It is a widely held notion that the most essential elements of a profession are learned while working on it. With the task at hand, we align ourselves with its objectives, we take action, we improve, and we succeed. And the repetition of the task, specific skill, or piece of work for which we work so hard eventually leads to us becoming an expert in that field. All we need to do is fire up our passion for that particular ability, and most of the time, the rest just falls into place.
Benjamin Talin’s professional entrepreneurial journey has followed the same path leading him to become an admired leader in the digital space. Benjamin began his professional journey when he was only thirteen years old and after many ups and downs, including many unsuccessful efforts to start companies, he finally realized what he wanted to accomplish with his professional life. As a result of his repetition, he founded MoreThanDigital, a company where he turned his passion, vision, and personal purpose into a successful corporation.
Following The Passion
Benjamin built his first company surrounding computers and finding smart solutions at the age of 13. At the time, he didn’t even think of becoming an entrepreneur. Rather, it was a challenge, and he had to prove himself in front of a friend of his family.
Since then, Benjamin Talin has come a long way in his professional journey. Today, he stands tall among the esteemed leaders in the world and is known for being a Digital Transformation Expert, International Keynote Speaker, Start-Up Specialist & Serial Entrepreneur, Futurist, and Guest Lecturer, and Associate Professor.
Benjamin earned all these diverse hats by creating an impact in the industry, having a clear vision, and staying true to himself. While it is hard to bring together all these qualities and be really good at it, Benjamin achieved this feat by following his passion devotionally. He says, “My biggest driving factor is always the idea of changing something. Give me a problem and I will automatically try to find a solution until it will be better.”
Benjamin also cites various influential people in his career to be his role models. These individuals were passionate about their visions, willing enough to challenge people, and be powerful to move masses.
Emphasizing the importance of having passion in one’s life, Benjamin also delivers a powerful statement about owning up to it, “Even sometimes things are hard, even sometimes people hate you and even if you are against the stream, it is always worth following your own passions. It happened to me and despite all of that, I followed my passion and will always follow it.”
Turning Passion into a Living
In everyday life, people sacrifice a lot to maintain the delicate balance of work and life. For Benjamin, achieving this balance meant sacrificing money, time, and friends, and much more to reach where he is today. And the more the work came, the more Benjamin found the challenge in following his passion.
His then girlfriend and his drive to learn, explore, and travel were reasons enough for him to take off weekends. And by fate, when Benjamin was involved in keynote speaking and established MoreThanDigital, this job no longer remained the job; it transformed into his hobby, his world, his thoughts, and more. It led him to meet a lot of interesting people, to come up with new solutions.
Turning his passion into a job, Benjamin created a simple pathway — MoreThanDigital—for entrepreneurs to stay up to date with the latest trends and latest happenings in technology for their digital transformation journey. The latest tools, buzzwords, marketing, and other digital aspects can be overwhelming. It is something that also baffled Benjamin during the establishment of MoreThanDigital, which at some point developed into a frustrating project in his life. Thus, he established a platform to help people around the world to learn topics of the future easily.
And now, MoreThanDigital.info, as a world-leading platform, is helping millions of executives every year to understand topics of the future with the buzzword and marketing free knowledge from the best experts and companies in the world.
Taking Challenges Head-on
Being an ‘all-in’ type of personality and passionate about his vision, Benjamin had to break the old stereotypes and structures to make into the ‘playgrounds of the big boys.’ Labels synonymous with ‘young and inexperienced man’ were associated with Benjamin pertaining to his young success, ability to give lectures, and being a published author at a young age. Obviously, this resulted in Benjamin receiving a great deal of negative feedback from people who were critical of him just like what any other ‘dreamers’ face every day across the globe in this modern age.
To his conclusion, although everyone wants to stand out in general, no one desires to be distinct from the crowd, different from the rest. And to succeed faster, people often succumb and play by the rules set by society. He explains, “I like to be a dreamer, thinking of a better future, thinking of solutions for tomorrow and also challenging the status quo. But all this always comes at a price and especially when you are playing with the ‘big boys’ the air gets thin, and you really have to excel in so many ways you wouldn’t believe.”
After going through these circumstances and notions, Benjamin Talin developed the capacity to see beyond those who cannot embrace change and ignore those who do not want to. His observation is that those who are questioning the status quo are more vulnerable to criticism. However, it is also the same element that gives them the ability to speak out when something goes wrong or is not right.
Advice to Emerging Leaders
Benjamin’s will of going upstream, further beyond everyone, and challenging the traditional norms was more important than making his life easier by playing by the rules. He says, “There will be a lot of stereotypes. But as said before, I am not the kind of person to fall to these rules and I am who I am because I was always like this.”
And his advice to young, emerging, and aspiring entrepreneurs entails the same ideology of never giving up. At the same time, he cautiously explains that our own assumption might have been falsified. As such, young leaders must move forward by keeping their minds open. They must know when sticking to their gun is needed and being stubborn is the only way to get through.
Future Impact
For years to come, Benjamin Talin has placed MoreThanDigital in the right place to develop more highly scalable solutions for economic development and education.
On the personal end, he envisions spending the upcoming years standing in universities, stages, in front of governments and ministries guiding individuals of all life. Alongside, he is keeping his keen eyes on strengthening his team to create an impact with #bethechange and MoreThanDigital. And the most important of all, going forward he will keep his passion for being curious, challenging the status quo, and being the best version of himself alive.
