Like any other city, Denver also boasts a thriving entrepreneurial spirit. As a matter of fact, we celebrate it annually during Denver Startup Week. This one-week celebration shines light on local economies across the world and the inherent role that remittances play in boosting local innovation and entrepreneurship globally. It’s a great way to meet like-minded individuals who share the same business interests and passion as you.
Speaking of which, our guest Susana González is here in The Commons on Champa. The Commons runs on shared ownership. This incredible community continues to give expertise, time, funding, and volunteerism to build and support Denver’s entrepreneurial circle. Suzana is spending her time getting involved and continuing her quest to bring Denver’s rich entrepreneurial community to her hometown back in Venezuela. Let’s hear from her in today’s episode.
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Energizing The Spirit of Entrepreneurship in Local Communities Worldwide with Susana González
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In a recent episode, we talked with Jodi Fischer of the Adelante Foundation about the entrepreneurial spirit in Honduras. The entrepreneurial spirit can be found in a lot of different cities. Blessed to live in Denver where we have a really strong entrepreneurial spirit. My guest today, Susana González, is here in Denver at The Commons on Champa, which is Denver’s entrepreneurial hub and a place that anyone with that spirit can come drop in and work and talk with other like-minded individuals. Susana is here to talk about her quest to bring the entrepreneurial spirit to her town in Venezuela, where there’s a lot of interest in starting businesses.
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Susana, welcome to the program.
Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be talking here with you and getting to know the Denver side scenes and the community that I think is very lovely and I like it very much.
Yeah, I love our community here too. I’ve said before in other episodes, one of my favorite weeks here is our Startup Week, which is in the fall every year and we have tons of people and it’s the place where you see people that are doing stuff about their problems as opposed to people that are just complaining, which there’s plenty of that elsewhere in the world.
I think this is the first time I hear somebody saying that entrepreneurs are those who do instead of complain and I love it.
Yeah, for sure.
I think you have said something mind blowing to me. That’s the spirit.
Now, Susana, you notice this spirit in your hometown. Explain the observations that led you to the path that you’re on right now.
Well, the thing about Venezuela is that we are culturally in this type of mindset that we like to do things, like if there’s something wrong in the office, we will clean it, we will fix it, we will just do it, it doesn’t matter that it’s not our job to do it but it’s the mindset that people take responsibility of things that are happening around. And then we have this strange political situation, economical decline, and people decided that they needed to do things to fix the reality and I think those two things together created this very entrepreneurial mindset, where everybody wants to start a business, everybody has an idea, because everybody needs money, and seems attractive enough.
So you’re observing, and I think most people listening are probably familiar with what the situation in Venezuela is like, this spirit of people, the average Venezuelan, as you’re observing, is someone that’s saying, “Okay, we’re in this tough situation, we had all this stuff happen over the past couple decades, now, I wanna do something about it. Now, I wanna help build everything back, I wanna build something that’s gonna make what I see around me better.” Is that accurate?
It is kind of in a way. I mean, I think I’m not the only one who has some questions to oneself regarding am I going to save the country? And if I’m going to do it, how am I going to do it? You cannot stay in a place that you don’t like how it is if you’re not doing something to change it, at least in a way.
And what kind of businesses are you observing people starting or people talking about starting, people have any interest in building?
There’s like going back to production of things, like I want to start farming, I want to start producing a type of meal fruit or product, because there is a lacking of local production. It is part of what happened a couple of years ago. The government made these policies that made it so difficult to have local production that they just started to bring it from abroad. Now, there’s no money to bring it so we have to rethink everything again. It’s about finding solutions to problems and necessities to cover.
So, a lot of this is just building back society almost from scratch.
It sounds, and I say maybe it is something like that, like there’s a lot of — the social fabric has suffered a lot. There’s a lot of things that happened and people are just trying to rebuild their lives. They’re just trying to make things better in many, many ways, which includes creating economical opportunities and getting the business up.
What barriers are you observing for the average Venezuelan that you’re trying to help that wants to build one of these businesses and is going about trying to build it, I guess?
The biggest thing entrepreneurs find in their way is always fear, especially because this is a leap of faith.
You have to jump into the void, and if you don’t have experience, if you don’t have the tools, it can be very scary. Click To Tweet
And the other thing, of course, is necessity. If I am really starving, I will just try to make money any way I can. So, it’s not like they won’t do their entrepreneur but they can maybe end up doing a cheap way or settling down for a very small goal instead of going all the way there. And, of course, there’s a lot of political issues regarding how legal can it be to become a fully operating business. It’s very challenging to do that nowadays in the country. Instead of being easy, now the government makes it very hard.
Yeah, so it’s like something I take for granted, because I’m sitting here at The Commons on Champa and that’s a center specifically set up here in Denver to foster our entrepreneurial community and it’s like people who donated, trying to make it easier because we talk about our challenges, which is often how much money do you have saved up? Do you have some sort of cash flow? Can you take care of yourself and sometimes your dependents and your family from the time in which you decide to go full in on the idea to the time when it becomes a profitable business, which is never a short period of time. You can never come into the endeavor expecting to suddenly be profitable on your business in two, three months. That’s just not realistic. But you’re talking about not only do you have that standard set of challenges that I just mentioned, but also additional hindrance from your government and challenges with the whole social situation going on around you.
Yes, that is a thing, like I have a co-working space in my country too, which has the same mission that The Commons has here, but we don’t have the same support from government and other partners. We have to make everything from our own pockets, in a way, sometimes, or just be funded by events or maybe the same members. So, actually, here in Denver, you are very lucky to have this types of spaces and this type of activities, with the only goal of giving you all the tools that you need. I mean, that’s why they are here. They’re just here to make your life easier. I think, actually, I cannot say because I haven’t been in that many cities but this is the best city to start a business, at least here in the US, and it has all the cool things that you need and you have the mountains.
The mountains make it a very desirable place to live. People want to live here, which is probably why it costs a lot to live here, but this is not the time or place for a tirade about how much houses cost here, but there was one in my neighborhood that sold for a million.
Well, but that’s the same cost in Florida, and they don’t have mountains.
Yeah, they have —
They just have lots of rain and hot —
And alligators.
Yes.
Lots of alligators.
They can eat everything you have. They can eat your child. No, no, no, it’s awful. I don’t know. It’s not — I don’t hate Florida, no worries. I think this is a very nice place to come and start your business and give your ideas an opportunity to become reality so I invite you to come. Well, you’re here, I don’t invite you here.
And so you’ve been here in Denver for a few weeks now. What have you noticed about the culture here? You’re around a lot of entrepreneurs, probably because of everyone in your program. What else you can bring back to Venezuela or was there some things that we can learn from Venezuelan cultures that we’ve neglected here because no place is perfect?
Well, that’s true, no place is perfect, but every place can be improved and everything can be improved and that’s a different way to look at it. I recommend you to think about that, especially if you’re an entrepreneur, but here in Denver, I have noticed that the only one thing that appears to be a common theme is that people take a little bit things for granted. You have something so you don’t pay much attention to it but you should pay attention to things, you should pay attention to the little details, and I don’t know if it is the mindset here in the US generally but you should really strategize. You should go into deep into what you want to do and what you want to accomplish, because, normally, things don’t come flying from the sky. That’s hard work for that to happen. You have to do a lot of things to reach to a point. We have something like that also in Venezuela. If you’re starving, you’re going to get mango anywhere. There is always a mango tree around, you can just get free mango so people don’t give them enough importance so when you leave the country and you have to pay money for a mango, it’s like, “What the fuck? Why do I have to pay for that? That’s free. That’s there.” So that’s one of the things I noticed. But that’s normal. It’s just an effect. And my recommendations to people who are leaving that loop is to pay attention to the details.
Pay attention to the things you have that you don’t know are not common for everybody. Click To Tweet
Yeah. Actually, it reminds me of this book called Factfulness that I read a year or two ago. First of all, it’s a great book because it talks about how our trends are better than a lot of people expect. So a lot of people oftentimes will say doom and gloom about what they observe, what the news says, but it talks about trends in, say, child literacy rate around the world and how a lot of middle income countries, countries that are somewhere between the dirt poor and, of course, the richest ones in the world, are making a lot of progress. Even countries that here we tend to put in a bad light, such as Iran, how that country is actually far better off than they were 30 years ago but we’re just not paying attention to it. But this book also told a story about a Swedish, I think, it was a nurse who did a program in India and she got in a lot of trouble because she went into an elevator bank and tried to stick her hand in the elevator to make it stop before closing, which, in the US and in Sweden, a lot of other Western countries, we take for granted because they all have motion sensors, but that’s not how it is in India. And the point of the story was that the way things work where you are right here is not necessarily going to be the way they work anywhere else.
That’s so true. Like you can take electricity for granted here but you don’t take it in Venezuela, because, let’s say if your work, you’ll always have your phone charged, you’ll always plug your computer because maybe you’re going to lose electricity and you want to have full battery charge.
Yeah.
That’s very true.
So, tell us a little bit about Twist Hour. I noticed you just worked on your pitch for the program of what you’re trying to build. How is this going to work once you build it or once you build it out, expand it to what you really want to do?
Well, Twist Hour came after trying to find a way to escalate. We’re a small place, we have very limited resources, limited staff, but we want to have a better reach in the community so I started to look at what to do, what member that’s here in, particularly The Commons, which is the place who’s hosting me, and I noticed that there was a lot of interaction with people. I think bringing global interaction to the people in a very small town in this very deprived country could be the thing that can make these people go forward with their ideas. Because, sometimes, we just need a pat in their shoulder, like, “I need something to do, I wanna go but I don’t feel like I have what it takes,” and you just need somebody to talk to you about, maybe listen to challenges, how they were solved. I mean, it’s a consulting hour, that is what I’m trying to make. Can be networking, can just be chatting. The idea is that I’ll connect entrepreneurs, experts, this type of people who you really want to talk with and only for an hour, weekly hour, so it’s more like some sort of matchmaking thing, not like an app, you’re not going to swipe, but maybe you will share some coffee, maybe you won’t because of the time but maybe you can share a beer, who knows? It depends because it’s going to be remote, full remote. It’s about making people to volunteer for it so I’m asking you here to volunteer. Thing is that we have to find somebody who speaks English. Unless you can speak Spanish. Can you?
So I can speak, “Un poquito de español pero muy despacito,” really, and anyone who speaks regular Spanish will probably hear how terrible that accent is because it probably sounds really horrible, but I just said like a little bit but very slow. It’s good to learn, obviously. Learning more languages opens up people’s…
It sounded very good. You don’t have to feel bad about it. You made it very well, yeah.
“Estoy tratando.”
Stop. Yes, you are.
It sounds like what you’re saying, and for anyone out there listening, is that when you go down the path of building something, whether it’s entrepreneurial or in another category of building something on your own and building something based on your own personal reflection and deciding, “This is what I really wanna do,” that can be a little bit lonelier of a path than, “I work and I have co-workers and we all do the same thing and then we’re gonna go get a beer at five o’clock when the day is over.” And so you need not only a little bit of camaraderie with other people that have followed similar paths but, also, and this is something that happens quite a bit on this particular podcast, some pointers from people who’ve done it. We’ve had past episodes with marketing people, people who know about how to build a brand, people who know how to build content, people who know how to truly find yourself, people who know how to refine a product based on feedback, and the list goes on and on of all the things that you just run into and you’re always going to run into when you’re building something.
That’s very true. It connects with other ideas that I have had and I have this thing called ED-Challenge, which is an educational challenge, and it’s about developing critical thinking and the origin, the seed of this is that we were raised or built in a type of education that doesn’t create critical thinking, quite the contrary. It just gave you like a rulebook to follow and you’re supposed to only look into that rulebook. So, whenever you find a situation that is not in the book, you don’t know how to do it, you don’t know how to solve it. And entrepreneur.
It’s not in the rulebook at all.
It’s not at all. And, nowadays, less, because making a business maybe 100 years ago was very much different than now. Nowadays, you have to be competitive, you have to be focused, and you have to get access to lots of things that maybe are not in access, like contacts, collaboration networks, and all of these things that maybe people who were born into very good environments have, like I went to a very fancy school and I’m friends with everybody who is in this business so it’s going to be easier. But it’s not easier for everybody. And when we talk about social mobility, if you want to make people with less resources to reach the higher mountain, you need to give them some tools, you need to help them and collaboration networking is part of that.
It’s part of who we are. And it is actually a thing, maybe even an evolution trait, because that made us look for a pack instead of being alone, which gave us better odds of surviving. So, yeah, you need that. And it doesn’t have to be actually a very good expert, just somebody that can listen to you, you can relate to that person, and can even give you like advices, maybe just tell you that you’re doing a great job. Just continue that path, because that’s where you’re supposed to be leading to.
So, I mean, it sounds like any path where you’re building your own thing is going to have its ups and downs, I think that’s just a natural part of it, and when you have the downs or the challenging parts where you’re not sure, it’s always going to be more likely that you’re going to succeed if you have some form of encouragement, someone that’s rooting you on. I actually have a photograph on my desk of a bunch of people that showed up to an event I had last Thanksgiving holiday, which, to me, is all about gratitude, so I had a gratitude festival and we all wrote down what we were grateful for and put it into a hat and I have a picture of this group of people to remind me whenever — that’s like my way of seeing, okay, these are the people that want to see me succeed. So that sounds like something that you’re trying to get more people tapped into.
Yes. Well, the ED-Challenge I was mentioning to you, it’s based upon this thing called SOLE, a self-organized learning environment. It was developed by Sugata Mitra. And one of the things is that you have the capacity to learn by yourself using maybe digital tools, maybe just a book, but you have the capacity, but you need encouragement. So, in this methodology, there’s this thing called the “granny.” So, it’s like your granny who wouldn’t understand your homework but would tell you, “You’re doing a great job, honey, just keep on going,” and will not be able to give you the right answers because she doesn’t have them, but it will give you the courage for you to find them.
That is amazing. And then when it comes to building out your network of people, how important is it to make sure that wherever you are, whatever your circumstance is, that you build a network outside of your own little geographical area, as opposed to, I think, you can build a network in your community, and I know in Venezuela, you probably need some people from outside, but probably even if you’re in a really well-off place like Denver, San Francisco, New York, anywhere else, it probably still helps to build a network of people that are in different places.
Well, I am pro open source, I am pro the new world, and that means a global world. It means international connections. You are not the same person after speaking to somebody who doesn’t know your country or even your continent, somebody who’s not in your same time zone. You change because those types of interaction allow you to see things very differently and that is part of becoming a very 360 professional. You have to be aware of the differences, the culture. There are many things that are very different. For example, I’ll give you a very particular example, you talk to people about Venezuela and you get lots of like internet buzz about how things are not, but people believe it and instead of believing something that they just read online, they should ask a local, they should communicate with the people and listen to what they have to say, because each individual story is different and you don’t get that if you stay in your hometown and you don’t interact with anybody else.
That makes sense. It reminds me of a common thing I hear about people from Africa complaining or just observing that a lot of people here think the whole thing is just a jungle and not even recognizing that, in Africa, there are cities. There are actually pretty big cities there just like we have here but it’s oftentimes depicted like, well, your house, there’s going to be a lion that just shows up at your front door no matter where you live, which is clearly inaccurate.
It is not Australia. You don’t have giant spiders. No, but, yes, that is true. It actually reminds me of a fellow I met once, she was doing a research in Iceland. For some reason, they were chatting about the fact of when you are not eating your food and your kid, they tell you, “You have to eat it because the children in Africa don’t have food,” and she wasn’t upset about it but she was like, “We have food.” I mean, I know not everybody has it but there are people in Africa who has food. There are people in Africa who goes to college, has PhDs, and then they get big opportunities. Even entrepreneurs and business people, there are. So there’s a whole scale of things that you can see in different countries. Of course, nowadays, we actually joke that moment that, well, maybe it’s like children in Venezuela who doesn’t have food. Unfortunately, there are lots of children in my country who are starving because of the reality but there are others who are in very good condition. It reminds me of the short story of Charles Baudelaire called the Eyes of the Poor, it’s a very good one, it’s from the 19th century. Charles Baudelaire is what you call a “damned poet.” But he has also short stories. And this one is he is noticing decadency of Paris, he’s having a coffee at a place with apparently his love interest and he’s just staring at how people are in the street, very poor and starving and whatever and then one kid is staring through the window at what he’s eating and he feels this sadness and everything and the girl just replies, “Isn’t this annoying? I wish he wasn’t here looking at us,” and that is the story, it’s that it’s just a story. So you have a person who’s touched and moved by the poor in the city and then you have another person just saying, “Isn’t this annoying?”
Yeah, which is, I mean, we observe that today. I mean, anywhere you go, like even here in Denver, you walk around, there are places where there’s homeless people and there are people who say, “This is annoying,” or people who just ignore it and other people who are genuinely moved by the fact that there are people here having that experience and wanting to help. It’ll just be everywhere.
Yes, and it is a mental health issue, I can tell you also, because it happens in Venezuela. If I were to pay attention to all the things that happen in the country, I would just go crazy. I will be entirely depressed every day, I wouldn’t be able to do anything good for me or for anybody, and it’s not my fault what’s happening in the country but I am responsible of what I can do from now on.
And it’s very difficult to find a balance, because when you are somebody empathetic, you care. There’s no way to shut that down. But you have to find the strength to collect yourself and do good things instead of focusing and feeling bad and sad.
One of the things I’m wondering also was that we’re all going to read the news, we’re all going to see some awful things going on, it’s easier to maintain that good mental health if you have a project, if you have something that you’re doing to help so you know that, okay, once again, I saw the same bad thing happen but I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing to help someone in my area live a better life.
I completely agree.
Having a goal makes everything easier. You just need to have something to do and to work for it. Click To Tweet
For example, what I do is that I just try to filter the news I get access to and the information. Normally, I don’t watch videos because videos can be too much but I have promised myself that I will read the names of the people who were like suffering or even died. I promised myself that I will be aware of what’s happening because I owe that to the rest of the people. Here in Denver, I have seen lots of homeless and, of course, there’s always a scary situation because I’m a woman and I’m not even from the country so puts me in a very fragile situation but I don’t like ignoring that they are there. I see them and I acknowledge them. Sometimes, I have given them food I have. I know it’s not being nice, it’s stupid, like just mention it, but it is part of my health, my mental health. I am not ignoring this. This is happening. It’s not like I’m going to turn my eyes away of the situation. It’s my duty as a human being to recognize this. And when the opportunity arises, I will do something to improve it, but I cannot do anything now because there’s no opportunity for me to do anything. I will just wait for it to come.
And so a lot of it is avoiding that whole tendency some people have to beat themselves up in the head, all the negative self-talk, self-shame, chatterbox, whatever word you want to use for it, and say, “Okay, listen, someone might criticize me, I might criticize myself for apparently not caring or apparently not doing the right thing, but look at this, I do care, I’m not ignoring it, and there’s something that I’m doing,” and, in your case, that is helping build people’s confidence to start businesses because when people start businesses, I mean, eventually, they could be employing people and they could be pulling a lot of other people up out of that situation.
That is actually what makes a healthy economy, businesses. Yeah, you cannot have a healthy economy without production and especially local production. You need local activation. And I think it is very important to notice that, for example, Venezuela is a country that has many natural resources and it’s easier to farm, it’s easy to do many things there, but people stopped doing those things because the situation was too difficult so now it’s the task of who are there left to start again. What you were saying before reminds me of the Rainforest Alliance. They had a commercial thing, a video, of somebody so depressed about the rainforest deforestation and what to do about it and, in the video, the person just give up his job, make a luggage, the baggage, and then departed to the rainforest, and returned like, “Okay, I couldn’t do anything.” That’s not the way of helping and what the video is suggesting is for you to select products of the Rainforest Alliance. That is a way of helping with the deforestation situation in the rainforest. Avoid to get in touch with those who are doing it wrong. It sounds like a tiny thing to do but it’s a big thing to do in the end.
Well, a lot of things are a tiny thing to do by yourself, but one of the things that I think a lot of people get caught in a trap is this idea of, “I’m solving this problem myself,” whereas, oftentimes, it takes different groups of people collaborating in different areas. For example, one of my previous podcast guests, Christopher Moore of Harmony Turbines, is doing the individual home wind turbines for wind energy and in the episode, we discussed how this wind energy innovation, making these smaller, more viable wind energy sources for the home, is combining with the people who are developing better solar panels and the people who are developing better battery storage techniques to all together solve the problem of home energy use using more renewable sources. And so it seems like a lot of it is this understanding like I’m doing my part and as long as you have some indication that there are these other people, these other initiatives going on, that you’re just part of it and that’s a good place to be.
I mean. I mean, collaboration is key in the new world. We’re supposed to be open for collaboration, being cooperative, and if you don’t keep those things into consideration, it’s going to be more difficult for you to do everything, like individualism isn’t bad, because we’re all individuals, but we have to find a way of connecting ourselves with the rest. You’re supposed to be individuals part of the community, not a common thing, just all together, like an amoeba or something.
Yeah. Well, part of it involves the comfort of being around people who are different and not being frightened by it and I think that’s one of the problems we had before was too many people were threatened by someone that looks different, acts different, talks different, approaches things in a different manner and it seems like this new world involves us recognizing that that’s actually something we need, that’s actually a great thing to be a part of, and that when you hear someone come at something from a completely different perspective, that’s a great experience to have.
I agree. I mean, maybe it was a very primitive instinct, to be afraid of what was different, because it wasn’t supposed to be part of your tribe. But, nowadays, there are many types of tribes. You don’t focus only like in the physical things. You want to talk to people that like the same music that you like and read the same type of books and watch the same movies and who enjoys to go outdoors or who enjoys a bike ride.
You want to connect with people because of their content, not because of how they look, and I think that’s evolution. We are evolving. Click To Tweet
Anything that will bring us to the next level, that is a great thing. And now you’re here as a part of a larger initiative, forgive me if I get this wrong, the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative.
It was perfect. So, it’s YLAI. It’s a State alumni program. It is set for people, entrepreneurs, and leaders of what you Americans call the Americas, which includes North America, South America, and the Caribbean. So they select a couple of people from each of these countries. From Venezuela, there were around 10. I think there were 20 from Mexico. Maybe like two from Jamaica, I don’t know, or two from Panama, I don’t know, depends on the country so there might be five, eight or two or three. And they just come to the US to different specific cities. In my case, I was selected Denver but there are people in Portland, San Francisco — no, San Diego, and more than 40 cities, I think, there are. Yes, and there are more than 10 of each. We’re in total 250 people from the Americas, including Canada, like doing this fellowship thing, different places related to what we do in our current countries. So, we’re here to collaborate, cross pollenization, and engage in joint projects, and learn. So, my host is supposed to learn from me and I’m supposed to learn from my host. In this case, my host is The Commons. And I’m very happy to have come here, it’s a very lovely place. I love it. I’m very sad this is going to be over very soon. It was not enough time, but it is what it is and we have to continue online then.
Yeah, for sure. And this cross pollenization, which I know is like a buzzword maybe some of you all have heard and stuff, but it’s interesting because it is a two-way street, like we’re learning both ways and, hopefully, that’ll make us all grow a lot better. And in this program, you’ve also gotten to interact with some people around town here who have come from all these other countries. What has that experience been like to encounter people from places like Bolivia, Honduras, and Belize and everywhere else?
Yeah, well, I think everybody’s very excited, at least here in Denver. I don’t know how is the other cities, but everybody’s here excited about their host and doing what they’re doing and learning and meeting people, like I have had the opportunities to revise projects. We had to do this pitch, you were mentioning, it was homework, it was mandatory, and you have to upload your page before midnight on Monday and everybody was so into it and I think it was very good for us to have that type of exercise, like having to pay attention to details, looking for improvements, receiving feedback from different people, like, “This is my page. What do you think about it?” “Oh, I think you should include these, I think you should take this away. Why don’t you look to the camera? Why don’t you do this and that?” And those are things that are very necessary. It is part of the learning process. It’s part of becoming a better expression of yourself. So I think this is, generally speaking, a very good experience. After we finish in our cities, we’re going to go for a week in Washington, which I think is going to be a very interesting moment to be in Washington and I haven’t been there so it’s good experience to go and know the city, and then we are supposed to go back to each of our homes.
And then when you go back to Venezuela and continue on your path, what’s the continued relationship with The Commons, your host, or with anyone else that’s involved in the program? Is there regular check-ins that people continue to give each other advice?
There’s going to be some opportunities for us to continue to interact together. In my case, it could be a bit complicated because of Venezuela but I know that, in other places and with other hosts, they sometimes can be invited to the countries. Yes, to do things for maybe a week only, but they can be invited and things like that, which is actually very good. I think you see a lot of cross-pollenization. Yeah, there will be other opportunities to have academic programs and things to do, which can be of a lot of benefit for both communities, the one in your country and the one that host you here in the US. So it is very nice. I hope to continue the very nice relationships that I have created here during my time in Denver.
That is awesome. It is just awesome whenever we bring together people to just give perspectives on ideas. Sometimes the best perspectives you get or the most useful ones come from the most unexpected sources. How much have you refined your ideas that you came here with for Twist Hour? How much has been altered? How much has been like, “Oh, I need to consider this,” or, “I haven’t thought about that,” or, “Maybe I need to reconsider that”?
Well, I think that one of the biggest lessons I’m taking with me is the importance of the community. I mean, besides the work in itself. One of the things that makes The Commons the way it is is that it’s part of a larger thing and that is very important to take with me, especially in my position where one of my goals is to restore the social fabric in my country, especially in my town, so I have to get engaged with the larger community. I have to be involved with the rest of the community besides the co-working itself.
Even here, sitting here at The Commons on Champa, for example, there are plenty of business-owning members of the community that will never show their face in this particular building, just because it’s here and just because people say, “You can come here whenever you want, we have these events, these resources,” doesn’t mean a specific person is going to decide to come and so you’re saying is that there’s going to be a whole community out there, both within your hometown as well as outside that needs to come in and somehow be engaged with the people who you are trying to help build their confidence, build their businesses, get the right reinforcement and get the right feedback.
Yes, it’s just that The Commons is part of a larger scheme. There’s a big plan here to keep them the way it is and to improve it as possible. So The Commons is just one part of it. Very important one, because entrepreneurial spirit is one of the things that makes the city go. And there’s also a lot of efforts regarding like urban planning and events and everything, like you have Startup Week coming very soon and that is all part of the same thing, is creating a better city and I love it.
You also said that you’re looking for volunteers to dedicate their time. Would you be able to quickly describe, if anyone out there is listening is interested, if anyone wants some more information, what exactly you are looking for, a person who is, say, moved to help Venezuela to do and how they would best find you, get a hold of you and talk to you about it?
Okay, so Twist Hour is just thought of as a weekly date, you will have a virtual date with a Venezuelan who is trying to get something done, an idea, a business, a startup, do big one, we’ll have to see what is available, so you will have the conversation with these people and it’s just going to be a nurturing time for both of you and, of course, it’s just one hour so it’s not going to take away much of you. And this will help a lot to our people. Unfortunately, the idea is mainly an idea now because it was something that I came up with last week but I hope that in the next maybe 10 days, I will have it available on the webpage so you can just go online, sign up, and engage with a conversation once a week with somebody.
And that webpage is twisthour.com? Is that correct?
No, it will be in our own webpage which is twiststudio.social.
Twiststudio.social.
Yeah.
Okay, just making sure that anyone out there listening inspired has the right means to go out the resource. And then the final question I want to ask about is if anyone listening is also, say, in that spot where they’re not sure, you talked about this a little bit earlier, they’re not sure what they want to do, they just know that they want to help, they just want to build something, what would you say is the number one thing someone can do right now to start that reflection or determine what is it that they want to build, what they want to do?
Start with a why. Just find why do you want to do something. I remember it was in 2014, I decided to ask myself why I was still in the country. That is my why. Why am I still there? Well, because I want to make it better. That is the reason I do all the things that I do. That led me to different projects and different ideas and everything, because my why is to make things better. I said in my pitch, I believe in people and I believe also in empowering others so that is what I do.
So that’s the first step, so I talked about the situation, I think it was brought up by one of my other podcast guests, of people saying, “I don’t know what I wanna do, I just can’t keep doing this,” this referring to whatever their current job or endeavor is, so when someone’s in that spot and let’s say they don’t have necessarily the time or resources to do a three-, six-month long sabbatical to go into the rainforest and take 75 deep breaths or whatever the stereotypical thing is, not that I’m throwing shade on those things because if you can do it, those are great, but if someone doesn’t have that resource and they’re just stuck where they are feeling stuck, the first thing they should do is just look into, “Okay, why? What is moving me? What am I wanting to do?” Like what is that why. You said like, “I wanna make my country a better place.” Maybe someone else is looking at the homeless population saying, “I wanna help —
“I wanna change that.”
— this group of people,” or someone else could say, “I just want people to sit in nicer chairs,” I’m trying to come up with something that doesn’t have to be this like deep, gigantic global problem but still something that’s worth being a why.
Yes. I was very shocked a while ago, I heard that the most wanted class at Harvard was happiness class. I was shocked, because I couldn’t understand how people were not — I mean, it was like people don’t want to be successful, people want to be happy, and I was like, how on earth will you be successful if you’re not happy? Like I cannot understand how those things are not connected. And then I understand that the culture maybe here is very different and people don’t get the happiness part and they only get the successful, which I don’t think that’s successful at all. And I have always been working with things I like since I started working. I like, at least at some point, even when I was like editing law books, I liked it, because I like editing and books and reading and everything so I cannot understand that somebody’s doing something that they don’t like and makes them happy. So if you’re doing something that doesn’t make you happy, please stop. Find something that makes you happy and then figure out why that makes you happy and then it will give you all the knowledge of yourself that you need.
Reminds me of a piece of advice I sometimes give people which is like finding those times when you’re in that flow state, when you’re so entrenched in what you’re doing and you forgot to eat a meal, you forget to go to the bathroom, or if dig deeper and say like, “Why did this make me so enthralled in it that I wanted to stay doing it when this other task I do, I’m checking websites, I’m just distracting myself with everything?” but if you dig deep into that, you can usually find your why and you can usually find, as you said, the ideas will come once you find that why and, hopefully, you’re all encouraged that this is something that you can do even if you’re not in the best of circumstances, even if you just have half an hour a day to spare to like really dedicate toward reading up on some subjects and seeing if it motivates you and reflect on your experiences.
I agree.
Well, fantastic. Well, Susana, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes. I wish you the best in bringing this entrepreneurial spirit to Venezuela, to a place that really needs it. I hope that it becomes a very positive and uplifting development for a place that’s not exactly having the best of times right now. And I would like to thank everybody out there listening to Action’s Antidotes and encourage you to find your why, encourage you to foster a network of people both within your community as well as all around the world from different perspectives, and tune back into Action’s Antidotes for other episodes where we interview people who are pursuing their true passions.
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About Susana González
As Susana González lives in Venezuela, she realized that she didn’t want to continue being a passive spectator of what was happening in her country. She believes she can do more for all of them. Among her current projects, she is the founder and director of ED-Challenge. She has worked in TEDx Events (UCV TEDx 2015 ), participated in activities of her university on storytelling (OBE UCV), weaved networks in cultural and artistic events with Revista Muheve in 2010-2012 and Caracas Transmedia.
From then on, she has continued her professional development perfecting her knowledge in the digital world, social networks and transmedia narratives. Being part of the United Nations University, she has fostered her connections with different networks and communities around the globe, being today a “member” of various digital tribes, innovating the way we understand our society and the role we each occupy.
Today, she spends her days meeting and connecting with professionals from the Altos Mirandinos in the spaces of Twist Studio Creativo, a place of which she is the founder and faithful believer. They focus on creating the necessary opportunities for entrepreneurs, independent professionals and small business owners to continue with their dreams and not give up.