Lessons Learned
For this week in Intro. To. Entrepreneurship I learned:
The purpose of this course. The topics are
Your Whole Souls as an Offering Unto Him – Elder David A. Bednar.
- He talks about Faithful and Competent. On this I learned the importance of “diligent” and “competent”. It mean to do our best in school to learn the lessons that is being taught. There should be balance in terms of faithfulness and competence. As for my own understanding about this, we should serve the lord better if we are competent and competent means we should acquire the best knowledge we can have to be used temporally and spiritually for our own advantage.
- I also learned the difference of “Sacrifice and Consecration. Sacrifice means “to offer or surrender something valuable or precious” and it is applicable during mortal life. While consecration means “to develop and dedicate to a scared purpose.” As we live the law of consecration, we are willing not only to offer anything and everything we possess for the sake of the gospel, but we also promise to develop and devote our best selves—our time, talents, and strength—to the building of the kingdom of God on the earth.
Living Life as an Entrepreneurial Hero – Jeff Sandefer
- Dream Big – we should dream big but start with small steps.
- We should start the first step.
“It’s not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” –Marcus Aurelius
- What Difficult Challenges Will You Face Along the Way?
Four of the hardest challenges will be personal, because you’ll have to;
- Accept that life is hard and seldom fair
- Know that you must persevere to develop the habits and character that will determine your destiny
- Understand that choosing doesn’t mean you are in control, and that real entrepreneurs learn to fail quickly, cheaply, and often
- Find the right fellow travelers, because you will tend to become like those who surround you
- Persevere from difficult decisions to habits to character to destiny.
Entrepreneurial heroes forge themselves one hard decision at a time, never giving up, always moving forward. You start by making difficult decisions. Over time, this becomes a habit. And the way you face these decisions etches character onto your soul, and that character determines your destiny. All of this requires intention. Because heroes don’t fritter away time, they invest it.
You get to choose, but you are not in control. Real entrepreneurs learn to fail quickly, cheaply, often.
- You get to choose, but you cannot control the uncontrollable. And that means you will sometimes fail. The sooner you embrace failure as a friend, the better. Blessed is the entrepreneur who learns to fail early, cheaply, and often. Cursed is the traveler too fearful of failure to choose the more difficult path. It’s not that heroes aren’t fearful. Of course they are. It’s that they learn to get knocked down and get back up again. And they learn how to get other people on track too. The Grail is more important than the ego.
Choose your fellow travelers well.
- Extraordinary things happen when you surround yourself with smart, talented, driven, good people who share your mission. Here’s a simple rule of thumb: an extraordinarily talented and dedicated person gets ten times more done than the merely good person, and the good person ten times more than the average performer. When it comes to employees, if you set the incentives correctly, you can’t overpay the best.
Will It Be Worth It in the End?
- All good stories have endings. And the climax is usually a surprise. In life, you don’t know exactly where the story is going, and that’s part of the mystery.
- Did I accomplish something meaningful?
- Was I a good person?
- Who did I love and who loved me?
Taking Your Life in Hand
- Begin living life as an entrepreneurial hero.
The startup of you
- All humans are entrepreneurs
- Develop a competitive advantage – Differentiate or die. To beat the competition, companies develop clear reasons why a customer should pick them over the alternatives.
- Assets – What you have going for you now. Your soft assets (like knowledge, skills, and connections) and hard assets (like cash in the bank).
- Aspirations & Values – Where you might like to go in the future.
- Market Realities – What people will actually pay you for?
- Plan to adapt – It’s about being flexible persistent: always ready to adapt, but also persistent in driving towards set goals.
- Make explicit the assumptions and hypotheses in your plan
- Prioritize learning.
- Learn by doing.
- Think two steps ahead.
Make three plans;
Plan A would be the original plan then Plan B if A is not working and Plan Z if everything fails as your life boat.
Takes a network – Maximize network of people using social media platform like LinkedIn.
Allies – You consult regularly for advice
There are a lot of things that I learned this week and I will not mention them all. To summarize everything for this week’s journal, it’s all about being who I am and who I want to be and to I achieve it I have to work hard in improving my knowledge both temporal and spiritual and always remember that there is no certainty in life’s journey, all we can do is to try our very best in everything that we do.