In class this week, we had a guest speaker to talk about his journey and the use of social media for his platform. The speaker was Valentí Sanjuan, a former radio personality turned Ultraman athlete. Valentí worked in radio in Barcelona in the mid 2000’s and was also pursuing another business on the side with his friends. All of a sudden, he lost everything within an eight month period. In these eight months he lost his job, his business venture with his friends, his longtime girlfriend, and his mother, who passed away suddenly. With his life in shambles, he thought about his mother’s life. For as long as he remembered, his mother and father worked and worked so that he and his sister could have a good life. Their parents enjoyed skiing, and his mother had been planning to use the first retirement check to buy ski equipment since she would have more free time. As fate would have it, she passed the month before the first check would have arrived. This forced his sister and him to look at their life and realize that anything could happen at any time, and tomorrow is never promised. They decided to make a bucket list of sorts, and started crossing items off the list. The first of these items was an Ironman race. At the time, he wasn’t in the best shape, and definitely wouldn’t be who one would expect to do a competition of this sort. In the end, he and his sister finished, and thus struck an addiction. From that one race, he decided to re-brand himself, and continue to train and push his body to finish more and more of these events, eventually competing in multiple Ultraman races and other high intensity races. He took to YouTube and other social networks, back when they were still new, to start sharing his story and inspiring others to seize the day. From the very beginning he committed himself to making a video every day, even bringing his laptop to dinner events to finish editing before the day was over. He has now built up his following to 280K on Instagram, 260K on YouTube, and 120K on Twitter. He also has his own high endurance clothing line on his personal website, and is the co-founder of Gordon Seen, a content agency that specializes in web 2.0. Now a days, Valentí can be found giving motivational speeches to venues with thousands of people, and sharing his feats of endurance on social media.

His speech taught me to take the leap in what I want to do. Tomorrow is never guaranteed and you have to do what you truly want when you can. It also taught me that in order to really be successful in something, 100 percent dedication is needed every day to truly build a brand or company. As far as improving his social media, I wouldn’t change anything because the content of the posts are clear and the frequency of the posts being published is ideal.