Week 4
Today I was working on writing my personal constitution and gave my husband a brief explanation of what I was doing. He pointed out that I’ve always got assignments about analyzing myself and writing about my personal goals and aspirations and whatnot. (From a distance, it can look very cheesy.) The assignments he was referencing were all from entrepreneurship classes.
I thought about that. And it dawned on me that he’s right, and this is exactly what I signed up for when I adopted entrepreneurship as a minor. And I love it! This is different from any other business classes. It’s not about marketing, or how to manage people. It’s not about finance, revenue, profit. It’s not about the strategy and the numbers, although all or these things are important in business. Teaching those skills is different from entrepreneurship because entrepreneurial skills need to be applicable to any industry or market. Entrepreneurship is as much about who you are as what you do. It’s not a job, or even a career. It’s a journey; it’s a spirit. It’s about continually working to build your business, your life, yourself. It’s about taking a good hard look at an idea and saying “How can I do this myself?” Then you put in the time and the hard work and you do it. Then you take a look at something you’re proud of (or at your failure), and ask how you can make it even better, which can be hard and painful, but it. Is. So. Rewarding! Then you make this process a habit. As you work on your business, you also learn to apply this principle to all other aspects of your life. You develop work ethic, discipline, creativity, fortitude...
Just for fun, I googled the definition of aspiration, even though I hate essays and sacrament meeting talks that use dictionary definitions because 9/10 times it’s lazy and uncreative. The first definition given was “a hope or ambition of achieving something.” In entrepreneurship, you must have an aspiration, a vision of what can be if you just work hard and long enough, through all of the setbacks, with just a little bit of luck. You have to commit. To successfully craft your dreams into your reality you must live and breathe them. The second definition of aspiration was “the [very] action or process of drawing breath.” Huh. That’s something I’m going to ponder this week and I invite you to do the same.