Hard work is the name of the game. In a world where ideas are being generated at the speed of a million-a-minute, it’s one’s ability to hold on to a single thought and run with it to the finish line and beyond that makes all the difference between success and failure. At least, that’s the philosophy that drove entrepreneur Nes Velazquez, who believes that there’s no tradition when it comes to entrepreneurial success. Here’s what he means.
If success is a destination, then, hard work, imagination, consistency, discipline, and love for knowledge are the roads that lead to it. Entrepreneurs make good success stories precisely because their sagas are always about overcoming internal and external odds. For Nes, an entrepreneur’s journey will never lead down a beaten down path because in a changing world people will always face new challenges and cultivate new ways to overcome them. He says, “There is no fixed tradition from whence entrepreneurs come. There’s a culture though, and that culture is constantly transforming, evolving, and growing. Entrepreneurs who think that they’d like to be the next Steve Jobs or the next Walt Disney soon find out that there’s a world of difference between emulating and copying. Most entrepreneurs I know, and that includes myself, had to grope in the dark, let our wits guide even as the unpredictable wilderness of the marketplace cut and slashed us on our way into clearer meadows.”
We tend to follow the footsteps of people we look up to. And some of the biggest entrepreneurs are names that have passed into legends and myths. What we see through media are specks of their genius and smidgens of their eccentricities. For Nes, this larger-than-life persona creates a semblance of tradition that people want to hold onto and take forward but are often disillusioned. He prefers, instead, to, “Make your mark. If there must be a tradition, you’ll have to create it yourself. Sure, there’s a history to where you come from. And the idea is not to repeat that history but to learn from it and then, in pure entrepreneurial spirit, improvise it, make it yours and thus add a new layer of joy in the world or peel back one to make things clearer.”
Nes started as an outsider in the world of finance. He did not let that deter him and instead relied on hard work and patience to make a name for himself in the world of Foreign Exchange.
