My Entrepreneur's Path

  Sister Patricia Holland taught us: “You have so much personal potential, and this is the greatest place in the entire world to develop it. This  is  the time and this  is  the place!” These were inspiring words to me at this moment since I am trying to discover my potential, my calling, my mission in life. I know about my talents, my gifts, and things I enjoy doing. However, I cannot link them to an entrepreneurial activity. I do not realize how to connect my strengths and the stuff I can do better than other to a venture who can rewarding me for doing what I love. I am researching the job market to get some ideas to guide me in my searching for my dreamed job or business. And as she pointed, BYU-Idaho is the best place to study and to acquire the knowledge we need to be well prepared for nowadays market employment. In the chapter 5 form the book “A Field Guide for the Hero’s Journey” (Sandefer, et al. 2012) we learned that in our journey towards becoming a...

  Steven Covey’s book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” was a wonderful discovery to me. It has answered some of the questions I have regarding my actual job and how to better get along with my colleagues. The teaching environment can become stressful, demanding, and sometimes toxic. This leads to misunderstandings or, even worse, broken relationships. Therefore, reading the principles taught in the book has given me some ideas on how to improve my self-view of my work situation. Habit number 1 “Be proactive” surprised me and made me realize I fell short about the concept. I consider myself a proactive person because I am self-directed, always ready to help others, and self-sufficient in my own life activities. However, Covey taught the following about the meaning of proactivity: “Proactivity means to subordinate impulses to values. Reactive people are swept away by the heat of the moment. Proactive people are driven by values that are both well thought out and internal...

  There are three questions to ask yourself if you want to become the hero of your life: have I contributed something meaningful?, am I a good person?, and who did I love, and who loved me? When we have become older and reflect upon our lives, these three questions will be the most important to answer. In this post I would like to focus on the first one. To contribute something meaningful to the world, we must discover what is our calling in life, our mission. We must identify our gifts and talents, those things that are easy for us to do even though they are not the same for others. We can ask our family and friends to help us identify them, and we would be surprised to find some things in common in their answers.   Moreover, we can ponder what are the activities we enjoy the most; those that, when we are working on them, we lose sight of the time, our need for resting, or even we do not think on eating or doing something else. It is what is called to be in the flow. It is ...

 One of the things that stuck with me was reading about the fact that too much analysis and planning can make us lose business opportunities. Some of the most successful companies were created without much reflection or checklists. Even though it is important to weight the market to decide if an idea have high potential or not, entrepreneurs should avoid investing lots of their time doing research because, by the moment they finish it, the business opportunity may not exist. Moreover, when we want to launch a venture, we cannot expect to answer all of the questions before acting. Instead, we use judgment, reflection, strategy, and the ability to quickly change the course if our initial idea does not work as expected. For instance, if we do not get good results, we do not receive orders, or a product does not work as we thought it would do. Listening to our potential customers is paramount to refine our idea and to adapt it to satisfy their needs. Besides, we can receive rapport and...