Final Post

Having finished the B183 course and looking back at the entire semester the things I take away from the course are mostly going to be tied to the stories of the individuals we studied and the personal reflection I had to do on myself.

Each of the individual we reviewed in the lessons be it through the Acton Hero’s or the other videos, each of them had a unique experience to share. Basically, to be an entrepreneur doesn’t require an individual to fit a mold, anybody can make it as an entrepreneur, all it takes is determination to succeed. I’ve often thought that it takes a special breed of people that have all the right qualities to have an idea and turn it into a business. In reality, they’re all just like you and me except that they decided to take the leap of faith and go for it. They didn’t have all the skills or even all the brains to launch things successfully right off the bat, they were just determined to make it work and learn all they could along the way.

A common thing among all the individuals too was that they surrounded themselves with people who they knew could make them successful because of what they could learn from them. They did all they could to glean whatever bits of advice they could apply to their business and improve their business with.

Another common theme I found with all of them is that they read. My dad would always tell us kids that “smart people were not just born smart, smart people are smart because they read. Smart people are always learning.” I see entrepreneurs very much the same way. Each of the individuals we read about and reviewed are constantly learning and reading about how they could improve or just reading because it keeps their mind constantly moving and developing.

Lastly, I took a lot away from having to reflect on my learnings and then write about them in a blog. I struggle a lot with having ideas but where I fail is in writing those ideas down and doing something about them. While doing this class I was reminded about a quote by Benjamin Franklin. He said “the dullest pencil is better than the sharpest mind”. No matter how much I enoyed learning new things unless I put them down in writing I would tend to forget them. Putting my learnings down on paper has helped me to internalize and have them more committed to memory and available to me for review.