Nelson's English teachers back in El Salvador thought he would never succeed but he's proving them all wrong with two secret weapons. Listen to this episode to find out what they are.
Nelson's English teachers back in El Salvador thought he would never succeed but he's proving them all wrong with two secret weapons. Listen to this episode to find out what they are.
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GabyV: Now Nelson so many people use that word "innovation", but it means a lot of different things. So how would you define it?
Nelson Mejia: All right. You have to imagine that I created a company because of this kind of a little rant you will say. I saw a lot of people using the word innovation for basically every reason you wouldn't like to use it.
Marketing purposes. Just tell the shareholders to hold and don't sell.
It's
'No wait, we're going to do something. We will start an innovation campaign or whatever.'
And also maybe more dangerous is when people say that innovation is around creative methodologies or about having nice ideas, which translates to extracting nice ideas out of your employees.
All of these definitions, they were always just like moving us far away from what innovation really means.
So that's why I created the weSpark helmet that you have seen possibly, and it's like this blue helmet, maybe if I can send you a video, and then you just put it here on the screen, but it has this like blue helmet with a spinning colorful thing on the top that I forgot the name [of] and the big light bulb and so on.
What you need to know is that this helmut is a visual metaphor of what innovation means. If you assume that in the future, there will be a helmet, you put it on and it makes you feel creative, it makes you feel that ideas just keep flowing and all of them are great and you can even mix them and create something of value beyond whatever you can reach before. Whatever topic you get into, you just know what to do. So imagine if this is possible in the future. We're going there with the neurolink from Elon Musk and so on.
But the thing is that when you see this helmet and you imagine this could be something in the [distant] future, then you make an assumption. You make an assumption that innovation is about people and how they think. And when you start thinking about that innovation is around processes or methodologies or having some resources or reputation, or, just keeping the shareholders happy and whatsoever, you can imagine that all of these things do not fit into innovation is about us.
Innovation is about culture. Innovation is about mindset. So we went on and decided to say that innovation is the state of mind in which you can create ideas that generate value for this world.
Yeah. So then I will tell people, Hey, okay. So if you take this helmet and you put it on top of, I don't know, of your business strategy on this like 40 page document. You just place it on the top. Is it going to enhance it? No.
Okay. Let's take it with us again and let's put it on top of a bag of money. Is it going to multiply it? No.
But if you put it on someone, you turn it on... you just get into it. And that's quite the assumption. And I hope when people see it, they understand.
'Oh, okay. Innovation is indeed about us first.'
So that means that if innovation is a state of mind, how companies should approach and see innovation is not as a procedure or standards or reputation or whatever else I mentioned before, they should see it as culture. Innovation in a company is culture. That's how it started. And nowadays all of our services and products are teaching human centric innovation so that people that don't know anything about it really quickly understand
'Okay. Human centric.'
Yeah, that's a good way to illustrate it in a visual way to be like,
'Ah, I got it.'
Yeah. thank you. Yeah people love this illustration, like to be honest, I haven't checked in some weeks, but on Giphy, which is like the animated gifs, some people have seen this or with influencers or other websites even marketing rockstars and when I see how many people have watched it, you will see here. Maybe my camera refocuses, but it says a 9.3 million views of these weSpark helmet gifs. It's- it's incredible like people actually like them and share them, but yeah, most of them don't know what it is, but I need to find a way of creating gifs that also give a little bit of the story for the people to know.
'Oh, okay. This gif means something.'
GabyV: Okay. We can talk about that offline because I'm working on that too,
Nelson Mejia: Yeah, sure.
GabyV: but how does that mindset affect you in your everyday life? You've been doing a lot of stuff. You have this Spark Hub. You're a contributor for Forbes Central America. You just had a TEDx talk in Vaduz, which I had to look that up. I was like, where is that?
It's in Lichtenstein.
Nelson Mejia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to be honest. I didn't know that either. I'm very bad with geography, to be honest, and it still - it's going to happen in August. The TEDx is going to be all around education and I wrote an article about that. So if you didn't know before now you know that this article is like a 100% spoiler of the TEDx talk. Different people want to learn and consume their knowledge or their inputs of knowledge in different ways. So, for the people who like to read, they benefit from reading the article first. While the people who are more visual and want to have more of the show and the experience, then they can wait till the end of August and then see the TEDx talk.
But sorry, what was the question?
GabyV: No, it was... I was asking, you've been doing all of this stuff. How does this innovation mindset affect your preparation or your goal setting?
Nelson Mejia: I really don't know. I truly don't know how to answer that. I believe it's way more complex than anything that I could think of, but something that comes to my mind about it is that all of us [at some point] we have had these days that we just feel that things work out.
Maybe we wake up earlier.
Maybe we get to make something in the morning that is out of the routine. Cook something, prepare our lunch, or create something nice or maybe paint or maybe do a little bit of sports and then we still have enough time to go and shower and prepare ourselves to go to work.
And then when we go to work that they just flows in a different way. It's these long emails you just answer them [as if they're really short], but you know exactly that you're writing what you should be writing, send really quickly, then you get into, I don't know, maybe that presentation or that page that you really needed to send weeks ago.
And then you figure out like everything makes sense right away. The last time that I generally and actively thought,
'Okay, I need to check for the patterns of activities that if I do them, I will be more likely to feel innovative on that day to really get into the state of mind.'
That was last week after I got into a conversation about it.
I was doing presentations before COVID, but when the pandemic started I wasn't applying my patterns or my learnings for quite some time.
And now that I'm aware of it I tell you from two weeks ago to this week, my company has been going well all the time, but now I feel that I am quite balancing everything that matters again between family, friends and like relationships and company and sports and free time. I'm happy with that.
And then about the whole Forbes thing and the press media, I believe that it just happens when you're truly speaking of what you believe other people get convinced and like that. Then it's cool. Then it's just kinda like the snowball metaphor, right? It starts rolling. And some of them, they break apart, but other times the snowball gets to roll a little bit more and the snow is just sticking well and it's growing bigger and bigger.
And then, you know, other people notice.
Of course there are other people that just come to you one to one with just like opposite ideas and contra arguments you could say and that's fine too.
I believe that if you're doing something and there's nobody questioning what you're doing, that's wrong. If you're just moving in one direction and there's nobody to tell you another argument, then how are you going to learn and improve on that?
This is just you convincing yourself of what you already know. I always welcome people to criticize things. I don't even say that it needs to be constructive. If it's constructive, great. Perfect. If it's not constructive I'm sorry, but I might quite ignore you and just say 'Oh Yeah. That's interesting. Thank you for your comment.'
GabyV: You're like 'Okay. Thank you. Bye-bye.'
Nelson Mejia: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's 'Ah, yeah, you're right.'
And if they continue it's
'Yeah, true that.'
That's it. Don't feed the online trolls, especially.
It's like with my company, when I started weSpark and I was telling you before that it was some sort of, like a rant that I felt a lot of people were abusing even maybe prostituting the word innovation. And I wanted to get everyone back to the true meaning and to this state of mind. So I made a claim at the very beginning. I said that weSpark is the first dedicated innovation agency in Frankfurt. And just [a few] days ago I was talking with a big influencer here in the city and he's like,
'Oh, you know, what about this claim? Two people have approached me and told me like, 'oh no, they are big liars.' They are not doing that.'
And I told them
'Please, next time, tell them,
'Hey, I spoke with Nelson, just please openly and publicly just try to destroy that claim.'
because then I can - I have a truly opportunity to teach.
'Okay. Alright. Let's go into what innovation is for you.'
What is very probable going to happen is that whichever company wants to get rid of that claim and says
'No, we were there first. We're the innovation agency and we were the first one.'
Then I would just like,
'Okay, what is innovation to you? If innovation is doing strategic consulting which is like to 95% of the time of the people doing these claims, then I'm sorry, but we are not in sync. You should speak with the people doing research and development and with the people from the academic world and then talk with them about what innovation really is. And then once we have defined that maybe we can go over your claim over our claim.'
Let's bring them in some sort of like online combat because it gives an opportunity for us to show what we truly believe in.
GabyV: Yeah, that'll be a mic drop moment. Be like 'Then what is innovation then? Fool!'
You and your girlfriend are both entrepreneurs, Mariya, how do you guys balance your relationship with working on two separate companies?
Nelson Mejia: Okay it's funny, because, I told you in the morning I was working with her from home and now she went to her home and I came here to the office in the afternoon. Oh, I don't know. I just have to say that we have to learn a lot on how we do this. I believe maybe the biggest challenge and something that none of us should fall into is this kind of like mental trap of thinking to the point where we take ourselves too seriously.
That wouldn't be good for our relationship, for any relationship at all. Just imagine if you're now with a man and he's an entrepreneur and he's just like priority 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 is the startup. Then... okay, where is the relationship falling there?
But I don't know. I believe like the two of us try to support each other's startups, as far as is possible. Or case by case kind of thing, where we check,
'Okay. Look, this is my sense of urgency right now. What's yours?'
I don't know what else to say. I will be interested in what she thinks about it. She will possibly think that I'm too focused on mine.
GabyV: I'll make a note to ask her the same question when we interview her later this season,
Nelson Mejia: Yeah.
GabyV: and then it'd be like, 'He said what?!'
Nelson Mejia: Yeah, absolutely. As I tell you, like in summary, I can say we're in a learning phase about it. We're in a learning phase. But, yeah, I don't know. We are learning. Things are working out. So yeah, but I don't know.
GabyV: It's just one day at a time. You guys got it.
Nelson Mejia: Yeah. Yeah. That's how we got to live it right? You have a plan and you know where you're going, but then you take the tasks and the challenges one day at a time.
GabyV: That's
Nelson Mejia: Yeah.
GabyV: I really wanted to ask you. Also with this Forbes gig that you have a lot of people that I've seen on LinkedIn, some of them are like micro famous, and then they get a Forbes contributor opportunity. How does that even happen? How does Forbes notice somebody?
Nelson Mejia: This time it's easy to explain how this happened. So there was a hackathon back in 2020, when Germany basically said,
'Hey, all innovators, all the people who are engaged [in] solving the biggest challenges from Corona, we need you. Participate in this hackathon. Help us create ideas and solutions to whichever problem we have.'
So I wrote a post on LinkedIn asking everyone on my LinkedIn to please participate with me and join my team. I gathered around 40 people from that post. I believe that if you ask me, this is the post that generated the most engagement from all the posts ever... real engagement. There are some posts that I have with over 500 likes and so on LinkedIn, but yeah, a like, it's not true engagement, or a reaction is not true engagement. But 40 people that joined your team to participate and build something and that totally sacrificed their entire weekends and a little bit of the days earlier then after - that's real engagement.
And there was another person, Andreas, he had an idea and he told me, 'Okay. let's join forces.'
So we participated from day one because you develop everything in around 48 hours. But since the very beginning of the projects from the hackathon we were at least in terms of reactions and people following the most popular.
After [that], one contact that I had, where I was writing before gaming articles for the biggest or second biggest, it's always changing, newspaper in El Salvador. I kinda got in contact with them and I told them,
'Hey, I did this and that. The hackathon.'
Then like the newspaper just wanted to cover the story and they published an entire page of it.
And after this newspaper published it then really famous people from the radio wanted also to do something and then the TV came and then another TV channel came. And after this is again like the snowball. Forbes Central America and Forbes Mexico noticed me, saw me on one of the articles that came after some of the other articles and said like,
'Hey, let's talk with this guy.'
When they were there, they also checked that I was writing articles and they asked me,
'Hey, do you want to write articles for us?'
Around two or three weeks ago, they interviewed me again. They are publishing something for social media, I believe from TikTok, to Instagram, to LinkedIn, more of a video interview.
Let's see. One good contact friend came to interview me here for one podcast. He told me,
'Hey, you know, Forbes DACH is looking for people who are building something around this and this topics, especially into the topic metaverse.'
And they told me like,
'I dunno, I'm going to suggest you.'
So at least I already am in contact with say like one of the people that can decide what comes into Forbes in Germany and Switzerland and Austria, but who knows?
I'm not actively looking for this stuff, if it happens, great. If it doesn't happen, good. I mean, we already have the attention that we need to continue. The attention that we get is from people that are engaged and that know that every time that we publish something that we are just generally trying to teach people and not sell them something.
But whenever it happens, I'm just really thankful because it helps, but maybe it doesn't help as much as what people [would] think.
Yeah, I don't know, 5, 10, 20 people might write you
'Oh I saw you in this article, whatever here and there.'
But it's not like you're famous and now you get out of your house and you have this like red way. How do you call it? Teppich in German. In English? rug. Yeah, no red carpet most of the people are unaware. it's not like you will be walking on and somebody will recognize you. I'm still thankful. Every little thing is a little opportunity and if they come to you just be open.
The most important thing I believe is that they see that you truly want to have a message, like an important message to tell, and the message should not be, to come and buy something. But something that is valuable for their readers. That's the most important thing. So if you keep that in mind, whenever somebody approaches you, because if you do think like that, they might cover you maybe a second time and the third time and so on.
GabyV: Yeah, that's a good attitude to have what I'm seeing more often. And Seth Godin talks about this too, where we talk a lot about the minimum viable products, but we also have to have the smallest viable audience. So you don't have to be super famous to make a lving anymore.
Nelson Mejia: Yeah, no. I don't know, what's the point of being famous at the end. You don't wake up and it's
'Oh, I was covered in Forbes.'
And then I brush my teeth like
'I got discovered in Forbes.'
Maybe on the same day that it comes out.
It's 'yeah!'. It's a good day but then it's - it vanishes and the very next day or two days after it's gone. Just enjoy your life as it is, try to do your best every day, help as many others as you possibly can and then just continue with what you want to continue.
That's how I see it. I don't know. It's quite a funny topic. I believe that the people that wrote me, they made a huge deal out of something way smaller.
GabyV: Yeah. It's important. Especially for us millennials to remember that because there have been so many polls where people were like,
'My goals are to be rich and famous.'
And you're like, 'That's it. Okay.'
Nelson Mejia: Yeah.
But imagine a big chunk of people they're... and this is because of the media that we consume. Like you see these like super body people on TV and, they even look like they smell nice. That's not how it is for most of the people. I know, like even becoming a millionaire or making lots of money is not what most people are going to achieve in their life. You know, it will be like below the 1%. So why do you want to pursue something that is unlikely to happen? You will probably skip the chances to have a truly happy life most of the time. I don't know, like I have a vision, my mission is, to spread innovation. So that's how I decide most of the things. You always have to ask yourself when do other things matter more. So I don't know a lot of the people that have managed to become greatly famous, whatever they knew what they were sacrificing.
I know that I'm sacrificing lots of things just to have my own companies. Moments where I have more energy maybe I could have a family by now, but I have decided to concentrate on company first. So everybody should know that, whatever you pursue, if you want to be the very best in something, then you're going to sacrifice other things.
I don't know.
GabyV: Yeah, that's a great point. Steve Jobs also said
'Focus is about saying no.'
So if you decide I'm going to do this, that means that you won't have the energy and time to do something else. So that's a great
Nelson Mejia: I learned to say no, a lot in things around work and I learned to say yes a lot in private things. You're going home and I don't know possibly you already know what you're going to cook and whatever and somebody writes you just five minutes before you get to your house.
Maybe you're walking back after taking the train or the bicycle, whatever. And somebody writes you,
'Hey, let's go out and do this and that.'
I'm more likely to say yes. But if somebody approached me and maybe they have a really good running company and whatever, and they tell me about,
'Hey, I saw your company. I really like it. Let's have a call to see whether we can start a partnership or whatever.'
I'm more likely to say, no, unless it's something very concrete. That's nice. Like most of the messages that I get nowadays sadly they are messages that I just delete right away. And I'm sorry but most of the people that add me on LinkedIn without any reason I don't accept them because it's so easy to just write me.
'Hey Nelson, I saw this video of yours and now we just like to follow what you do.'
Cool. Perfect. I'm going to accept you like right away, but then it's 'Hello, Nelson Mejia,'
maybe even gets one of the emojis from my title, Nelson Meh-gi-ah and the little spark, and then it's like... today I got one something starting with something about the Euro Cup now.I didn't continue there. It's just like I scroll down. There was a link. Scroll up. Reject.
I'm sorry, dude. Look, I don't... you write me in German. Maybe if you will see that my entire LinkedIn is in English, then you will know that I prefer English. I mean, yeah, it's okay if you write me something little in German, but this a huge paragraph.
Second [thing] is that I don't even like soccer. Where... how did he think that I like soccer because I'm a man? It doesn't work like that. I enjoy the finals from the champions league. I really love watching the World Cup. I watch every single game, but then in between, I almost never watch.
If you ever write someone, you should know where you are, right? Who's this person that you are writing to? And the higher the difference of how much this person have achieved, that the chance of this person actually reading your messages is lower.
So if you're going to write a message to someone, just be really concrete about what you want and how you found them. People just knowing that you didn't found them automatically through LinkedIn. That's perfect. Just like
'I saw your video here. I read your article.'
One sentence. Perfect. And then just say what will be your proposal.
Tell them how you know them and write very concretely what you want from them or what you're going to do for them.
But yeah, but the worst you possibly get lots of these messages because you have a quite big following
'Ah, hello, Gaby. I'm also in the industry of X, industry of education, industry of teaching, industry of languages, industry of content creation, whatever. And I saw your profile and it looks super interesting. And I don't know, maybe one day we can have a chit chat.'
It's Okay ,cool.
You accept them. Three hours later, [not] three hours and one second, [not] two hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds. It's three hours later perfectly... phoom.
'Hello, Gaby. I was checking your website from...'
and then it says Clever Hybrids and then maybe there's a space too much and whatever.
'Look, we help with SEO so that you can market whatever and get more customers. So our customers gain, I don't know, whichever 70% or something da da duh. Eh, can I have 30 minutes of your time?'
It's 'No, please. I trusted you. I accepted your request. Why do you do this to me?'
I have some people that are in my network and people that I know in real life, and sometimes I get automatic messages from them.
And after getting into some conversations, I just decided to mute them. If you're spamming, I'm just going to mute you or even better. I might delete you. It's fun how things work, but automizations for everything around doing business like, this, it's never been my thing.
GabyV: Eh, but this is good point. You mentioned where you're like,
'English is more my language.'
How did you get into English growing up in El Salvador? I know you went IB but how did you get into English? How long did it take? Are you still feeling stuck in some ways?
Nelson Mejia: Yeah. So you have to know one thing, from all the skills out there languages belong to the list of weaknesses that I have. I'm bad at writing, talking, reading, understanding in English, Spanish and German fluently. I'm not good at it. I always have problems explaining myself and a lot of the things that I'm telling you nowadays, they might be unstructured or this might be super structured because I have been repeating them again and again. But let's say that when I have ideas really spontaneously, I know that people will not understand whatever I'm explaining, because the problem that I have is that I jump from idea one to idea four, without explaining how I went from idea one to two, from idea two to three, and idea three to four. I wrote an article about that. I believe it's called what's wrong with my mind. It's really awesome. But basically summarizing what I discover isI have a really like holistic way of thinking. On structure is chaotic, but also visual. So I learned that if I am visualizing what's in my mind, really going down and drawing and sketching, what I mean.
People get just like that. It's just like, 'Ah, Okay. That's it! I get it all because it's been super well explained here.'
So this way, like I'm not the sort of person that will go into Clubhouse or one of these, like a platforms where you only talk, at least not for now. Maybe when LinkedIn does it, I will try to structure my points ,write them on paper, and then I can say something more... something that makes sense at all.
GabyV: But, yeah, don't worry. It's just because as a society, we focus so much on oratory, like people would be like,
'Oh, he's such a great speaker,'
but there are other ways to get your point across. Like you draw it. Some people they're like, 'Okay, I can't draw. And I'm not very good at speaking. So just let me show you.'
Everybody's different.
Nelson Mejia: I thought that maybe I'm just not good at explaining things. That's what I thought all the time and it kind of changed over the years. But in school I was among the worst in my class in English and German and in Spanish I was okay. I was ok, I never had the best grades. Sometimes I had the worst grades as well, but it was not as bad as with English and German. And I hope that my English teachers are seeing this that will be awesome. That will be hilarious. I started learning English when I was in, I believe, fifth or sixth grade. That's how the German school does it and before it was learning German.
So how I started learning English, it was through video games, especially one game called the Legend of Zelda. That's a game where I learned the most because, I kinda had a dictionary and I would go over each of these words. I know I have a lot of like pretty extended vocabulary about medieval stuff,
GabyV: Like Link and his arrow, and his
Nelson Mejia: Yeah, is the arrow. This is the bow. This thing in the back is the quiver I don't, I never said this word in my life. So I guess it's something like quiver, I don't know.
GabyV: Yeah, you're right.
Nelson Mejia: And then, it's what is a talisman, these kind of things that are unnecessary. What is smithing? Like smithing is not one of those words that a lot of people know because you don't quite use it nowadays unless for some reason you're making shields and swords I don't know some sort of iron stuff at home. But I, I started acquiring all these vocab. And I don't know that's how I started learning English.
So I couldn't say much at first, but I started seeing some patterns, like in Pokemon you have this'run' ,like 'menu' and, some things that make sense, like menu, for example.
But I've kind of seen the patterns of what happens when I click some buttons and then, your brain kinda notices,
'Oh, okay. Whenever I press 'catch' then this is like, you're throwing this is pokeball, right?'
So through games is how I started learning English and nowadays I should read more. It's difficult to find an interesting read because I'm the sort of person that if a book doesn't move fast enough, I'm sorry, but I just can't and I just leave them and I believe that most of my books, I go through one third of one, maybe two thirds or something like this. But if somebody is telling me the same again, and again, I'm going to skip pages and then just continue a little bit forward and I just go like 2, 3, 4 pages forward and if it's still making sense, I know,
'Okay. This dude, or whoever wrote this, repeated the same thing again and again, always paraphrasing [themselves] multiple times in a row.'
Or giving me two or three examples.
Just give me a really short example. Like I have it. Or at least tell me, look these four examples from here just grab whichever applies to you. Give me that I'm going to read the example that I needed to read. And if I don't understand that I'm going to read the other ones, but make them optional, right? Then I believe how I learn the most is through writing and then people telling me about all the mistakes that I did or getting some feedback about, what people think about the articles that I write. Sometimes I read it three times and it's so obvious because I know exactly that mistake that I made once somebody points it out. I don't sometimes you just write it and it makes sense in your head.
Yeah. Now I'm using this Grammarly thing it helps a little bit but it's not always right of course. You need to make the last decision at the end.
Basically if you asked my English teachers about my let's say like opportunities in life working in English, whatever, they will [said] that it [was] zero.
I can tell you that I have made a living now working in English, at least part of the time or half of the time. The other half it's almost in German, then a little part in Spanish. That's how I started learning like other languages, especially English because of video games.
And nowadays I try to continue by reading a little bit and writing a lot.
GabyV: Yeah, that's a good way to adapt to your visual brain. People need to know that it's not like your teachers like
'No, Nelson is not going to be able to do it.'
It's just because they didn't do it a way that worked for you.
Nelson Mejia: They almost made me fail school entirely because I was just not good.
GabyV: Oh no!
Nelson Mejia: It's like, I'm sorry, but my nightmare from 0 to 100 at school were English and German. Everything else... I was okay in sports. I was okay in arts. I was okay in everything. I was really good in physics.
Yeah, language has been terrible and now I'm trying to learn a little bit of Russian too. But yeah, the basics.
GabyV: Yeah, language learning is broken, but that's a conversation for another day.
Nelson Mejia: Yeah. I guess so.
GabyV: But what would you say, Nelson, as wrap up here to someone who is in LATAM, maybe in central America, that they... they're being told this by the teacher be like,
'You'll never be able to amount to anything, blah, blah, blah.'
How did you get past all of that conditioning to be where you are now?
Nelson Mejia: Yeah. I believe it's complex. But it should be a balance between really do listen [to] what people are telling you and filter it. If everybody absolutely everybody is telling you the exact same maybe you should consider, doing things differently.
Filter things. Most of the time when you're working on something in particular, when you have something in mind, you have potentially spent orders of magnitude more time, you have experience way more than the people that are giving you advice on something about a particular topic, whatever.
Still listen because you will learn how people think, how people see things. One of the most important things that I learned at school. This was from Herr Hubner or Mr. Hubnerthe name of my teacher. He showed us to do something called in German, Quellenanalyse or source analysis. And I believe this is one of the things that has helped me the most, like directly one to one skills learned in school skills apply in the entire life.
But I continue using the source analysis who is telling you what. So yeah, in that case, if somebody is telling you that you cannot do, but you have a plan. You have a structure, a way of getting there, of getting to your goal. Then, okay, keep it in account, but don't let them stop you.
A lot of people, like my parents told me not to start a company. 'Don't do it. You have a really nice life already. You're working for an extremely big company. You have a supervisory position. You're getting paid really well, especially for your age.'
and I left all that because I really wanted to start a company. And I told them,
'Hey, listen, the two of you are entrepreneurs nowadays. Basically without wanting it or not, this is what you taught me. You taught me that becoming an entrepreneur can be a nice thing. If you work hard and you work smart, **especially smart, this more important working hard** So what you should keep in mind is that I'm going to, I'm going to do this, whether you like it or not. So it is up to you now to support me or to not support me.'
When you're a kid and you're in school, I would never tell to my teacher, something like, 'Look, I'm going to Germany, whether you believe in me or not', because, I don't know.
Some might take it a little bit too personal. They might just, fail you on a specific subject.
Eventually, you start noticing that in this world you can really decide. Whenever you have like a strong vision and, with vision I'm going to say something that solves a problem for a group of people somewhere else in the world, then you might most likely be on the right path. This is the path that you should go, because if something doesn't work specifically, as you wanted, you still have this vision of what you want to achieve in this world. Change something in this particular region, whatever.
So you're going to go another way. So you don't feel bad that idea A doesn't work and there's nothing else [other than] idea A. But if you're thinking like,
'This is where I'm going. This is vision A.'
'Okay, idea A. Didn't work.'
'Okay, idea B, idea B2, idea B3. Idea B4 is the right one.'
And then you conquer and you go wherever you wanted to go. This is where I'm going to go and there's many paths. All of them are unknown to you at this point, but you will figure it out on the way.
really think forward. What is the next thing that you want to achieve and move towards it.
GabyV: Wow. I love that. That's a great place to wrap up and Nelson just to give people a way to find you... what are some of the ways they can connect with you and the weSpark team?
Nelson Mejia: Yeah, sure. Google weSpark and then click on the wespark.io link so that you can learn about what we do or check on LinkedIn.
Find me on there - Nelson Mejia. We are always sharing lots of different let's call it tips and tricks around innovation, life and business career.
Everything that might inspire and help you figure out the way forward towards your purpose and vision. So yeah, you can just follow us there. And if you have a very specific concrete question, please don't hesitate to just write me directly, add me as a contact. And just write me, 'Hey I saw you on the interview with Gaby' and then I will know right away and I will accept you and whichever question you have if I can help you, I will find a way to do so. That's how you can get in contact with us.
And if you're in Frankfurt, just Google weSpark and then you can come here and visit our really nice innovation space.