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Tag Archive for: entrepreneurship
What To Do About The Struggle [a letter to entrepreneurs]
The hard thing isn’t usually what you think it is. In the entrepreneurial journey there are a lot of emotions, life gets down right shitty some days. There is hope though. You’re on a journey only the greatest minds of our world start out on. A journey that most won’t try make. The journey of a true entrepreneur is plagued with disappointment, triumph, and even more let down. As long as you stay a little more positive than those negative thoughts you’re going to come out the other side a winner.
When you’re in it, it sucks. There’s no way to describe it. It’s a necessary evil, without the years of failure there is no learning, and no learning means no company.
What is the struggle?
Something every entrepreneur human being goes through. The longer you can last, the further you will go. A lot of people don’t last. The Struggle eats them up, destroys their soul, and all they’re left with is a scared, hurtful attitude towards anything outside of what is expected. Protectionism sets in the status quo is the only way of doing things.
Why do we have to struggle?
Simple, the universe doesn’t give you anything for free. Nothing in life is easy. The more you struggle, the better the reward.
There’s a famous quote from Bill Gates “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”. You have to struggle, there’s no easy way about it. You have to go through the bad to appreciate the good.
How long has the struggle been around?
The struggle has been around since the dawn of civilization. Our ancestors went through it. Anyone who has done anything worth talking about has been through it. Anyone who has that crease near the corner of the eye, you know the one, the one that lets you know they’ve been through a lot.
When we’re in the struggle our minds are our greatest enemy. We tell ourselves lies, we’re delusional, we create a reality in our heads that’s just not true. Humans are amazing at finding every possible way a plan can fail. We find every loophole that might come back to bite us in the ass. In this horrible state of mind we never look for the positive horizon with the attitude of it gets better. No instead we try to warn our subconscious with these thoughts, it’s a defence mechanism sounding the alarm bells. Read more
The Aftermath of UpliftingT-shirts.ca | eps 40 #InTheLab
“It worked, it really worked!”
We went into this class not knowing what to expect. It was my first time teaching entrepreneurship and I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity for some hands on learning!! A few weeks back before we started UpliftingTshirts.ca I filmed this #InTheLab episode asking the question, how do you teach entrepreneurship? At that time I had no idea what would happen with our newly founded company disguised as an experiment disguised as a class.
How Do You Teach Entrepreneurship? || Eps 35 #InTheField
How do you teach entrepreneurship? How do you teach an art form?
My best guess is you must experience it.
I don’t have the answer but I do know it’s not the traditional way of textbooks, quiz’s, sitting in desks and writing tests. Memorization is not a quality we need in the world of 2015 and beyond, so why do we keep putting so much emphasis on the standardized test? Read more
How Long Should A Website Take To Build? A Highschool Website Experiment
The other day, Brandon and I went to a Campbell entrepreneurship class taught by Jordan McFarlen. Mr. McFarlen invited us to talk about how we started Strategy Lab and the entrepreneurial experience. The way Mr. McFarlen teaches the class is he divides them in two groups and they have to start companies which over the semester they will run like an actual company (last years company actually imported iPhone cases from China, pretty awesome). Mr. McFarlen is one in a million and the Campbell Business program is very lucky to have him. The passion and excitement for learning he has is such a bright light in our ever troubled education system.
Instead of talking about ourselves for an hour, we decided to do something different.
In the first 15 minutes we talked about as a company what we believe in, our 10 values, and the story of how Brandon and I met.
Then Brandon went to work.
This first thing Brandon did was made each company decide on a domain name and he bought for them. Then he set each website up on WordPress and give them the login. There’s a lot of technical work that Brandon didn’t do (like 18 hours worth of work he’d do on a regular website) but the students will figure that out, they can learn how to hack WordPress to get it to do what they want.
It was amazing to see the looks on their faces. Something that most people think takes days, weeks or even months, Brandon created in front of their very eyes. It was amazing to witness. A website doesn’t have to take months to create, you can have one in an hour, it won’t look great but you’ll have your very own online publishing platform.
Websites don’t take that long to build. Yes there is a lot of technical and design elements that you should trust a professional on but for the most part people spend an insanely long time on design. Why? Because they’re trying to appease everyone. But when need to build a bridge, you don’t ask a committee or a board, you hire the best dam bridge builder around. Something to think about the next time you want to “re-design” your website.
I’m really excited to see what the students at Campbell will end up doing with the websites. The last thing we said on our way out was, experiment, try new things, and try to break the website. Get Creative.
Hopefully they teach us an entirely different way that websites should look and feel.
How To Actually Teach Entrepreneurship
I’ve taken several entrepreneurship classes in my day, in Highschool and in University. Nothing compares to what Mr. McFarlen is doing at Regina’s Campbell Collegiate. Read more