Oso Trava, a speaker at IBTM Americas on Sept. 14, believes that the more we broaden our field of vision, the more we can identify and change the mental models that limit us.

Oso Trava believes that the more we broaden our field of vision, the more we can identify and change the mental models that limit us.

Trava, a speaker, investor and business consultant who participated in Shark Tank Mexico, presented “It’s Always Day 1: Entrepreneurship and Leadership” on Sept. 14 during IBTM Americas in Mexico City. Trava also hosts the Cracks podcast, where he seeks to learn from the brightest minds in various fields.

Trava inspired the IBTM Americas audience to do things differently and to believe that today is the beginning of the rest of their lives. He shared two examples of people who have managed to transcend their vision and differences: Jeff Bezos and Richard Dawkins. 

Bezos is the founder of Amazon, a company that started selling books online and became one of the largest and most innovative companies in the world. Bezos always maintained a long-term vision and an attitude of constant learning, Trava said, which allowed him to create much value for his customers, employees and investors. His philosophy was based on considering every day as the first day, i.e., as an opportunity to improve and grow.

Richard Dawkins is a renowned biologist who wrote a book called “The Blind Watchmaker,” in which he talked about the essential characteristics of life, noting that our human nature results from our struggle against the environment, which forces us to evolve and survive. Trava agreed with Dawkins that being normal is the surest way to guarantee our lack of transcendence and, ultimately, our death. 

From a very young age, we have been asked to be adaptive, to resemble our environment, we have been asked to be “normal,” and it seems that being so guarantees our success, Trava said, while inviting the audience us to break the normal and go after the extraordinary.

Trava also talked about the changes we are living in a post-pandemic world, where artificial intelligence is a reality, and said that to create a culture of innovation, we must know the levers that drive our companies. When we think of high-performance teams, we imagine something ideal: that each company moves autonomously, collaborates with the others and can achieve any goal together, Trava said. However, we need to set up systems that foster psychological safety, innovation and teamwork to achieve this vision.

We must be customer-centric, understand our customers’ needs and provide them with solutions, Trava said. Our customers do not buy what we do but instead based on why we do it. When we connect with the purpose of our customers and our team, we can start growing. We should not wait for things to be perfect but act today. The more we broaden our field of vision, the more we can identify and change the mental models that limit us.