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.

Week 7 - Ethics, Integrity and Self-Mastery go hand in hand.

Well, it's been yet another week. 

This week was good. I found myself doing a lot of internal reflection and finding some things I did and some things I didn't like. 

The videos and papers we read had to do with integrity and Ethics in my other class and this class was about mastery mostly.

I listen to a podcast called Startup and this most recent episode has a lot of what I would consider reflection.

It addresses some of the hard things we have to do in life. It may be applicable to you, it may not but I think that listening to the process of how they got there was great and could be applied by anyone if they truly wanted it.

I found it curious that all these classes and things aligned.

In order to truly master something, you have to be aware of yourself. Your thoughts, feelings, etc. You have to do a kind of deep dive into the dark spaces of your soul to figure out what makes you tick.

Everything mixed in a sort of wonderful cocktail of introspection that made me think a lot.

We did a book report on the book Mastery by George Leonard. It addressed the principle of mastery and how we go about achieving it. The most interesting part is that there isn’t an end goal necessarily. It’s a goal unto itself and has no end. It’s learning to enjoy the process and not just scrambling for an end goal. You should read it if you haven’t.

Until next week.

Week 6 - Priorities and Speed

Week 6. A satisfying, almost-halfway through the semester kind of week. Workloads in many classes have been increasing, but this week for this class wasn’t too bad.

I felt that this week was mainly focused on, do you really want to be an entrepreneur? There was some thought inducing videos about family and the importance of it even while creating a business. The main point in those is that you cannot sacrifice your family for the business. Your responsibility to them and to God must take priority over the business work to achieve success and happiness.

We also read an article called, “How Entrepreneurs Craft Strategies That Work” which was very interesting as well.

The article went through several ventures and some of what might be called standard criteria for opening or starting a business. There were a few interesting points on the benefits or opportunity costs of planning very well vs just diving straight in. While planning worked well for some, it didn’t work as well for others. In fact, it addressed the possibility of the idea no longer being good if one waited too long. I think that’s even truer in today’s world due to the amount of technology we have available. Just because you have an idea, it won’t stick around for you if there is actually a demand for it and there are so many people out there looking for something great to do.

Bottom line, there is risk, but if you can look, act, and take changes into stride, you could do very well.

Until next week!

Week 5 - Spreading Happiness

This week was pretty good. We watched the video, “A Hero’s Journey” which was quite interesting. I know there are lots of takeaways from the video. The main ones presented were:

1.  Was I a good person?
2.  Have I contributed something meaningful?
3. Who have I loved and who loved me?

Contained was the thought that after living a long life, that these would be the burning questions that were actually important at the end of it all.

Another item that was touched on is a list of “I will nots”. Write yourself a letter for each of these moral boundaries, or temptations, call them what you will, and take it out and read it when  you are approaching the thought of doing one of these I will nots. I think that’s very interesting and it also brings the topic of pre-decision decision making.

The last and most interesting thing I found in the video was the thought that, the hero does it first, the fool does it last, but they both do the same thing.

This, above all the others, really made me think. Am I taking initiative to help someone in need now, maybe when it’s inconvenient vs. later when I feel bad about it after living my life not having done so. Am I the hero or the fool? Did I take the risk, did I make the move, and did I make the leap? Now when I have so much to lose or did I wait until I felt secure, beyond the point when it would actually make a difference?

It’s going on my wall.

Levi

Week 4 - Overcoming Fear

Alrighty, so this week, addressed our fears, read some motivational literature and did a book report.

This week, the hardest exercise for me, and I think it would be for many, was to actually write down and address our fears and then look for solutions. I found that when you look at fear in a logical way, you realize, that if you can just plan it out and reason through it, it’s not actually that scary.

I realized that my worst fear is the unknown. It’s a hard fear to overcome as there are always going to be unknowns for as long as you are alive. The best way to mitigate the risk for the unknown is to learn. You must educate yourself by any means necessary. Whether this be through a formal education such as a University or Trade School, or a great mentor or friend with hard-won life experience, we need to learn.

The more we know, the less afraid we can become and the more able we will be to predict the outcomes of our choices. I personally would want to start small and then grow and gain confidence based on my successes and more importantly on my failures. As I learn, I will have that larger body of experience to draw on when making larger, or riskier decisions.

That’s what I really learned this week. If you have any thoughts, comments or just want to link to a great article, please do so in the comments.

Until next week!

Week 3 - Code of Conduct

Hello again!

So this week focused on a woman named Magdalena Yesil. She was pretty interesting.

Here is some of my intro which gives some insight of what I learned from this assignment.

Yesil’s lifelong habit of learning allowed her to change from one career type to another as they naturally flowed one into another. She accepted challenges and less-than-ideal situations and used them to learn everything she could about what she was doing. By being a lifelong learner, she was able to learn multiple aspects of each business and transform herself into the power house she became. This aspect of her personality also made her attractive to others searching for intelligent well rounded individuals such as Dan Lynch and brought different options to her several times.  If she had refused and decided to just stick with Computer Engineering, she probably would have never even been presented so many large opportunities down the line.

My brief conclusion is that she was a hard worker, intensely passionate about it and willing to learn anything that would make things better. No excuses, just solutions.

The other part we discussed was a personal code of conduct. I think this goes for everyone in that regardless of religion, creed or upbringing, we should all choose a code to live by and attempt to stick with it. That isn't to say that it can't be changed or modified when we find confusion or discrepancy, but taking action when your core beliefs are already decided is a much simpler process in the moment. 

Just to clarify, when I say "core beliefs" I'm not talking about ones like, I believe in God. That may be a huge motivator for your code of conduct but I'm talking about ones along the lines of, I will be honest always. 

Until next week. 

Week 2 - Questions

• Why do you think Randy Pausch was able to achieve so many of his childhood dreams?

In it, Randy ( who is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer ) give some great thoughts on life. He says that tenacity is the key. "Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to to show how badly we want something."

• Do you feel that dreaming is important? Why or why not?

I feel like dreaming is very important. One thing about dreaming is that it doesn't necessarily have to be realistic. In dreams, anything is possible and our minds can be as creative as they want. There are no boundaries and no impossibilities. Snapping back to reality, our dreams allow us to attempt to create something that is impossible today, but might not be tomorrow. 

I think many people have dreams of flying but this guy actually decided to figure out how to do it. Pretty impressive for something cobbled out of zip ties, duct tape, a pair of pliers as a hand held accelerator and a bunch of electric motors. 

• Discuss at least one of your childhood dreams. Explain why you believe you can or cannot achieve this dream.

I honestly don't remember any of my childhood dreams. I've had other desires since. I really wanted to build some great speakers. I have them in my living room right now, almost completely built and am starting to test them and measure them today. It took me at least a year of research and a good solid several months to build them, but the dream is finally coming to fruition and I'm EXCITED. They should rival some very high end speakers in the 10's of thousands dollar range and be able to reproduce pretty much anything I want to throw at them. 

Until next week.

Week 1 - Feelings/Commence Launch

So, I'm starting the course B 183 entitled "Introduction to Entrepreneurship" at University this week. It requires a weekly blog post.

The purpose of the blog is to both chronicle events as well as record thoughts, feelings, and archive things that we learn or insights gained during the course.

Currently I feel a little overwhelmed as I've just started 3, 3 credit hour courses which all tell me they are actually going to take 9 hours a week. For me that is totaling 27 hours a week which should be interesting considering I have a full time job, a spouse and 1.5 kids. They need time to so the balancing act should be fun.

For the actual content this week, I really don't have much. The assignment was pretty much to introduce yourself to your fellow classmates, read or watch motivational content on leadership and start a blog. Check, check and check.

In the interest of attempting to do some further exploration, take a look at this article from Forbes on first impressions. I thought it was pretty interesting and laid out both side of a first impression not mattering at all but also that we have ingrained first impressions which may be very subconscious in nature.

The other content, aka required reading, I read through, point to the importance of self assessment and thinking of ourselves as always in a developing or changing stage. They talk about how to get our entrepreneurial juices flowing and then maintaining those good habits so as to "etch them onto your character".

All in all I think it will be an interesting ride throughout the semester. If you feel like it, subscribe to the blog as I'll be posting weekly insights into my course work. You might, just might, learn something fun along the way. I'll even try to include fun pictures as time permits.

Until next week.