Sterling Bond

Welcome to my Mastery Journal. This site was created as part of my Master's curriculum in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Full Sail University Online. I'll be doing my best throughout the program to post weekly, and I may even figure out how to link it with my personal blog, which you can find at my website: www.sterlinghbond.com In my master's program, I'll be working on building a website I've been conceiving for a few years. I own the domain, which has a brief description of what it will be: www.alchemystar.com I'm also involved with a skincare startup and we are currently marketing a line of rejuvenating products that contain a very interesting and powerful extract of Tepezcohuite. You can learn more about these products, if you're interested, at: www.vitalitreeskincare.com

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November 2017 - Business Model Presentation and Thesis

The time has finally come to bring this chapter of my ongoing education to a close.  My original goal in this final course of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Master of Science program at Full Sail was to “develop proposals & presentations I’d feel comfortable delivering both to my professors and to potential investors”.  This goal was certainly met by this course, and it wasn’t too hard for me two years ago to see what I would be doing now as the course materials are made clear in the course’s name.  The biggest part of Business Model Presentation and Thesis was to organize and present the business model I’ve been working on throughout this whole program to my teachers for review.  The other major work in this course was to create a thesis, which in this case was for all practical purposes a functioning business model, explaining in more thorough detail the most important points in launching this business.  I felt very well guided through this process and all of my work came together very organically.  Overall this month was extremely inspired for me and, while I was often pressed for time coming up with material on the fly at the last minute, the work I accomplished is some of the best content I’ve come up with yet for the social media network I’m working on.

This course’s learning style was a bit different than a typical college course.  The purpose was much more to present what I have learned over the duration of this graduate program, but that’s not to say we didn’t cover any new information.  For the most part, this involved pointers on refining aspects of presenting our businesses from the elevator pitch to the formal business model presentation.  We did also discuss the search for funding and other elements of launch with a bit more specificity than in previous courses.  The most important lessons this month dealt with mastery.  This class pushed me to the limits when it came to time management, creativity, covering all of my bases, knowing how to explain I’ve covered all of my bases, and presenting myself & my ideas.  This month has very much been the culmination of everything I’ve taken in during the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Master of Science program.  For what it’s worth I have to say I feel so much more confident with myself and my ideas after this last class specifically.  My teachers’ positive reinforcement has probably been the most beneficial tool in solidifying this self-assurance, which was definitely present in months prior but not without a hint of apprehension.  The best way to apply these lessons in my professional life is to stick to seeing my goals and dreams through until the end.  I have so much gratitude for my education at Full Sail and the faculty that has provided it.

Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamcnelson/4602923530/in/photolist-81KbNw-81G3iv-81Kbs3-mSVnoE-9MuMhR-izaj3X-92FmHu-m39dGP-684uzy-m3a1SW-m38yAa-m39ftp-8b9T9U-m38AtD-m3a4Cf-m39YJs-67ZoVv-m3a5qs-m39ZSE-m3a9MU-m3a3Zw-81Kg6Q-m38xKn-81Kbtd-81KbJA-m39kdz-m39fCH-m38xeT-m39gdR-m38BiK-81KbzL-m38AnM-m3a8aW-m39ije-m38Fmz-m3a73q-m3a8GC-m3a7zN-m38ze4-m39j4a-m38ygc-m3a2xy-m38FjF-m38zwt-m3a1CC-m38wZz-m38FY6-81G3jR-m3a3KU-m38Gkt

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August 2018 - Business Model Implementation and Management

In the beginning of my Master’s program, I set a goal for this course: to wrap up everything needed to at least be proposing my new business.  In truth, this is going to be a continued goal into my final presentation next month.  What clicked for me most in this course is that I wasn’t going to spend the month building a model from scratch.  I actually took a lot of data from the entire IEMS program that I have put together for Alchemystar and used it for my assignments this month.  This was one of the strategies I noted in my Mastery Timeline.  The other strategies revolved around compiling and saving all valuable stats, which I feel I accomplished, though I didn’t actually collect as much data as I expected this month.  Instead I used a lot of data I’ve been collecting over the last 2 years (I’ve taken some time to handle business throughout the program, so I could never do it all in a year like some of you die-hards).

The most important things I learned this month were what’s coming for me in my final course, but as always these lessons have many real-world applications, as well.  We discussed some of the more nuanced concepts decisions entrepreneurs deal with, like choosing when to hire vs. when to contract, management functions, optimizing operations, developing metrics / feedback loops, and being a good leader in general.  The screenshot I used in this post is from my presentation slide deck, which is going to be the foundation of my final business model presentation.  I’m excited to be wrapping up this program!  I have been applying the lessons I’m learning every step of the way at VitaliTree.  Beyond that, I look forward to hashing out my next business ideas with even more agility equipped with the knowledge of an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Master of Science.

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July 2017 - Innovative Work Environments

My goal in this course was to “Envision and plan the ideal workspace that my future offices will provide.”  Clearly by the two videos I posted to YouTube this month (links below), I really got into this visionary process.  The strategies I laid out actually contributed substantially to my learning process in Innovative Work Environments.  The first strategy I noted to help me with this was taking lots of notes, both on strategies and inspiration, and I have not only documented many of my thoughts and extra research this month but I’ve shared quite a lot of this content, too.  The second strategy was paying attention to team building skills and pointers on facilitating creativity; these are really two different points entirely, I now realize, but they were both covered this month.  We covered the importance of adequate employee perks and amenities as well as designing a space to facilitate creativity, or more importantly “chance encounters”, because collaboration leads to innovation.  My third and final strategy was to balance cost efficiency, and I’m so grateful we spent time talking about the founder stages in which founding owners may operate on minimal resources without all the fluff of a hip and successful hiring startup.  I got to really analyze my home office, as well.  We deeply delved into several different innovative work environments where business leaders and some of the best employees in the world congregate to get work done.  

I am already applying the lessons learned from Innovative Work Environments both in my home office and at VitaliTree’s shop.  I have a passion, if not a bit of an obsession with ergonomics, so I have already invested quite a bit of time and money making sure my workflow doesn’t destroy my body.  I was surprised at how much I learned about employee relations in this class, honestly, and these lessons couldn’t have come at a better time for me.  Alchemystar is still just an idea, but VitaliTree is on the precipice of hiring both upper management that will also fill in the rest of our board as well as production & sales employees.  In all honesty, this course has made me a bit self conscious of our current facilities, and I’m starting to try to think of new ways we can enhance the user experience in the shop.  The production facility is fairly straightforward and needs to uphold certain standards which end up pushing it to look a certain way.  That look is probably about as good as we’ll get in this building for that process, but the way we have our meeting area integrated with our inventory and shipping/fulfillment areas might be less productive.  There may be certain items I could take on in my office to ease the flow of everything going on in the main room.  Overall, I’d say it’s clear I got what I was looking for out of Innovative Work Environments, and I’ll continue to use this knowledge.

Links to My Innovative Work Environments Video Assignments: Cool Work Environments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0jBu7K9Y5A&t=40s

Designing Your Company's Innovative Work Environment  - https://youtu.be/oganm-E4OgA

Mastery Journal Image Credit: Ashstar01. (2011, March 1). Google Mountain View campus garden.jpg [Digital image]. Retrieved July 31, 2017, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_Mountain_View_campus_garden.jpg

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April 2017 - Marketing Strategies for Entrepreneurs

My original goal for this class was to “Master implementation and long-term success of viable products & bring this knowledge to everything I do.” When I was assigned to project my goals for all of my courses in this program, I was somewhat shortsightedly heavily focused on product development. I now see that marketing is often more about cultivating relationships. Still, what I learned this month about studying my target market will help me make decisions about altering my products in the future.

My strategies were first to review materials from Product Design & Development, which turned out to be an unnecessary projection. Next, I told myself I would bring my schoolwork to my companies for review and testing, and this has definitely been crucial both in helping my businesses, but also in helping me retain all of this information. Finally I said I would make necessary adjustments to implementation of my product lines (noting this would also help internalize the lessons, interestingly enough). As convention season approaches for my skincare business and we assess new ad potentials, I am much more insistent on advertising with agencies and publications that provide adequate metrics.

I learned about several tools that will be helpful as my businesses grow when it comes to keeping up with that growth. Outreach is another important element of marketing that can be hard to measure, but my extensive reading and video-watching this month has introduced me to several different creative approaches or unique factors to consider. I have put back all of these materials, most of which I have already shared with my partners, and will continue to reference them for the foreseeable future. The abstract nature of this class has challenged me in ways I wasn’t expecting, and the sheer amount of material to digest has been truthfully overwhelming, but I’m glad I went through with it. I feel much more confident marketing the brands that will sustain me, now, and that’s important because without proper marketing in place these brands can only take me so far.

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May 2017 - Entrepreneurial Finance

Entrepreneurial Finance has been a challenge, to say the least, but the information I’ve come out of it with is unmeasurably valuable towards my success as an entrepreneur.  My original goal for this course when I began the Innovation & Entrepreneurship M.S. program was to, “Stay grounded and pay extra attention to budgeting and allocation - study and save extra resources on this.”  Probably the most valuable part of this course has been all of the resources.  Professor Thompson has been extremely good about organizing data in easy-to-download presentations, and I have saved every bit of data I could to a well-organized folder. This folder is already being shared with my business partners, and new strategies are being implemented in our company.

I definitely did learn quite a bit about budgeting, financial allocation, and projections, as I hoped I would.  In a nutshell, I learned entrepreneurial finance, like the course name would suggest.  This is a vast topic, though, and looking back on the month it’s quite impressive how much information was crammed into this short time period.  I learned the ins-and-outs of several different approaches to business financing, which is lucky because as it would turn out not all of my business ideas can really be accounted for the same way.  For instance, my skincare company, VitaliTree, would benefit more from a more standard Net Present Value (NPV) accounting, where my social media network, Alchemystar, will require a good amount of outside investment and may benefit more from factoring the Payback Method, at least in early stages.

One of my strategies I noted at the beginning of the program was to, “Review course materials with my accountant and adjust accordingly.”  This is already taking place, and VitaliTree’s accountant has been impressed with the data I’m bringing to the table from this course.  I did fall short of one of my strategies, failing to “interview successful entrepreneurs about unique ways they finance new startups,” but I feel good about the third strategy, which was to, “take the time to master the art of making accurate projections.”  Thus, I feel like I am already applying the material I learned in this course in my professional life.  Still, I can already see that this course folder will be a constant reference for at least the next several years of my life as an entrepreneur.

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February 2017 - Legal Issues in Entrepreneurship

My original goal for this course was to, “Focus on business structure and the small insights no one else will tell me – everyone I have looked up to has had unique experience and wisdom in organizational structure.”  My strategies for doing this were to be: 1) take lots of notes and attempt to relate them to past experience or incorporate them in present work; 2) read and save or bookmark as many resources as possible; and 3) make necessary adjustments to my companies.  I knew when I embarked on this degree program that this specific course would be one of the most useful I would take, and I made a point early on to be prepared for it. Saving the information I gained in this course has been extremely important to me, too.  Rightfully so, because so much of it has already come in handy.

 While my teacher was unable to give me any specific legal advice, per se, I used my assignment prompts as opportunities to do specifically relevant research.  I actually learned a lot about tech companies, the ways they are typically structured, and more of the exact advantages to forming a C-Corp, specifically in Delaware.  When it comes to specific course materials, though, I learned so much this month it’s hard to summarize it in one post.  I learned about business structure, contracts, negotiations, intellectual property, and even some public relations concerns.  I came out very impressed with the amount of knowledge we were able to cram into a month, and I feel very fulfilled knowing these things.

 I am already applying the materials from this course professionally in my current venture, VitaliTree Tattoo.  We are incidentally going through a major restructure of organization and operations, so this knowledge couldn’t have come at a better time.  As I knew I should when I began the IEMS program, I wound up saving and bookmarking quite a lot of different links, PDFs, and other snippets.  I meticulously saved every bit of assigned work, reading, and videos, to be sure I am able to reference anything & everything I covered this month easily in the future.  I am very grateful to have taken this class!

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January 2017 - Business Model Development

Business Model Development proved to be a sufficiently challenging course, not just of my drive & determination but also of my business idea in general.  Halfway through my degree program, I was forced to reconsider many aspects of the business I’ve been conceiving since I started about a year ago.  My goal from the beginning of the program for this course was to “Begin developing a working business model for my thesis.”  My strategies to attain this goal were to: 1) Study successful businesses objectively; 2) Study my idea journals and start to consolidate useful ideas into models; and 3) Getting peer insight into my ideas is one of the most invaluable resources I have.

My goal was predominantly met by this course in the form of my SmartStart Business Canvas.  I have played around with portions of this aid, but this was the first time I actually started putting one together.  My canvas is my featured image this post, so you can see what it looks like.  I had to practice my strategies in the discussion boards, where not only was I prompted to give and receive feedback about business ideas, but we were discussing the major failures and successes of several established and historical businesses.  The only thing I’ve fallen short of, really, is journaling.  I don’t have near as many of the ideas I’ve had over the past year journaled to the extent I would have liked to.

Business Model Development did not show me, step-by-step, how to draft a business model like I expected it to.  Honestly, I’m not disappointed by this, because there are uncountable templates out there for me to choose from when looking for inspiration in crafting my own personalized business model.  I learned, instead, how to *develop* a business model.  That is to say I learned the key considerations in approaching a new business, and some valuable methods by which to utilize all of the data I’ve learned to collect and observe so far to start building my actual MVP.  Rather than learning how to assemble a business plan to a formula I have learned a more responsible approach from which to harness my own creativity.

I am already applying these lessons in my skincare business, VitaliTree, and we are revisiting a lot of our operational procedures with the SmartStart Canvas.  This is a tool I will use for many different pieces of the puzzle developing the bigger picture that is Alchemystar, as well.  Another crucial skill I honed this month was to sincerely study my competition and find their weaknesses, not to exploit them but to make sure I don’t suffer the same difficulties.  I hate to focus so much on one thing, which happened to be the last thing we really studied in depth in this course and was something previously introduced to us in other courses with a lighter focus, but the SmartStart Canvas I can already tell will be crucial to my development as an entrepreneur and the development of all of my projects.

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Business Feasibility Mastery Journal

I apologize I haven’t been keeping up with the weekly posts I wanted to be sharing on this page.  The past few months have been pivotal in almost every major area of my life, especially for the skincare company I have been working with, VitaliTree.  Aside from major business changes, we have attended many trade shows this season, and I was already very booked for these months around the country as a DJ and a live audio engineer.  While I still applied my actual assignments to Alchemystar (the social media network I am drafting throughout this graduate program and hope to pursue after) in this month’s course, Business Feasibility, it was an interesting time with VitaliTree to be learning how to make these observations and decisions.  Pivoting has been a sort of theme in the office lately, and often intimidatingly so.  We have completely shifted our management team with the exception of myself and one of two founders; the other founder parted ways to pursue other endeavors, which has been kind of sad but has also allowed us to start restructuring the business model in a few ways we’ve been wanting to.  We have met new difficulties in funding that weren’t problems before, though, and this has caused us to pursue much more diligent sales & marketing outreach.  Our product is already on the market, so the fact is that it’s just time to scale up our sales outreach.  All-in-all we are growing much faster and making very positive changes, but the challenges and the stress are immense.

At the beginning of the IEMS program, I set my goal for this Business Feasibility course as, “(to) gain the most objective wisdom possible with which to judge my own business ideas and establish my models.”  I would not say I was discouraged at all regarding Alchemystar in the idea’s feasibility as a business, but I would definitely say I got a major reality check.  Even after taking courses on research and product development, this was the point at which I had to put everything I’ve compiled together and rate my qualities against my competitions’.  Social media is an incredibly daunting industry.  I will absolutely need a lot of help from many different talented professionals and venture capitalists, which means I will need to conceive some innovative ways to make money BEFORE even presenting my idea to them.  Monetizing free websites is a notoriously slippery slope.  Given the current stirrings in the mainstream media about social media, it’s the perfect time for a site like Alchemystar to launch if it were only ready, but it sadly is not and neither am I.  The truth is that I need to continue getting my feet wet as an entrepreneur before I even fully grasp some of the implications of launching a business like Alchemystar with my hopes and expectations.

Fortunately, that’s happening, and this has been the perfect time to step back at VitaliTree and take a look at the bigger picture.  We have a year of very small sales history, and we have a fairly advanced digital infrastructure in place to get clean metrics from a variety of sales channels at different rates.  With this data I’ve been able to analyze our growth, given minimal marketing, and also measure growth during different marketing campaigns to gauge their efficacy.  Comparing this to the competitions’ prices, their outreach, and the way people in the industry speak about all of us (feedback such as what they like or don’t like, etc.), we can not only see that our business has the potential to have a major impact on this market but we can do it in a positive way.  This course has actually greatly helped me in establishing a plan to maintain consistent growth without giving in to the weight of bigger established brands.  I intend to continue applying my school assignments to Alchemystar, as I hope to graduate from this curriculum with at least a rough model with goals and projections for that business specifically.  Nonetheless, I am taking these lessons to my office and applying them at a real business in real time.  Despite constantly feeling overwhelmed and challenged, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be learning this material at this time in my life.  Whenever I finish a course I feel better about my potential to bring people amazing things with my ideas!

My strategies to achieve my goal started with releasing attachments to take a fresh look at my ideas.  This has actually become a fairly standard mentality for me after the courses I’ve taken so far in this program, but that’s not to say I didn’t have to warm myself up to yet another fresh perspective.  The next strategy was to get as many opinions as possible and then consider all of them.  We actually had an assignment this month in which we had to survey 10-15 people and ask them questions about our ideas, so I was actually somewhat forced into utilizing that strategy.  I learned a lot from it, though, and not just how to ask questions.  I am implementing new ways to survey customers for product feedback that goes toward product development now at VitaliTree, which before I saw as too difficult and not presenting much value.  I feel the opposite now, it’s pretty easy and goes quite a long way in making stellar products.  Finally, I wrote that I wanted to journal my ideas to be able to return to them later with even more perspective.  I was unable to keep up with this strategy, but this very blog post is inspiring me to more diligently report my progress and discoveries.  I hope I am able to balance more of these types of interactions into my routine.  A major goal is to publish more business, audio, and family related articles at my personal website – www.sterlinghbond.com - where I advertise my audio skills, and maybe automate this Tumblr account to share them.

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Business Venture Research Mastery Journal

My main goal for Business Venture Research was to “Learn where to find and how to use the best statistics.”  This was a very specific goal that I feel I met somewhere between halfway and completely, but I was also given the knowledge and understanding to further master the art of business research while I continue to grow as an entrepreneur.  At Full Sail, we typically take one class at a time (always in online grad school) and this is a major double-edged sword.  The format allows classes to build on each other, which streamlines the receiving of information for the student and bypasses a lot of filler material and busy work, but with classes like this one the material can be a lot to squeeze into a month.  The workload was fair this month, but challenging nonetheless.

I learned this month that, so long as I am willing to really read and understand it all, the more sources I can find on a topic the better.  Quality comes first and a handful of quality resources are necessary to trust your results, but quantity of research to compare goes a long way as well.  The latter is where secondary research (research someone else gathered that the researcher studies) comes in handy, where primary research (conducted directly by the research) will produce more quality information.  Statistical information is some of the most valuable and reliable secondary research you can find, though, and at this point my favorite and least favorite part of this course.  I am so grateful to have my eyes open to the vast databases people can use freely today like the Small Business Association and the almost infinite amount of US Census data, but I wish we could have spent more time learning how to use these tools and their resulting data in depth.

The strategies I developed to meet my goals, which I set in month 1 of my graduate program, were to; 1) find extra data to compare, 2) develop a strategy to qualify credibility of information, and 3)   bookmark all the most useful information stumbled across in this course, whether I use it in class or not.  Number 1 must have been a premonition because the importance of vast data points to compare was a major theme in class this month.  Number two more fell into the realm of a skill I much better understand now but need to continue honing, and I definitely fell short of my goal with number 3.  Honestly I might have pulled more quotable points from this class’ assigned reading and viewing than any class I’ve taken in college, but I keep having to stumble over my tracks to find them to share or credit.

Business research will be a necessary part of every endeavor I pursue for the rest of my life.  Even if I wanted to get a job making hamburgers for some massive chain I know I would learn to do anything better by researching and studying, and any knowledge I gain would only make me more valuable to any company I could work for.  I’m very grateful to have taken this course on my entrepreneurial journey, as I these are skills I will always use regularly.

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Product Design and Development Mastery Journal

In our first course with the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Master of Science’s degree program, Mastery: Personal Development and Leadership, we were asked to set goals for each of the courses we would be taking over the program.  This month put me in a very useful course called Product Design and Development, and this was the goal I wrote: “Considering this is a bulk of my current career responsibilities, I must do my absolute best at mastering every bit of this course’s materials.”  Obviously this class was important to me before I ever started, and truthfully I have been looking forward to it.  The three strategies I listed to help me succeed in this class were to make extra time to read extra research, bring what I’m learning to work to test, and to take lots of notes on planning strategies with launch phases.  These strategies definitely helped me throughout the course.

My goals were absolutely met by this course, and I feel much more capable to carry on designing successful products, as well as to deal with failures and shortcomings of ideas that don’t work out.  I have gained so much new information and knowledge this month, and I think the first strategy of making extra time to read extra research served me best in achieving that goal.  Throughout the month, we have been given many different excellent resources and several of them came from blogs that I am now following.  Having other articles to cross reference has been crucial in mastering my understanding of more advanced topics.  One week we were given an article that listed 11 great blogs about design, and I have been slowly integrating the ones that appeal to my interests most (which is almost all of them) into my reading routine.

This month I learned how to measure my ideas viability, and most importantly to always start a new idea with the MVP - the “Minimum Viable Product” design.  The MVP is the most affordable and accessible design that gets the best balance of the original intention across with minimal effort and investment.  Once this is discovered, the product needs to iterate versions by gaining insight through the “build-measure-learn loop”.  In this cycle, we start with building a product (the MVP) as fast as possible, getting it on the market to be used by the consumers.  If the product will fail, we want it to fail as fast as possible so it will cost us as little time and money as possible, so this is the first hurdle we are trying to jump by getting releasing the MVP ASAP.  When people start using it, we must get their feedback and measure the success of the current version.  Combining this data with our predictions, market analysis, competition’s history, etc., we learn how to make our idea better.  Assuming the idea isn’t doomed entirely to be scrapped, moving the company on to the next idea, any idea can (and arguably should) always be made better.  At this point we must build the new version and get it out to the public, measure its success by reception and feedback, and learn more insightful data to keep making our product the best it can be.  The MVP and the build-measure-learn loop are both concepts highly regarded in Eric Ries’ book “The Lean Startup”, which has inspired a new movement in entrepreneurship that is the basis of our studies in this program at Full Sail.

I am already applying the material learned in this course every day at work with VitaliTree, the skincare startup I have been working with for 4 years now.  Following through with my second strategy of bringing what I’m learning to work to test, I have noticed much more confidence and quick decisive action when considering new brand or marketing directions.  In learning lean startup methodology, I have also been able to confirm many tough choices over the years as being the right or wrong thing to do, and this insight has made my day-to-day choices much easier as they do not seem so permanent anymore.  The fact is: everything changes, or if something can’t change it eventually dies entirely.  When you look at changing your ideas as a daunting or impossible task, you are stuck in the past and too afraid to move into the future.  My final strategy for the month, taking lots of notes on planning strategies with launch phases, wound up being a list of sources I want to keep up with over time.  The MVP and the build-measure-learn loop are invaluable strategies, but as the field of entrepreneurship grows and more young entrepreneurs share their ideas online the horizon of possibilities itself expands.  I intend to keep up with the times as I grow with the free market, and I hope to inspire my partners, coworkers, and peers to do the same.

References:

Blank, S. G. (2006). The four steps to the epiphany: Successful strategies for products that win. Lulu.com.

Blank, S. (2013, May). Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved July 15, 2016, from https://hbr.org/2013/05/why-the-lean-start-up-changes-everything. Hosted on HBR website

Ries, E. (2011, October). Build Measure Learn uncertainty waste value. Inc., 33(8), 56-63. Retrieved July 15, 2016, from EBSCOhost.

Ries, E. (2014). The lean startup: How today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. New York, NY: Crown Business

Image Credits:

Boegh (Photographer). (2011, August 27). Innovation[photograph]. London, UK: Flikr.

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Here is a presentation I made for Business Venture Research about TOMS Shoes - Enjoy! :)

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☉ Magic Transistor

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As much as technology has changed, there is an inescapable logic to signal flow.  Understand this and you can learn to understand any technology.

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That moment when Julian Cope hands u an artifact manufactured by coca cola in 1927 & then explains how time mag. made hitler man of the year in 1938 & then goes on to explain how the U.S. 45th infantry was mostly #firstnations #indigenous wearing the same symbol on their arms until 1940 & u realize how bloody important dismantling the system actually is & how powerful a platform music/art is & can be & u realize how much the establishment projects itself thru media & watch people/friends/family ingest poison as entertainment & u still haven’t paid ur rent & u can’t figure out how to disrupt the system without being driven mad by it all & u don’t know what to do with all the information ‘cause obviously nobody cares enough or thinks it thru enough to… & everybody wants to be entertained, & everyone wants to escape & everyone’s applauding the winners while they suck the life & breath of the underground, the root, to propagate more bullshit & win ur dollar & ur vote, they shift ur value system until the truth ain’t worth shit, but u keep pushing & pushing & pushing 'cause u know it’s all built on lies & the people are hungry, so hungry & confused that they’re living vicariously through suckers & u think maybe the time is now, right now & u work for it & u overwork for it & ur underpaid for it & then u realize & the people realize & the followers realize that they already have the thing that will turn it all on its head & then the beat drops….

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If you trace most American problems back to the source, more often than not you’ll find big businesses and corporate agendas. This system is ultimately providing my generation with the tools and infrastructure to make some very positive changes in this world.  See my last post - innovation is about solving problems.  Corporate America as it stands is a problem, and young entrepreneurs have a responsibility to bring trade back to a place that is truly fair and free.  Encouraging and teaching creativity and innovation in schools can empower tomorrow’s leaders to ultimately bring about a positive transformation and growth for our species that we can’t even conceive from within the blinding smoke and dust in this economic foxhole.

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From the Chief Knowledge Officer of NASA Innovation is one of the foundations of true Entrepreneurship...

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hmmm....