My storybook writer mindset:
My husband and I like to play a game sometimes, we look at random people on the street as we walk and we ask each other questions about them. - “Look at that girl at the airport, is she single or married?” - “Is she from Central America or South America?” We have to quickly analyze details and give answers that we will never know if are accurate or not, but the exercise of focusing on situations, people or objects, and finding reasons about why they are in a particular place or time is fun for us. Sometimes, I go a little bit further, and l imagine a full story about people’s lives.
I have done this since I was a little girl because it is fascinating to me the fact that we live in a world where millions of possibilities can happen. I enjoy expanding my imagination and curiosity about cultures, societies, and places. How external factors can change people, but also how people can influence in the environment around them.
Since I was five years old, people have told me that I am a natural storyteller. However, I know that my mom and the exposure that she gave me to literature and scenic arts have had a significant influence on my life, and specifically on this passion that I have for writing fiction books. From her, I also learned the love for teaching and helping others. Her support was tremendous when I decided to co-found an educational startup, that combined my fascination for education and storybooks.
At the end of 2016, a friend of mine and I started to create a subscription box for children, that included science experiments, art projects, and stories related to the theme of each box. Other two people joined us as co-founders, and we got a seed investment of USD 29.000. Creating this company has been the most challenging thing I have ever done, it also brought me a lot of satisfaction and learning, but most importantly, helped me to develop an interest in businesses and how they impact our world every day.
I transitioned from different positions in my company apart from being the writer and content creator, one of them, and probably the most important one, was to be our Chief Operating Officer. In this role, I developed crucial skills thanks to different situations that I had to face daily related to the creation of products, dealing with suppliers and contractors, etc. However, I think that having the mindset of a fiction book writer helped me to look at situations from different perspectives, and finding solutions to problems in creative ways that nobody else in our team could think about before.
Even though our company was growing, two years later there started to appear problems between some of the co-founders. More then, everybody decided that it was wiser to split the company and end it.
It was hard to say good-bye to my first startup, but all the things I learned there are always going to be part of who I am. In the present, I am starting over again. I am working on the creation of Orinoco! My brand of storybooks. Besides, I am building my career in business; I want to improve my skills in the area of operations and use them for helping companies to be successful in their processes. Additionally, I want to explore and get more knowledge about other business areas. For that reason, I am a participant of Praxis, an excellent apprenticeship program that is helping me to sharpen my skills and learn from experts in the tech world.
As I live life and I get exposed to new places and people, I develop new interests that I can turn into business ideas in the future, projects for serving people, or hobbies that I enjoy. But in everything I do, I bring my imagination to reality to think of infinite possibilities in which things can be designed or fixed, and that is thanks to the creation of fiction books and the way they have expanded my way of thinking.