The Last Lecutre

What would be your Last Lecture?

This week I would like to talk about what I have learned this semester. There has been a lot, but a few things have stood out to me more than other, things that are more important than I thought in running your own business. For example, the idea that I have heard most often in my intro to entrepreneur class is the idea of honesty. It must be super important to be honest in a business that you start. And I guess that makes since. I have known a few people that were not very honest in their dealings with myself and / or my family. And that was really an easy way for them to lose the trust and business of my family and friends. I think that it is also important to be honest because it will keep you out of trouble, and I like to live by the saying “better safe than sorry.”

               Another thing I would like to remind you all of this week, was about how religion can and really should be incorporated into your business. Every religion that teaches good and uplifting principles can be easily imputed into a company or business to better it and its people. For example, if your religion teaches a moral of “early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” then you should support that in your business and as people live by good teachings from God, they can become even better people and in following, even better employees. But the stipulation of that is that you need to be living by those principles too. I can teach that you need to count the cash in the cash box with another person if I don’t expect myself to do it.

               This leads to my next point. One thing that I have learned is very important in your own business is to lead by example. I am sure that there have been many times where a person has made it to the top by doing what they want and bossing people around and making them do the “unwanted” jobs, but I’m not sure how many of those people have stayed in a position of power for a long time. I think that the people that make it to the top and stay at the top are people that lead by example, the people that aren’t afraid to clean up and help others and do themselves what they expect others to do. I hope that you all remember these things and I really hope that you also learned something too from this semester. Have a great week!

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just two more

Wow, just two more weeks. We had a good class this past week. We spoke about buying a company instead of starting one. It was kind of interesting. I never thought about being an entrepreneur through buying a company that was just recently started. It is kind of a new idea for me. I think that the start up of a company can really be the hardest part, but if you just skip that and let someone else do it, then it will save you a lot of trouble, and even a few years. But it also taught me that it is really hard to find a startup company that is ready to sell that is worth buying. Because you want to be the owner of a company in the market that you are interested in, it will be hard to find a company that is doing well enough to buy and that is being sold. In the case we read, there were a few companies that Mr. Larson wanted to buy but they were so different, that I didn't really know what kind of business he was interest in. But ya, it is a new idea to think about that would solve a lot of problems in starting a business by avoiding them, but it also has its own problems I think.

another week down

Week Three!!! We’re almost there! Just eleven weeks more. So not quite there. But we learned about integrity this week. It was a good reading and a good class. Life lesson 101 it is important to tell the truth and to base your life on truth. The gospel brings about happiness and blessings and is based on truth, so if we fashion our lives around the idea of living true and honestly, we can get happiness and blessings just like the gospel provides. I am sure that there are a lot of people that have made a life on lies and dishonesty, and they have made money and brought temporal power to themselves, but the fact of the matter is that it is just that, temporal. The moment that their lies and deceptions are brought into the open, they will lose everything that they have in just a short moment, never to be brought back to them. But a life that is build on honest dealings and good relations will never have that problem, in fact they will have the opposite, if it is ever revealed to the world that they are always honest, that they always mean what they say and will always uphold their promises, they will gain power and fame and riches, because the people looking for that kind of business will flock to them in all parts of the world. So in short, just make sure you don’t lie and that you do what you say you are going to do.

Okay, so this week is week 2, and it is Presentation week for my group and I. The topic of the day, “Find your Passion, Live your Passion!” And we killed it, we really killed it. I think we did great. Ryan started us off with his Yo-Yo demonstration, then we had an activity where everyone had to sell another person’s passion to show that it is hard to sell what you don’t like, and later they got to sell their own passion, and in the middle we should a clip on passion from the movie remember the titans. It was a lot of fun and I think that we set the bar pretty high for the other groups. Passion is something I learned we all have, for something or other. And passion is what can drive us to excellence. If we have passion for something we are willing to make it our life, and if we find the right niche, or in other words, if we find the people that also have that same passion, we can turn it into a living. Passion is also something that I learned we don’t always know about it. Like I have passions that I didn’t know about until people were asking me about them, things that I thought were just normal, routine, and daily tasks for me that ended up being things that I just liked doing more than others. So if you don’t know your passion, you can at least know that you have one, and that you just have to find it.

first

This is my blog for the first week of class, and will be treated as my first blog. This seems like it is going to be a fun class. We discussed the expectations and what we will be doing in class through the upcoming semester. I will have to write one of these blogs every week and talk about what I learned this week. My group and I have the first assignment to present our presentation this semester and that will happen next week. So in anticipation for that I read and studied a lot on passion. I wont talk about it a lot now, because that will be my topic for the blog next week, but just know what is coming and what I have been thinking about this week. The reading assignments will be fun, but there is one book that seems a bit odd. It is just a book that is just full of short stories, a lot of them I already know. And even more weird I thought was that there are stories about Jesus Christ, I guess starting a church would make him an entrepreneur… maybe. But there is always something to learn from him. But yeah, all in all this will be a fun class, I will be doing this every week, I’ll talk about passion next week, and we will be learning from Christ on how to be the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Can’t wait!

A confusing week

Wow. this week's lesson was interesting. I thought that the presentation was all over the place. I have no idea what they were talking about as a whole. We briefly learned about never giving up, devotion, superheros, something about making a business out of nothing, or Nerf darts or something, and a few more topics. I really wanted to ask them to explain what the topic they were trying to get across was, but they were already 10 minutes over, so I didn't feel like I had time to ask, but oh well. I did have a great week with my brother. He is in town for my wedding this week and we were talking about business ideas and what you would need to do to start a business. He seems a bit weary on starting a business, but I might try talking him into it as I get closer to graduating. We came up with some good ideas and I think that it would be a lot of fun. We spoke about what we would do, the law involved, the niche we would fill, and a bit on what we as individuals would do. If I do start up a business using what I have learned in this class, it would probably be based off of what my brother and I spoke about this past week.

4 Weeks Left

This week we had an interesting discussion on Mills and her company Warm Fuzz Cards. The topic of the discussion was whether or not Mills should expand her company rapidly, or more slowly. We spoke a little about leadership and the methods to lead as well that day, but I'll talk about that later. I was pro growing slowly, Mills and her husband were trying to have a baby in the next year and I didn't think that trying something new with the company at that time was a good idea. And moreover, I think that it would have been overall bad business to abandon the time and care she put into her personable business to grow rapidly. What I learned even more was that this whole discussion depended on your definition of "grow rapidly." We had some people that I agreed with, but our definitions were different. But yeah, on to the topic we had that day, we had a good talk about leadership and what that means you have to do. And to sum it all up, leaders will put the people up, and managers will have the people push them up. Although that is a simple way to put it, I do think it is the best summary for what I learned.

Half way there

Well, were half way there through the semester. This week in entrepreneur class was fun. We talked about getting over the stumbling blocks in our way, and even more so, how to turn those stumbling blocks into advantages that others don't have. One of the biggest things I learned was about student A, student B, and student C. And I learned that I would be a student C. Students A and B are people that have had some negative challenge in their life that they were able to turn into a motive to move forward and do better, but student C was someone who hasn't had a stumbling block that they could turn into motive. In my life, I haven't had too many experiences where I was negatively impacted and was able to turn anger or sadness or any other feeling into motive. But because of that, I think I would disagree with what we were talking about in class. In the gospel we don't teach that you shouldn't drink coffee because it is terrible for you and all this bad stuff will happen, but rather that a lot of good stuff will happen if you don't drink it, and Christ wasn't mocked by the people around Him and immediately think "I'm going to get them back as soon as I become a successful leader", no, rather I think He took the positives from His life and the blessings He had in success and experience to motivate Himself. Now maybe I misunderstood what was being taught, but when it was stated that we should feel sorry for Student C, I would have to disagree and say, let's be student C. Don't use your hate for authoritative people or bad past experiences to motive you forward, but instead, look at all of the good from success you have had and the hope for future success to push you forward. So, yep, good week.

A little bit later

(intro: please ignore the lack of capitalizing, im (and punctuation) feeling lazy on this one) this week we learned about the 7 habits of highly effective people. and synthesize and synthesis. the group this week put on a great presentation. and even better, the father in law of my professor came this week. he is a real entrepreneur and gave us a few words of wisdom. he spoke about his life story and it was very interesting. i thought that it was really cool how he didnt actually plan on being an entrepreneur, but life just ended up being that way. i wonder how many people plan on being an entrepreneur. because for me, i think the skills to do be one are necessary for business success, but i am not really planning on starting my own business or anything and i think that it was really cool how he wasnt either. he also gave some great wisdom on balancing your lives, both business and family and church and other. he made it seem like family comes first, then church, then business and then other. at least that is what i got, and i think that is a good philosophy to live by. so i think im going to do that, yep...

A later week in the semester

This week was good. We had a really interesting presentation this week with a video that I really liked. It was about a 3rd grade dropout and how he become not only successful, but also "the wisest man" the speaker knew. I thought that the principle of self teaching was really taught well in that video. and although it wasn't the purpose of the presentation I really thought about that a lot. I am subscribed to a an entrepreneur news feed and now I am trying to read up on more of those articles, along with articles that explain more about my major, accounting. It is that concept of teaching yourself wise and important life principles that will help you with what you want to do with your life that I think I really learned this week. I am looking for things that I know and things that I don't know in readings that I find, readings with real-life scenarios, and from these I see what I already know, what I need to practice, and what I will need to know. I think that the idea of self teaching needs to be taught better, and not just self teaching through reading your text books, but learning from life and the lives of others, things that will be important in your life and the lives of your family.

week 3

This past week was week 3 in our b 183 class. it was a good week. there was a great presentation on Monday about finding a balance between what you like and what you are good at and what will support you through your life. It reminded me of the reasons I choose to be an accountant among my other choices. I remembered that I really wanted to go into woodshop and be a carpenter. I still wouldnt mind that, but I had the opportunity to try accounting in Argentina and I learned to love it just as much. but the nicer thing about accounting is that it will pay the bills and it is in high demand now. I like both, and I like to think that I am good at both, so it came down to what would be a better life plan. I thought that it was interesting in the presentation this past week who they described all of this as a seed, soil, water, and sun. All of which are needed to grow the plant, and if you are missing one, you will fail. I think that is very important to think about when choosing your life path, it need to have 4 things, 1) you need to like it 2) it needs to be in demand 3) you need to be good at it and 4) it needs to pay well enough to support you and your family. So with all of that to think about, this was a good third week.