The author
Rodel Sinapilo
Author of The Unreasonable Why. Co-owner of a Philippine social enterprise. Formerly the man working overseas and not talking about what he wanted.
Rodel Sinapilo is a Filipino author and social entrepreneur, and the author of The Unreasonable Why: 10 Powerful Reasons Not to Give Up on Your Dreams (113 pages, ISBN 978-969-699-296-7). He is co-owner of Coco Deli, a social enterprise in the Philippines that makes food products from coco sap, lettuce and oyster mushrooms while working with smallholder farming communities. He grew up somewhere that did not encourage big ambitions, spent years working overseas to support his family, and wrote the book from that vantage point rather than from the far side of an obvious success.
Where he started
He was born and raised in a place where dreaming big was neither encouraged nor thought particularly possible. That is not a rhetorical opening — it is most of the argument. The book’s central claim only makes sense from somewhere that gives you no reason to believe it.
Like a great many Filipinos, he went abroad to work and to send money home. That period has a texture people who have done it recognize immediately: the practical success of it, the money arriving where it was needed, and underneath, a life put on hold that nobody asks about because from the outside it looks like everything is going well.
What he does now
He is co-owner of Coco Deli, a Philippine social enterprise built around coco sap sugar, and vegetable and oyster-mushroom products, working with local farmers and growers. The business is the reason the book is not theoretical. It was the thing that was unreasonable at the time.
His own site is at rodelsinapilo.com.
Why he wrote it
To say one thing plainly: if he could turn a vision into something real starting from where he started, then the reader can too. That is a modest claim and the book keeps it modest. It does not promise the reader will succeed. It argues that the reason to keep going has to be found rather than manufactured, and that most people already have one and have simply stopped listening to it.
The writing shows its working. Chapter 1 opens with Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory rather than a pep talk, and the stories in it are about a man who sketched between customers at a hardware store, not about anybody famous.
What he writes about
- Perseverance, and specifically why it fails — the mechanism by which people stop, which is rarely a dramatic decision.
- Intrinsic motivation, identity, and the difference between a goal you adopted and a dream that is actually yours.
- Comfort as an obstacle: the particular difficulty of leaving a life in which nothing is wrong.
- Social enterprise and building something in a place that is not set up for it.