Assignment 28- Your Exit Strategy

For my exit strategy I plan to stay with my business for several decades then retire because it is something I think I would enjoy doing for years to come. And If possible I might even pass the business down to my children. I chose this strategy because I don’t want to sell my business and the vision I had when I started becomes construed or even lost so I’d rather keep my business and continue working for the next several decades. I think my exit strategy did influence the opportunity I identified because I wanted to find a need that would forever be needed not something that was just temporary. And I wanted an opportunity that could be expanded and have the ability to create more than just one product.

Assignment 27- Reading Reflection No. 3

For this reading reflection I chose How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. This book looks at the ups and downs of Adams career and how despite all of his failure he still managed to come up big. He also gives advice on how to succeed and explains that no career guide will work for everyone but to study others and see how you can change their method to help yourself succeed. I think this book was really relevant for this course because it focused on failure and many entrepreneurs are scared of failure and taking risks. Adams used his own multiple failures to show his readers that failure is okay especially when you learn from it. If I had to design an exercise based on this book I would have students identify a moment anytime in their life when they experienced failure. I would then have them analyze this experience and look at how many times they failed, if they made changes each time, and how this affected them and what they learned from it. I think my “aha” moment was reading about his failures because when most people say they failed at some point in their career it was usually only one or two times. So seeing Adams openly talk about is multiple failures in a way gave me some confidence and also reinforced in my mind that failure is just a part of the process and normal.

Assignment 26- Celebrating Failure

So this semester I started going to the gym consistently and for my warm up I always do the stair master for 15-20 minutes. But of course, because I was out of shape I had to start slow so I set a personal goal to reach a speed between level 6 and 8. If you go to the gym then you know that most people dread the stair master so for me this was important because I didn’t want to avoid a machine just because it is hard. Each week I reached a higher speed which was great but every time I tried my goal but I just couldn’t keep up.  And this made me realize that it’s okay if it takes me longer to reach where I want to be. I learned that I shouldn’t rush myself just to reach a goal but instead trust the process because if I continue being consistent and slowly getting faster I will eventually reach this goal.

            Because I don’t like failing at anything when I do fail it does leave me a bit frustrated but then I turn that frustration into motivation to figure out a new plan or idea to reach my goal. I think being in this class has showed me that its okay to take risks and fail because failure may seem like a bad thing but in reality we learn from these failures. I definitely think that after being in this class I’ll be more open to taking risks even if failure is a possible outcome.