How looking closer changed the way I see business, sustainability and community.

One of my favourite things to photograph is insects.

Not because they’re rare or particularly beautiful in the traditional sense, but because most people don’t stop to look at them. Some people don’t notice them at all, while others actively dislike them.

Macro photography has taught me that if you get close enough, the world changes. Tiny hairs, unexpected colours, intricate patterns and relationships suddenly appear. Things that were always there become visible simply because you decided to look a little closer.

Looking back, I think that’s exactly what happened with entrepreneurship.

For years, I struggled calling myself an entrepreneur because I hadn’t built a successful business.

I had started projects. I had ideas. I’d tried more than once to create something of my own, but none of those attempts became the kind of business people usually celebrate. So every time I tried to describe myself as entrepreneurial, a little voice in my head would answer:

“yeah, but not really.”

The funny thing is that this struggle probably started much earlier.

When I left school, I chose to study Environmental Sciences because I was fascinated by biodiversity, indigenous communities and the relationship people have with nature. I was drawn to the idea that humans weren’t separate from the natural world but were very much a part of it.

Then I got to university and I quickly realised there was an underlying tension that nobody seemed to question.

Many of the people around me viewed business, entrepreneurship and money with suspicion. They represented extraction, inequality and environmental degradation. If you truly cared about nature, it almost felt as though you were expected to reject business altogether.

At the same time, my own experience told a different story.

My father built his career in the corporate world. Thanks to that, I grew up with opportunities, stability, an education that I know many people don’t have and ironically, access to nature.

Thinking about it, neither perspective felt completely right. So instead of choosing one over the other, I found myself asking a question that would quietly shape the rest of my career:

Why do these two worlds seem so disconnected?

That question eventually led me to study Business Creation and Development after Environmental Sciences.

At the time, I thought I was learning how to create businesses. Now I realise I was actually trying to understand how change happens.

Years later, while working at Laboratorio Social in one of Mexico City’s most dangerous neighbourhoods, that understanding began to shift again.

We worked with entrepreneurs from communities where starting a business wasn’t about building the next unicorn company or becoming wealthy. It was about creating opportunities where very few existed. It was about generating enough income to support a family, to keep children away from the streets, rebuilding confidence, strengthening local economies and giving people more control over their own future.

Entrepreneurship looked completely different there.

It wasn’t about growth for growth’s sake. It was about dignity, about resilience, about possibility. I began to realise that perhaps I’d been measuring entrepreneurship against the wrong definition all along.

Over the years I’ve also worked with international organisations, sustainability networks and businesses of all sizes and what I’ve noticed is that business itself isn’t the goal.

It’s a tool. And like any tool, it can be used to extract or to regenerate. To concentrate wealth or to create opportunities. To ignore communities or to strengthen them.

The question isn’t whether business is good or bad.

The question is: what are we building with it?

For me, entrepreneurship has gradually stopped meaning “creating companies.”

It has become the practice of creating possibilities; possibilities for people who haven’t had opportunities before, for communities to become more resilient, for businesses to create value beyond financial profit and most importantly for nature to become part of the conversation.

And perhaps that’s also why sustainability in business has always made sense to me.

Not because it’s another department or another report, but because it invites us to ask better questions.

• Who benefits from the decisions we’re making?
• Who might be left behind?
• What impact are we having on the places and people around us?
• How can we create prosperity without losing the natural systems that sustain us?

Research increasingly shows that businesses integrating environmental and social considerations into their strategy are often more resilient, more innovative and better prepared for the future. But beyond the evidence, I think something even more important is happening. We are begining to redefine success.

Not as financial growth, but as the ability to create value that lasts; for people, for communities and for nature.

Looking back now, I don’t think I’ve spent my career trying to combine environmental science with business. I’ve been trying to reconnect two conversations that had stopped listening to each other.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always enjoyed connecting people, translating between disciplines and bringing together ideas that initially seem incompatible.

And maybe that’s also why I finally feel comfortable calling myself entrepreneurial.

Not because I’ve built a successful company, but because I’ve spent my career creating possibilities.

Sometimes that’s through businesses. Sometimes through communities.Sometimes through sustainability. And sometimes, just like with macro photography, by simply helping people look a little closer.

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Claudia Cordova is the Community Builder at Women in Sustainability Network. With a background spanning sustainability, entrepreneurship and international development, she’s passionate about helping people and ideas flourish through meaningful connections and shared learning. Away from her desk, she’s often behind a macro lens, discovering the remarkable stories hidden in the smallest corners of nature—and occasionally finding unexpected lessons about work and life along the way.