’t flight. “I didn’t leave to escape anything. I left to expand,” she says. The Philippines had given her a foundation she names with precision — a science high school education, a nursing degree, her first garment construction training with TESDA. The UAE was where she intended to stress-test all of it. “Working abroad was never just about remittances or a bigger salary for me. I wanted to find out how far the whole of me could actually go.”
That instinct — to keep adding rather than narrowing — ran through her corporate years too. She didn’t just collect a paycheck at RAKBANK Group; she collected wins, including a Bronze out of 260 entries at the RAKBANK Innovation Awards, plus a Team Vibrant Award and an ESG Special Mention at the WAVE Awards. And she never stopped studying on the side. Fashion design and illustration at Campustar Fashion Institute in Dubai. Steel-boned corsetry at London College of Fashion. Finalist placements at Bride Abu Dhabi’s Arabic Fashion Award, Runway Dubai, and The Ajman Palace Wedding Fair.
The classes weren’t carved out of some generous open schedule. They came out of the margins. “It was evenings, weekends, and annual leave,” she says, “one class at a time.”
Betting everything on a vision only she could see
Then, at some point, the collecting stopped being enough. The hardest thing she did in Dubai, she says, wasn’t any single exam or competition — it was letting go of the safety net.
“One of the hardest things I did in Dubai was walking away from a stable corporate job and a steady paycheck for a vision that I could only see,” she says. She did it deliberately and completely, putting her belongings into storage and flying to California to bet on herself.
What followed was a stretch of early 2026 that would have flattened most people. From February to May, she ran three high-stakes tracks at once. She passed the US Registered Nurse boards, the NCLEX, in 60 days — after 16 years out of the nursing industry. She earned a Grade A in Stanford Continuing Studies’ Business Innovation Models course in California. And she completed Stanford’s Code in Place Python certification, a program with an acceptance rate in the range of 10 to 20 percent out of 66,000 global applicants.
The logistics were as humbling as the workload. There was no salary and no fallback. “Just my savings and my sister’s generosity,” she says. She commuted every Tuesday from her sister Hanika’s place to Palo Alto, staying overnight in cheap Airbnbs to make the classes work. “It was an incredibly high-pressure phase but I passed all of it. It proved to me that you can truly surpass all of life’s challenges. It just starts with you.”
There was a quieter battle running underneath the visible one, and it had less to do with exams than with identity. Being multidisciplinary, and being a woman, had both been used against her. “For years, I was told to pick a lane, that a jack of all trades masters none. That creativity was nothing but changing colors. That it doesn’t add value to the business.” She remembers competing at an Innovation Awards where a C-suite professional told her she’d only been selected to provide a female representative.
She won anyway. “Sometimes,” she says, “you just need to drown out the noise of people’s opinions and believe in yourself.”
The formula
Ask her what she loves about the work now and she reaches, unprompted, for Steve Jobs. “You can only connect the dots looking backwards,” she says. “What I love most is that nothing I’ve ever learned goes to waste.”
She can trace each dot to its landing point. The composure and precision from nursing show up in how the studio runs its process automations and customer-journey mapping. The corporate years taught her the language of C-suite decisions — KPIs, deadlines, regulatory compliance. She files those under the Left Brain. The architectural logic of corsetry shows up in how she builds interfaces and digital aesthetics; the fashion, the painting, and the marketing feed the creative expression. That’s the Right Brain. And her instinct for technology and AI became the multiplier that lets one person execute like many.
She’s distilled the whole philosophy into something she can write on a single line: Your Brand = (Left Brain + Right Brain) × AI Velocity.
“I chose this field because I believe one multidisciplinary person, amplified by AI, can now do work that used to need an entire agency,” she says. The payoff isn’t the technology, though — it’s the face of a client at the reveal. “The most satisfying part is watching a small business owner see their brand look elite for the first time, in days rather than months. They walk in feeling invisible and walk out feeling seen.”
That vocabulary — invisible, seen — isn’t accidental. It’s the same lens she brings to the work she does for free.
The other studio
Outside the Lab, she is an active Emirates Red Crescent volunteer and the founder of Z, Art, a non-profit creative initiative that brings light and hope to people facing mental health challenges, critical illness, and special needs. It has partnered with Friends of Cancer Patients, Mediclinic, and NMC Royal Sharjah Hospital. She’s exhibited during the UAE’s 50th National Day and Philippine Independence Day, and painted live at The Ritz-Carlton JBR.
The advocacy isn’t a side note to her story; it’s closer to the spine of it. “Creativity saved me more than once,” she says. “I want to pass that lifeline on.” Her longer-term aim is to grow Z, Art into a foundation that supports young creatives with training, materials, and mentorship.
There’s a wider aperture, too. Along the way she has traveled to 37 countries — more than 10 of them solo. She skydived in Dubai, scuba dived in Greece, swam with sharks in the Maldives, camped inside Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, and saw the Northern Lights in Norway. She once got stopped at the Tanzania border and had to bribe her way through to make it back to Dubai. She draws the same conclusion from all of it.
“Calculating risk, embracing the unknown, and taking chances on yourself is the most rewarding experience you can ever give to yourself in this lifetime,” she says. “Allow yourself to just live.”
Building before you feel ready
For all the momentum, she is careful about what she’ll say out loud. Ask about the future and she offers real goals — grow the Lab, expand the foundation — then draws a line. “There are bigger plans beyond that, but I’m keeping them under wraps. I have a personal rule to never announce half-baked dreams. I build quietly and let the world hear about it once it’s real.”
Her immediate ambition is pointed and a little defiant: to prove that Filipino talent can compete at the highest level of design and technology, “not as outsourced labour, but as a brand.” In June 2026, she registered ZYLEEKA LAB LLC under the SHAMS Free Zone as sole shareholder — a Filipina with 100 percent ownership of her own company. “Ten years ago, I arrived here as an administrator with a dream,” she says. “Today, I’m living the first chapter of my dream.”
She has advice for the kababayans watching from wherever they are, and it starts with a command. “Stop shrinking. Whatever range you’ve built, the caregiving, the side hustle, the course you took at night, is not a distraction from your real career. That might be the whole point.” Invest in yourself, she says, the way you invest in your remittances: “Money sent home is love, but a skill compounds and no one can take it from you.” Choose people who make you braver. And when the dream keeps you up at night, stop waiting for readiness that never arrives. “Build a parachute on your way down.”
Her logo is a hand-brushed letter Z with a comma, and it holds three beliefs she keeps returning to: life is a marathon, not a sprint; one life, so make it yours; and the little wins are the big wins, because the journey is where life happens.
She’ll also tell you that most people only know half of the proverb that dogged her for years. The full version runs: a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one. “Somewhere along the way the world kept the warning and dropped the ending,” she says. “I’m here to put the ending back.”
Her own edit is shorter, and it fits her better. Jack of all trades, master of fun.
