Last Week - Final bit of advice

If I had one final lecture I would break it up into different sections.  Secular and Spiritual. We know however that all things are spiritual in the end.

First spiritual. My advice to you would be to get yourself in a place where you can be consistent in your spiritual habits and patterns before you ever worry about the secular stuff. Find out how to draw close to God so that your life can have a Divine Director. No matter what you are enthusiastic about or what your passions and desires are, you will benefit greatly by listening to the promptings provided by and an all-knowing Being such as our Father in Heaven. He can guide and direct you better than I will ever be able to and provide you with specific, personalized direction.

My second piece of advice would be to get married to someone that lifts you up, encourages you and is not demeaning. I would encourage you to find someone that challenges you both in your ideas and thoughts and also to be a better person. I would advise that you find someone that is willing to participate with you on your journeys especially when it gets hard, because it will always get hard. That can either bring you closer or split you apart.

I would also advise you to learn how to learn. We can all attend school but the thing that will make it that much better for you is by learning how you learn. If that’s by reading, visually, listening or hands on practice, understand yourself and how it works for you. If you can figure that out, you will be able to figure out anything required of you in life.

Keep learning. Never finish. Always be reading, writing, and practicing. New hobbies are a great way I have personally found very enjoyable and instructive. I would recommend finding hobbies on the other end of the spectrum of what you do for work. I personally work white collar, service based jobs, but I enjoy building things out of wood or metal.

Doing all of these things brings me to my last piece of advice. Vanquish your fears. Working on projects, understanding how you learn and having a Divine Director are all keys to allowing you to become the best possible you. By taking calculated risk, overcoming your fears of the unknown, you will find that anything becomes possible and even fun. Relish the trials and experiences you have, and learn what you can from each one. Things that have been difficult are the best teachers in life as they cause you to either grow and get stronger, or give up and become weaker. They are the refiner’s fire in life and will help you to reach your full potential.

Week 13 - Randy Haykin

This week is our second to last week. I was so excited that we were so close that I just did all the readings and a lot of the work on Monday. When I had watched the videos and taken the quiz, I realized in my excitement that I had actually done all of Week 14's readings, video watching and quiz. I guess I got it done early. :)

This week, even though it was the 2nd week I had done this week, was still very good. We did a case study on Randy Haykin which was interesting. A few quick points I wanted to share about what I liked about him and that I thought were worth learning and noting. A list of do's if you will

• Always be learning
• Acknowledge your strengths as well as your weaknesses
• Balance your work and personal life
• Minimize your risk by using opportunities presented to you
• A partnership is like a good marriage, with multiple checks and balances as well as a complementary relationship

Another thing I thought that was interesting was in the paper we had to write. It asks the question, "What has Haykin's "toughest hurdle" as a business leader?" - There's actually a paragraph dedicated to what he felt it was. He basically said it was failure. In my paper, I chose the balance of work and life as my own toughest hurdle as I feel like I am personally acquainted with failure and to me it seems like something there to teach us more, but the struggle for balance never goes away. 

Until "next" week. :)

Week 12 - A Hero's Journey

First off... week 12! Semester is almost over which is crazy to think about. I've got my first 9 credit hours in the last 2 years of school almost done and with all A's ( I hope I can finish with )

This week was good as always. I wrote a book report on the book, A Hero's Journey. It was interesting and has lots of really good little stories, poems, etc, that are both interesting and inspiring.

There were some great quotes and thoughts given in the book.

Invictus:

“I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” 

This has always inspired me. It brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from a movie:

We listened to a great talk which basically addressed the question of what one does with their money when they have been blessed with a lot but also addressed what one does in service regardless of the money.

Elder Holland also had a great talk that I liked a lot. I always enjoy his talks. He puts a capital P in Passion.

3 questions were included for the journal this week:

• Based on what you read in the first two pages (pages 3 and 4), why are virtue and integrity so vital to an economy?
• According to Charles Handy, what is the “real justification” for the existence of businesses?
• What are two solutions proposed by Handy that you agree with? Why?

Answers:

1) Essentially, they are so important because without them, we could not transact business. If we didn't have trust or confidence in a merchant that they would either provide quality of merchandise or service, we wouldn't buy from them. See also, confidence in the reality ( or lack thereof ) in the story of JSG Boggs who is an artist that did a social experiment on the value of money.

2) "It is to make a profit so that the business can do something more or better.That “something”becomes the real justification for the business. Owners know this. Investors needn’t care."

3) Serving Neglected Customers and Associating with a Cause. I believe that the value of money diminishes if it is not attached to something. See the intro for the JSG Boggs documentary. If we can find value to the people, the money will come.

It's been a good week. On to the next!

Until next week.

Week 11 - Attitude on Money

• What is your attitude toward money?

I don't particularly like money, except that it grants me freedom from stress and allows me to do things. It is an excellent tool but a very poor master. 

I respect the power of money to create or destroy. I see it every day in work where people leverage money to do some very cool things. Both creatively and professionally which oft time mix together.

On the other side of that, people get very attached and feel very entitled to money that isn't theirs or that they didn't earn. They tend to become pretty nasty individuals when they find that they are in debt or are slaves to poor decisions when they have chosen not to do due diligence or take responsibility for their actions.

• How can your view of money affect the way you live?

I feel that it can benefit me greatly if used properly. For example, if I use it provide food and comfort and stability for my family, it can be an excellent tool like I stated before. If, however, I choose to use it for frivolous things and I don't manage it properly, it can become a huge burden and weight on my shoulders.

Currently, it is neither a great tool nor a burden as I don't have extra but I don't owe extra. I have sufficient for my needs which is an ok place to be. Not ideal, but ok.

• What rules are recommended for prospering?

I would say the biggest is live within your means. Don't spend more than you have or you will become a slave to someone else. 

If you have extra, give. Not out of fear or guilt but because you genuinely want to help others. There are lots of organization or even personal things you can do for others to help. Money allows you the freedom to serve once you have eliminated your own debt to others.

Week 10 - Interviews

This week I have learned about time management.

I know it has nothing to do with the reading or the videos but that's what I've really learned about.

The videos and readings were good as normal but the interview was what took up most of my time. Here are my takeaways from it at the end.

My first takeaway was that you need to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses. LaMar recognized that he was good at some things and not so good at others. He was very interested in some aspects and not at all interested in other. I think the key is to really take the time to understand which is which and how you can fix that. For some it may be just learning different skills, for others it may be having those tasks given to someone else, which brings me to my second takeaway which is more of a personal insight.

The insight I got is that I hate pricing things. It becomes too personal to me. I feel very attached to what I choose as my pricing and if I’m directly involved with it, I find that I have a poor response. If someone doesn’t want to pay me what I think I’m worth, it again becomes a personal insult almost. Moving forward, I’m having my wife talk to people, and negotiate my prices so I don’t have to worry about it. I can just do the part I’m good at, interact with people and take pictures. I’m also very good at process improvement. I can take something, tear it down to something simple and assemble it back together in a functional, efficient and understandable process.

My second insight is that no matter how good your product is, if you can’t sell it and people don’t know about it, you can’t be wildly successful. Success in business comes when there is a perfect storm or balance of all the characteristics… maybe even the 4 p’s that we learned about in this last chapter of another class.

Until next week.

Week 9 - Leadership and Ethics

This week there were some good videos and articles as usual. One thing that stuck out to me was Levinson’s video about ethical practices and being moral. He says they hire “nice people” which I thought was kind of funny. But then he went on and told the audience that they had just accepted returns, no questions and just replaced things for their customers. Being a business major, that thought intrigued me and then he drops the golden nugget. “The whole goal of business is to weld customers to you and part of what does that is just treating them as you'd like to be treated or more.”

We talked about treating others as they would want to be treated today when talking about stellar customer service. We talked about how treating them as they want to be treated is very important because it takes you out of the equation. You are not important in the interaction because it’s all about your customer.

In my side work, I need to remember that sometimes, the end result is more important than the time, even when it hurts a little bit. I also need to remember that my $500 client will never be my $5000 client. Just food for thought.

Until next week.

Week 8 - Entrepreneurial Studies

This week, as many weeks are, was good. We started reading a new book called "A Field Guide for the Hero's Journey". That’s been interesting but not what I really wanted to focus on.

I think my favorite part of this week was the short video on the Five Why’s which can be found here.

For me it’s always interesting to see how an organization evolves and progresses and how one might overcome the difficulties and challenges that come with pioneering something new.

The main focus of this video is what the author, Eric Ries, calls “human problems”. He reviews how one might encounter an error and only look at it topically but that we really need to ask additional questions to find the root causes of these problems.

He details them more clearly in other examples such as this one.

He provides a scenario for us in his article.

Let's say you notice that your website is down. Obviously, your first priority is to get it back up. But as soon as the crisis is past, you have the discipline to have a post-mortem in which you start asking why:

1.    Why was the website down? The CPU utilization on all our front-end servers went to 100%

2.    Why did the CPU usage spike? A new bit of code contained an infinite loop!

3.    Why did that code get written? So-and-so made a mistake

4.    Why did his mistake get checked in? He didn't write a unit test for the feature

5.    Why didn't he write a unit test? He's a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD

These are all why questions used to get to the root cause of the error and from my understanding are learned from the Toyota Production System. The method is still the same today and it’s basically just asking why at a minimum of 5 times in order to get to the real reason for the issue. 

Hopefully that was some good food for thought.

Until next week.