I always tell people I was a favorite.

And still am: a favorite of Fortune.

I was born in a home with a good father and a good mother, and grew up living a good life with them. From their example, I learned all about honesty and hard work and dedication and loyalty, and just trying to be the best you can be.

Chances are, you’ve never heard of the city where I grew up in the bottom half of the world: Cochabamba, Bolivia. High up in the Andes mountain range, it seemed like a small town when I was young. Today, Cochabamba is not so small. With a population of more than 600,000 people, it is the fourth largest city in Bolivia.  I attended good schools there and got a good education, but like many South American countries of that day and to this day, Bolivia was beset with political problems which made it difficult for people to get ahead. My father left the country to attend college in Chile, where he studied engineering. When he came back to Bolivia, he did very well. He became a stalwart in our community, and both of my parents hoped that I could follow in his footsteps. But, I realized his path might not be the path for me.

There was a little store in town that had magazines for sale, which included English-language issues of Time and Newsweek. As a boy, I used to go there and look at their covers, with pictures of planes and trains and the newsmakers of the day. When I became old enough, I would buy the magazines. I still marveled at the pictures, but I couldn’t read the stories. Yet, that’s how I began to teach myself English, by studying the captions to the photos.

At the time–the early 1950s–the United States was involved in the Korean War. While Bolivia did not directly participate in that war, the US and Bolivian military relationship included training programs. A military mission was set up near where my family lived, and frequently I would go and watch the kids of the American soldiers play baseball. And that inspired me. My parents wanted me to go to college in Chile, like my father had, but I told them I wanted to go to school in the States.

It took my father a while to come around to my way of thinking, but I was insistent. Finally, he agreed and quickly came up with an idea about where I should attend college.

“There is a group of Catholic missionaries here,” he told me. “They are Augustinians, and they have a university in the U.S., in Philadelphia called Villanova.  You can go there and then we'll be sure that you are safe.”

Those Augustinians in Cochabamba turned out to be Dutch, but they still had connections and were instrumental in helping me gain admission to Villanova.

To get to Philadelphia I flew to New York, and what I found there when I got off my plane was a completely different world than the one I had known. The only English I knew came from reading those magazines, so I was unable to carry on even the most meager of conversations. It turned out I also couldn’t read the signs at the airport telling me which way I needed to go. I got there a month and a half early so I could spend some time in New York City and learn more English before starting college. But, when I realized I had no idea how to get from the Idlewild Airport–now Kennedy Airport–on the south shore of Queens to my intended destination of Manhattan, less than 20 miles away, I began to panic, I found a bench outside the terminal building, sat down there, and began to cry.

I didn’t know where to go or what to do.

Finally, I discovered that a commuter train ran from the airport right into Times Square, the heart of Manhattan. I discovered that when it came to money and conducting a business transaction to land a place to stay, the language barrier disappeared and that more people than I imagined spoke Spanish. Thus, I was able to accomplished what I had set out to do, to immerse myself in the city, its people, and, most importantly, its language, and in my first year at Villanova, I wound up making pretty good grades in my quest to study engineering.

But it turned out I didn’t like the East Coast. It was cold and crowded, and as a first-year student at Villanova, I had to wear a beanie atop my head and a bow tie around my neck. After I heard the adage, “go west, young man,” and understood what it meant, I wrote to several schools I considered to be “in the west” to see if I could arrange a transfer.

Believe it or not, I was accepted at Stanford, the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, and Texas A&M. After I told my advisor at Villanova about my options, he told me, “The school that will give you the best bang for your buck is Texas A&M.” After he explained what “bang for your buck” meant, I decided to transfer to Texas A&M and become a civil engineer, just like my father. When I wrote and told him about my new plans, his first question in the letter he wrote back to me was, ‘Where is Texas A&M?’ .When I explained in my next letter it was located in College Station,Texas, he wrote back–letters back then took at least seven days each way to get to their destinations–and told me, “There is no such place. I can’t find it on a map. I can’t find it in a dictionary. I don’t believe this ‘A&M’ school exists.”

Finally, I convinced him, and when I arrived in College Station on the campus of Texas A&M College in the late summer of 1956, it was love at first sight. And in time, my father became a big Aggie booster. My brothers followed me to school there, and more than 240 kids from Bolivia wound up becoming “Aggies,” in large part, I think, because I had paved the way.

After I received my bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, I went to work for the Texas Highway Department working on the design team for the construction of urban bridges in Houston. That experience helped me understand what my father had already been trying to tell me: I needed to learn more. So, I went back to A&M and got my master’s degree. Then, I went to work for Brown & Root, a big construction company headquartered in Houston.

George R. Brown, brother of the company’s founder Herman Brown, played a major role in bringing NASA’s Manned  Spacecraft Center–now the Johnson Space Center–to the Houston area. As chairman of the Rice University board of regents, George Brown persuaded Humble Oil Company to donate 1,000 acres of land southeast of Houston to Rice, which in turn gave the land to NASA. As it turned out, Brown & Root was one of the major contractors involved in the construction of the Manned Spacecraft Center, which was opened about a year after I went to work with the company in 1962.

I was fortunate to be hired into an elite group which tackled the company’s most challenging engineering projects. One of those involved drilling operations at Lake Maracaibo in the South American country of Venezuela.

Shell Oil Company had a number of off-shore platforms in Lake Maracaibo, which is home to the majority of Venezuela’s oil production, and had run into problems. The lake was about a hundred feet deep, and the piles on which the platforms sat were beginning to settle differentially, and several had begun to tilt and were at risk of toppling into the water. To address the issue, we eventually hired an expert from the University of Chicago who helped us solve the problem. I learned a lot as a result of that experience, mainly that the business of engineering was not just sitting at a table talking, but actually getting to the root of a problem and determining how to resolve it. And, as a result of that experience, I decided I wanted to go into business for myself.

I met Joe Elliott eating together at “late tables” offered by the Texas A&M Athletic Department. While in college, I was a member of both the gymnastics and diving teams, and Joe was a member of the fencing team. As participants in “minor” sports, we were not given scholarships, but were provided the last meal of the day for free at the athletic dormitory. Joe was an incredibly smart guy. He majored in both electrical engineering and English. After graduation, Joe went to work for an aerospace company in California. We stayed in touch, and when I got restless in my job at Brown & Root, it turned out Joe was ready to go out on his own, too. The two of us came up with the idea of going on a road trip from Houston…to Cochabamba, Bolivia. To do that, we went in together and bought a Jeep. This was in the fall of 1963, which is springtime south of the equator. Ultimately, we drove all the way to South America, sometimes along dirt roads, sometimes through the jungles, and recorded the entire 35-day adventure in a diary. Once we arrived, work was hard to find, so we eventually started our own consulting firm.

While discovering that I am an entrepreneur at heart, I also realized that I had been “right the first time,” when I decided to attend college in the U.S. I was not cut out to thrive in a socialist society, Still, Joe and I hung in there, and over the course of ten years grew our company substantially. When the political climate finally got the best of me, I decided to take the $53,000 I had put aside and take that with me, along with my wife and three children, back to the U.S., back to Texas, and, as it turned out, back to “Aggieland.”

There, in 1974, I got into the real-estate business, and I’ve never looked back.

But times haven’t always been easy.

I wound up establishing my base of operations as.a real-estate developer on the west side of Bryan, sister city to College Station. Just as things started to look up for me business-wise, my wife and I divorced. And, the only thing that saved me from totally succumbing to despair as a result of losing my family was running.

As an athlete, running renewed the familiar feeling of being in touch with my body. Soon, I was running almost all of the time, or at least that’s how it seemed. I was running two, sometimes three hours a day. So, I came up with the idea to start my own fitness center. Once I got that up and running–pardon the pun–I soon realized that I was working like a son of a gun and making less money than I had hoped. The worst part of my newfound “success,” was that most of the money I was making was going to the bank to pay off loans.

Then, the Savings & Loan crisis hit. This was in the late 1980s when “S&Ls” were generous about loaning money to entrepreneurs like me. As a result of the significant financial downturn that followed, I could not get any more funds to finish my projects. Worse yet, I still had to come up with funds to pay off what I already owed. When I couldn’t, I went broke. Or, at least I was on the verge of being broke. It was like being in Bolivia all over again. The system was working against me, and it would have been easy to have just given up.

Instead, I went to see one of my bankers. I told him, “Look, I don't have many assets. You can take them all and be short on what I owe you, or you can give me a little more time and I'll pay you every penny I owe you.” I was confident the economy would eventually turn around, and if I could just stay afloat until it did, I knew that my business instincts would work again in better economic times.

A substantial part of the debt that I held was on land that I was holding on to for future development. I had made a deal with a family to purchase 360 acres of land from them, also on the west side of Bryan. When I realized I had already paid them enough to release 40 acres of their property, I asked if they would be willing to do that. I told them I would make another additional payment from the little money I had left to seal the deal. As a result, they gave me those 40 acres free and clear, and that provided capital that I used to get a new start. Little by little, I eventually paid off all my debtors.

Still, it was a very stressful time.

Then one day, sometime in 1992 as I recall, I got a phone call from my banker. “Ram,” he said, “It looks like we’ve got a piece of land here that you used to own. I think you need to buy it back.”

“I don't have a penny to my name,” I told him.

“You did everything you said you would do when you told us you would pay off your debt,” he replied. “We trust you. We believe that you can do it again. Take the land and start another project.”

I did.

And when I sold that property more than 30 years later, I had become a millionaire.

The lesson learned here is that economic misfortune happens all the time, but if you always do what you say you're going do, people will notice that, and you'll be “credit worthy” again.

Simply put: Be a man or a woman of your word.

Live your life with integrity.