Susime is the acronym of supersize me and it is a blog about ideas on business and entrepreneurship from a quite different perspective. The actual name represents the initiative and the process of taking a tiny little idea and growing it in size and directions beyond whatever you could have imagined upon perceiving that idea in the first place. So, it is about startups, business, entrepreneurship – you name it. After all, it is about creating and developing ideas and the end goal is to inspire you to start trying things out. Let’s all start crafting ideas, throw them out there and let’s try to make the world, our world, a better place. And let’s make some noise!
This might sound a bit too abstract, so let me start by creating a bit of a context and position this in time, in space and ultimately in your mind. I am 32, living in London, UK for the last 6+ years and I have an office job I am terribly bored of. I have been thinking and saying out loud that one day I would like to have my own business – you know, to do my own thing whatever that may be.
That last phrase “whatever that may be” is actually important. It doesn’t matter what exactly because it is not critical according to my specified criteria. Those criteria are very simple and they are just two – that “whatever” has to:
- interest me, so that I can really hook on it and take it as far as I can, and
- make a positive impact to the world, whether this is something as little as alleviating a simple but yet annoying task in one’s everyday life or tackling global issues like let’s say finding the cure for cancer
In any case, I would consider myself ultimately successful if I managed to inspire people to initiate ideas that will make themselves better humans and the world a better place.
Inspiration is the only heritage that can continue expanding and affecting people infinitely through time and space without requiring the physical presence of the person triggering it
I want to inspire. Plain and simple. And I was always thinking that if I manage to create something astonishingly big and shake the ground below your feet, then that would probably make a quite inspiring story to move you and motivate you to do more.
But let’s leave the “great impact to the world” idea aside just for a moment and reflect upon the here and now. How do I approach the concept I described above? What do I actually do? Well… The truth is that I am just trying to figure that out… Funny as it might sound, I think it is quite legit though.
If everything still hovers above a vague territory, I hope it will get crystal clear once I describe the incidents that formed the creation of susime. Lately I have been stripping myself off of any excuse for not taking real action on creating something, anything, aligned to the direction my dreams have always been pointing towards. It is one thing to dream on, and it is another to act on your dreams. Dreams should never cease actions. They should fuel them instead. So, one day around four weeks ago, I set myself against the wall, I threatened me to the point that I was all wet in sweat and cold in fear and I instructed myself to take immediate action otherwise I would drown myself in an abyss of misery and depression for the years yet to come.
I started looking at entrepreneurship fast-track 2 or 3-day courses, I found nothing that could serve me immediately and without realizing it I was lost in books, blogs, podcasts and any kind of medium reading and listening about startups. Within a few days I decided to start a website and since then, around three weeks now, I am working on it. This is the point that you may start imagining that I found the opium that will change my life once and for all and if you do so, I will have to tell you… not quite. It never works that way I guess… It will be a pretty basic website to start with. But more on that in the upcoming posts.
So, I work on that website fragmentarily whenever I find some time. Sometimes in the office I listen to some podcast I think it could be interesting and relevant to my needs and concerns. Such a day, I listened to Pat Flynn’s podcast, episode #46, in which he interviewed Dane Maxwell, founder of the Paperless Pipeline and The Foundation and apparently a fairly successful entrepreneur. That is an interview that I very much enjoyed and I found quite inspirational as well. Once the podcast was over, I scrolled down the post looking for a link that Pat had mentioned and I wanted to check out myself. So I ended up going all the way down to where the comments begin and out of curiosity I stopped to read the first two that appeared on my screen. And boom! Long comments arguing that Dane made it sound all very simple but it is not, or that he targeted a very particular industry and a very lucrative one, or that it made a difference that his uncle was working in that industry, a fact that had a very critical impact on his success and so on. The comments were very nicely written and polite and, honestly, they had some fair points. But, and this is one huge but, that made me realize that people are always, always, always looking for excuses. And those comments really destroyed my strategy on how to inspire people. Remember, I was thinking to create something and try to succeed big time and once succeeding I would have a successful story to share and thus inspire. I was also thinking that being a successful entrepreneur gives sound credibility to talk about entrepreneurship.
By reading those comments I was left to wonder if it does really work that way. Eventually, it might be the case that the very fact of being successful is a great pool for excuses in some people’s minds. They would always try to convince themselves that there had been certain reasons that made your story a successful one, reasons that are so particularly tied up to you that something similar wouldn’t work for them. This is what turned my mind 360 degrees and this is what gave birth to susime. I will not try to succeed and if done spread the story. Instead, I will create the story of my success pursue. The website that I am working on is not live yet and frankly most of the things about it exist only in my mind as of now. So, I will share with you practical steps I take in approaching that website and entrepreneurship in general, I will share with you my thoughts, my strategies, my feelings. My peaks, my valleys, my enthusiasm, my agony, my joy and my sorrow. Susime will emerge as a blog about entrepreneurship in the making. After all, there is no more time left to lose and if I want to find a way to inspire others I’d better get started sooner rather than later, with whatever means I have. I will let it all out. And I will succeed or I will fail, step by step, right in front of your eyes. But if I do succeed, only if I do, then there will be no excuse for anyone to use for holding themselves back. And I hope that through that journey, through observing one’s attempt to success, you will get engaged and you will try your own ideas, your own way of creating an ever better version of yourself, an ever better version of the world we live in.
I will create posts very specific on the website I am working on to give you an actual insight for the process but I will also create more general posts about entrepreneurship or anything else I have in mind and I feel that one way or another have an impact on my journey. I will also create how-to posts with a bit more specific or technical content regarding things that bother me and I end up researching online and/or asking people for quite a while before clarifying them in my mind. So, if you happen to struggle with similar issues and dilemmas, I want to save a bit of your time and help you focus more on the ideas and less on practical issues.
There are these moments that I feel I would love susime to become an online community, a very big round table. I want to reach out to you. I want to influence you. To influence you to influence others. And start a domino that will carry on eternally. I want to see you get motivated and start your own thing. And maybe further down the line we will all be in a position to bring something in the table. And start connecting all those pieces. And create something way bigger than the sum of our achievements. And find out every single grey zone in this world and paint it colours. Let’s roll!
Welcome on board, susi… you
If you generated any thoughts on what you just read, either good or bad ones, I would appreciate it if you leave a comment below and let me know. Feedback is invaluable in one’s strive for progress. If you think that this post could possibly motivate people to take more action on their lives, then it is worth sharing it. And if you come back to read my next post when this is up then you will make my words really count. Until soon!
