“We will not stay at the foot of the mountain, being able to ascend to the summit.” I am Teresian and that is a phrase that has always inspired me. Some may wonder what it means. The quote speaks of that although we have the option of staying to enjoy the valley, why are we going to do it when we can climb to the top of the mountain?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how time is running out. I feel like the moment to make my mark on the world is coming and I can’t put it off any longer. Maybe it’s because this 2022 I will be 37 years old or because I have seen the musical Tick, Tick … Boom! Too many times in a single week, but I certainly feel like next year will be the most interesting of my life.

Why? Because I have decided so.

After two years in a kind of limbo due to the pandemic (like everyone else), I am setting 2022 as the year when everything is reactivated, professionally and personally.

Of course, it seems very arrogant of me to decree that the next 12 months will be mine discounting factors such as (for those of us who are spiritual), the designs of luck, destiny, Universe, God or whatever they want to call it. However, what are we entrepreneurs if not beings who refuse to give up?

It hasn’t been an easy end of the year, but for someone who lost both parents before their 29th birthday, this all seems peccata minute . And the thing is, all the entrepreneurs I know – Latinos who know what it really means to live in crisis – are exactly like that. We do not shrink from external circumstances. Does life give us lemons? So we take out the tequila and have a party (or a citrus app).

To show “some buttons”. Latin America has not stopped being the troubled region that it has always been, even more so taking into account the effects of the pandemic in the last two years. However, in 2021 more Latin American unicorn companies emerged than ever ( Kavak , Clara , Incode , to name a few), others even reached the New York Stock Exchange (the Brazilian Nu , for example), and in the past 12 months, only in Mexico, there were capital rises amounting to 3.4 billion dollars from the main foreign funds.

We remain in an extremely volatile environment and global crises for our region are always multiplying. But also our ingenuity and inventiveness. Latinos are specialists in being fishermen in troubled rivers because our rivers are always troubled .

True, we still do not know what will happen to Covid and its new variants or what opportunities will open in the coming months (it is World Cup year!), But what we do know is that we have always survived. Our millenary culture and the old mule stubbornness that all Latinos have force us to get ahead.

Yes, 2022 will be a wonderful year, but it depends on you, on me, on everyone. I’m sure it will be a phenomenal year because we have no other choice.

It is time to build collaborative networks across the region, to look at new horizons. Of, -as Teresa de Ávila (a pioneer writer of the Spanish Golden Age) said -, “always aspire to high ideals.”

Happy 2022 and much success, entrepreneurs.