Week 6

This week we got a bit about how intense it really is to be an entrepreneur. One of the speakers jokingly said that if you are single, stay single. It can be taxing on both your relationship and the business. Another taxing relationship can be our relationship with the Lord and the church. If we choose to ignore a calling and because we feel we only have time for our job, then when we are in need of help we cannot count on the Lord to be there for us. In such a situation, he knows where our priorities are. As an entrepreneur, we need to know, and have our priorities right before we become entrepreneurs. Going into a situation with no ideas planned out beforehand can cause what we really want to shift from good to bad. We need to have our own personal "default" settings determined before we face tough situations. We need to be in good standing with the Lord so that we can get help from Him in our businesses and other aspects of our lives. We need to be able to have our families know that they can count on us and that their problems will not be ignored for our own personal wants instead.

From another speaker he was talking about how entrepreneurs would be entrepreneurs no matter the circumstances. That drive to be an entrepreneur comes independent of making money.

Week 5

Do not be an entrepreneur for the money. You can make more money by working at Google. Also you should make a list of passions. Don't worry about picking one passion, aim at a majority of passions, but then don't look at the "horizon" or the long term goal of passions, look at the "foreground". Look at the short term choices that need to be made. When faced with decisions that you have to choose between a few options, look at it as that many options that opened up in front of you and not having to lose an opportunity in place of another.

This week we read a case study. We read about the passion of one lady and how she started a business and then we contemplated the possible outcomes of various choices she could make that would need to be made and taking her future desires into account. I feel that weighing the pros and cons of her decisions would be very important to figure out which decision to make. Also, in decisions that we make, especially in a business sense, these pros and cons can help figure out what choice best fits our needs. Another thing to think about is that everyone may have different needs and depending on their goals, their decisions may be different.

Week 4

This week we focused a lot on how you should work. One of the videos described the Venn Diagram with three circles. What You're Good At, What You're Born to Do, and What Someone Will Pay You to Do. Another video described the choices you make that lead you to where you are in business situations. Each decision you make leads you to a future of possible outcomes. Some decisions close some opportunities off and some open more options. The focus of this to me being that you need to know where you want to go and the choices you need to make to get there. So with that in mind you need to pay attention to those three circles. By combing these two ideas, you can know what you are good and and what you want to do and how you want to live and make the right choices to get you to that situation.

One thing that I really took away from Jim Ritchie was about networking. In business classes you hear a lot about the importance of networking, but he made me think about it in a different way. He mentioned he retired at 35 years old and was a part of 6 businesses giving him passive income. This made me think of networking in the way of finding those sorts of opportunities. The people you know can come upon these opportunities and if you have given them the idea that you are someone they would want to offer an opportunity such as that, and also that you would be willing to take part in that sort of business idea. It made me think of networking as ideas that you put out of yourself and less so of the people that you know and the number of them being so important. Obviously both are important, but you can know a lot of people and every single one of them can have a terrible idea of you and won't want to offer you any sort of thing that they hear about or that comes up.

Week Three

I got to read a case study this week. It gave us a lot of information about the decisions and goals that this lady had and how they affected her career. it made me think a lot about the things that would decide between jobs myself. If I were to become marketable enough that I had multiple offers and the things that I would have to choose between about what would be my deciding factors in picking one job over the other. I wish that I could work little enough to support my family and spend as much time with them as possible. I hadn't realized how big of a deciding factor that would be for me before until this week. Also this week we were asked to come up with our own ethical guardrails. I chose mine to be fairly broad so that they would catch more problematic situations than just a few specific ones. I think it will be nice to have something written to look back on though. I feel it may not always be at the forefront of every decision I make, but I know that these are the things that I want to give focus to, and I can know that I have made these decisions and how I want to act in my career opportunities.