It is inspirations like these that makes it all the awesomer!

I’m a big fan of @WooThemes although I don’t use them all the time, but even more so, I’m a bigger fan of people who do REAL work for the benefit of others, for example, the co-owner of Woothemes @adii himself! He once blogged this:

Now this was exactly what I had in mind as I created my own startup called SocialGrooves.com, which is aimed to be a social business utilizing social media to promote other cause-centric businesses that are more often

not seen or known. Although the site is new, I’ve always been working with startups such as UKEC (or at least revitalizing it to its full glory), Young Corporate Malaysians (YCM), RandomAlphabets and its sister company Wago and even TeachForMalaysia, a new initiative whose objective is such that one day, all children in Malaysia will have the opportunity to attain excellent education. But most of these do not add to my rice bowl, hence, @SocialGrooves was formed on the 15th of December 2010, under the support of one Ong Kian Ming aka @imokman who said that I had to make a living for myself at the end of the day.

@SocialGrooves would not have formed if not for two people who joined me at the heart of it all, @YapThomas and @PD_Ren. Part of my own little ambition, the creation of the Engagement of Youth in the Economy (EYE) Project would not have started as well if not for @Re7a. The point here is that, if not for these people, none of this would have happened, and mind you none of them has gotten any pay because they want the companies to receive fundings first. Money will surely come, but passion and desire to make a winning product is really the most important factor as a startup! (this was how the initiatives mentioned above became successful anyway, because of the dedicated teams in each of the respective startups).

Now in every initiative, there are always leaders associated with them. For @WooThemes, there was @adii, Magnus and Mark and crew.

For UKEC, @WMFirdaus, myself and the rest of the crew compromising of Lopes, @aliaishk, @iedilputra, @rashdanh, Wan Zu, Ain and more.

For RandomAlphabets we have @ZainHD, @NikiCheong and I along with playas @vinivedivici @devuschka @shaqyl @radiojules and more.

For Teach For Malaysia, there was @Dzameer, @keeransivarajah and I before super crew @nawranajebe and others came in.

So you see, it always starts with a small group of people before the community grows. And now, all of the initiatives have grown so much it’s amazing. It’s part of people’s lives. It’s become a reason to live. The people who start all of these, they are inspirations by themselves. I needed @Adii to know this, and his reply was as above!

The next thing I know, he says

Tweets like this, makes everything so much more worthwhile. 🙂

Clicking the link brought me to his blog, on this post right here:

Can you imagine the thrill of having someone like @adii blogging about you, appreciating a reply from some random nobody who’s a big fan of his work? This is a person who leads some 45,000 community of users using @Woothemes and is currently heading Aboard Entrepreneurship, a project about entrepreneurship and empowering upcoming entrepreneurs do be better entrepreneurs in the future by teaching them skills and inspiring them via the shared knowledge and experience of all of AE’s contributors, some of which consist of the people in the list below:

• Alexa Andrzejewski, Foodspotting
• Jacob DeHart, Threadless (Ex)
• Todd Garland, BuySellAds
• Justin Kan, justin.tv
• Jenn Lim, Zappos
• Matt Mullenweg, Automattic (!!!)
• Alexis Ohanian, Reddit
• Naveen Selvadurai, Foursquare (oh yes)
• Collis Ta’eed, Envato
• Garry Tan, Posterous

You can’t tell me you don’t know at least 2 of the people in this list! Anyway the point is that if someone like me can be a reason for @adii to

do more, what if I, in turn, became an inspiration to others, too? It’s a whole ecosystem here, and a positive one, too 🙂

Seriously @Adii, not only did you inspire me with your work, but with this single post, I feel that I can achieve this year’s seemingly impossible target I’ve set for myself and my amazing team. The impact of your post even beats the highlight of being made into a referral point at Forbes’s blog for this post I made about Obama and the Digital Knights of the rectangular table 😛

The above is a screenshot that I will forever remember as my first step into one of Forbes’s many powerful list 😛

Yes, I am indeed inspired again and again this year for so many reasons. I cannot afford to fail myself, my team and my country and so will never give up and live up to the namesake of my father, the great Dr Tock Min Kin, who taught me the meaning of perseverance.