Reflections For Week 12

This week has been a very interesting week for me. I learned about two great entrepreneurs. As I learned about them, I thought about ways I can include such lessons to make my $100 project better and to have increase in my business. I was able to identify areas that I can improve upon. Although my set target for the class is almost achieved, however, I am looking at moving forward beyond the class duration.

Tom Nall was the first person I researched on. He was a man who believes in being himself. Be you and you can be different. Tom Nall, was the man who helped build Wick Fowler’s Two-Alarm Chili mix into a national brand, teamed up with Ken MacKenzie, a longtime student of tequila history and technique to come up with Republic Tequila and its unique, Texas-shaped bottle.

Everything he has done in life including position he held has given him something valuable. Taught school and sold insurance. He did lots things that are considered as internship today. He went out of insurance and became a market and sales person. Have to do things differently and imagine in order to compete with the big guys. He loved what he did. He is optimistic even in times of great risks because he believed that risk takers are entrepreneur and he wants to be one. His retirement lasted two days. It is his dream to give opportunities to people who wants to be successful and he believe they can if they work hard. Learned new technologies for networking. Likes to get people who have little experience, but wants people who don’t think they have to do it the way industry does it. Honesty, integrity, and hard work are the top priorities. Golden rule, treat people the way they want to be treated. It does not matter who it is, everyone deserves the golden rule.

I did also some research on Steve Job of Apple. His life and story is so inspiring and the experiences he went through are so motivating that I decided to research on him for this assignment. I have learned a lot about him and the things he did as I work on this assignment. He never had things going easy for him but at the end, things worked well for him because he was determined and focused on that he love and what he wants to become. 

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave their unnamed son up for adoption. His father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor, and his mother, Joanne Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents. His life as a child was not easy for him but he went through them knowing that things would get better.

After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes at the school. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.

He wrote "When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: 'If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.' It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'no' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

Steve Jobs summarized his guiding principle in life in 2005 at the commencement at Stanford in a talk titled “How to Live Before You Die.” He said, “You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.“ This is one of the finest lessons I have learned from this great innovator of our time.