Sept. 17th, 2010
Good things are happening pretty quickly now. The Yale talk went well yesterday; more on that soon (video update!). I was able to secure support from two more companies: The Vitamin Creek and the Tunstall Organization, Inc. You can read a little more about their involvement at the end of this post. We’ve also been published in another NYC area newspaper. It’s a medium-sized publication called The Scarsdale Inquirer, and we were published in the “Glancing Askance” column. I met the author of the column, Marc Wollin, while eating pizza at my new friend Salvatore Naimo’s diner, Cavallo’s Pizzeria. The article is incredibly well written, and I think it captures the essence of our tour perfectly! Marc also posts his stories to his blog; I’ve pasted an excerpt here:
“… Szelkowski certainly could have taken a more traditional approach to starting a business. After all, even in recession ravaged Michigan, most people looking for work don’t take off on skates for a year. Why this direction? He says it had its roots when he spent a semester in Germany. While he and his fellow students felt out of place and out of control, he finally figured out the way to cope was to give that control up and ride the wave. ‘For just a period of time, instead of living life, I let life live me,’ he recalls. ‘It’s not to say that I was passive. I just learned to laugh with the punches. I learned to let life be an interesting and unpredictable experience. I let life be an adventure. I’ve never lived more fully than I did during that three month span. Never.’ …” Read the rest…
Now its on to Harvard, Wellesley College, and beyond! For now, here’s the story about how I got involved with my new partners Sabir Semerkant and David Tunstall:
Sabir Semerkant, CEO of The Vitamin Creek, has gone out of his way to provide both financial support and suppport via connection for the Freedom Skate. We had the opportunity to interview Sabir and a group of entrepreneurs he meets with each week, The Idea Team, to discuss my journey. Sabir, along with the idea team, provided a lot of great insights into the connection between entrepreneurship and freedom. They also provided us with some great ideas to help make this journey a success.
David Tunstall, CEO of the Tunstall Organization, Inc., has provided both financial support for the Freedom Skate as well as key ideas and connections to help us move forward. The Tunstall Organization is an accounting, consulting, and tax preparation firm that works primarily with non-profits and small businesses. David is the founder of “The Idea Team,” which brought us in for some documentary filming and idea sharing. I suspect that our meeting with The Idea Team will be one of the central grounding scenes of the documentary. It covers so much about the philosophy, psychology, and motivation of my journey.
