Lesson 1

I am very excited about this class this semester. I have always wanted to own my own business and I am excited that I will get the opportunity to do that this semester.  This week as I studied the course material and read my student choice book, several important things stood out to me.  First is that every entrepreneur will need help at some point, asking for help is not weakness it is strength that will help your business to be successful. I chose the book StartupNation to read for my student choice book. The authors Jeff and Rich are the inventors of Battery Buddy. The Idea came while sitting outside a bar one night and watching a guy struggling with a dead battery. Jeff thought about how awesome it would be to create a device that would hook up to the battery and keep it from going dead. He didn’t know anything about cars, he didn’t know anything about how batteries worked but he found help from people who did and after hard work and disappointment, Battery Buddy was patented. This week we studied blogs that gave tips and vital information to help entrepreneurs. Coming to the realization that I will need to be willing to ask for help if I plan to be successful is big for me. I tend to be one of those people who thinks I can do it on my own and I don’t need help but that is not the case and I am glad that I have resources I can turn to.   

The second thing I learned is that you have to be willing to push through difficulties and disappointment to be successful. One of the discussion board comments this week really hit me. It was talking about the first 15 min of learning and how we get frustrated and give up just before we get to the point of breakthrough. If Jeff and Rich had given up the first time they were denied a patent or the first time they were told they needed to have a better prototype they never would have created Battery Buddy. As our Acton Hero for the week Corey Bell said, we must remove the word Can’t from our vocabulary. If we allow ourselves to get discouraged our if we start telling ourselves, we can’t do something we won’t be able to accomplish it.

The final thing that really stood out to me was that to be successful, we must have a burning passion. It is that burning passion that will carry us through the difficult times and the frustrations we will face. That leads me to my $100-dollar project. As I was brainstorming ideas I had some real passion for my big ideas that I have been thinking about for a long time, but I was feeling very uninspired by any of my small short term ideas. That was until the idea of selling home décor made for reclaimed barn wood and tree wood. I have made a lot of this type of décor for our home and always get compliments on how awesome it is. I can start this business for almost no money since my Aunt has stack and stacks of old barn wood I can use. This is a business Idea that really gets me excited and I hope I can pull it off for this class. Overall this was a very productive learning week for me and I cannot wait to see what the rest of the semester holds.