My Last Lecture

When I was eleven or twelve years old I was the moderator of an online forum about Real-Time-Strategy Games. The website was managed by a fourteen year old boy in Spain who knew PHP programing, and the forum was moderated by other boys my age in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. We never saw each other in person and never received any kind of training, but our website became the largest Spanish-speaking online community about RTS gaming at the time. When I look back I realized that we were not afraid to fail, because for us it was just something we liked to do in our free time; a game! What if we could see life like those little kids running one of the most important websites of its kind without even knowing what they were doing? What if we could stop being afraid of failing because we enjoy what we do?

My first summer job was selling computers at a convention in the WTC at the company where my dad used to work. Before I started selling, my dad warned me that I was going to be rejected many times, but that each rejection was only a step closer to a sale. When I realized that I could do it, I was so excited that I sold more than the salespeople who worked fulltime for the company. I think it was because I was inexperienced, unbiased, and willing to learn.

Over time I have grown up and learned that failure is something to be avoided, selling is unpleasant, rejection is hard to take and popular websites are almost impossible to create. Taking classes in college that have an entrepreneurial perspective has helped me realize the need to bring that child I used to be back to life. The most important thing I have learned from entrepreneurship is that I need to unlearn many bad lessons, and start learning with a new perspective.

Christ always taught that we need to become like small children because they are meek, humble, and innocent. I say that entrepreneurs need to become like children because they are willing to learn, not afraid to fail, and are still capable of dreaming big.

If I could give a piece of advice today to whoever reads this is to never stop learning, to be willing and eager to fail, and to be humble enough to correct the course.

‘’Stay hungry, stay foolish’’ Steve Jobs.