I chose How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. The theme of this book was to embrace your failures. All throughout the book Adams shares his experiences of his life and how time and time again he has failed but yet he uses his failure in his favor he says "invite failure in, embrace it, then pick its pocket." I think that his mindset is what set him of for success.
I believe the books goes hand in hand with what we're learning in ENT 3003. With entrepreneurship I believe you have so many obstacles coming at you from every angle and to be honest one of the most challenging things you could do is start a business from scratch so I do believe you will fail time and time again so this book tells you to take those failures evaluate them and turn them into successes.
If I had to design an exercise for the class the exercise would involve Adams point to not read the news for truth. I would pick some of the craziest articles and have the students read them and then have them read articles about the same topics but that are actually true. This exercise would help students understand that when you read the news you take it with a grain of salt and read it for exposure of topics not word for word what the author is saying.
My "aha" moment when reading this book was that Scott believes that systems trump goals, and that people who use systems over goals are more successful. I think it took me by surprise because my whole life everyone has been asking me what my goals are for the this semester, or the next couple months, or even within 5 years, yet no one ever talked about systems like that. I found it very interesting that he said you should have systems instead of goals. I might have to give that one a try. My favorite part of the book was when he talked about faking it till you make it. My family and I have always said that so it was pretty cool to read about how this successful person has the same idea we have about that situation.
Hello Jaycie,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that starting a business will result in many failures and challenges. However, if you want to be successful now and in the future you must be able to learn from your failures. I believe that a successful entrepreneur should also be proactive in the market. I think the "aha" moment you mention was surprising. I consider goals to be important and is something that motivates and drives people to achieve.
Hello Jaycie,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your reflection about this book. One thing I found interesting was the activity that you would have the class complete. Often we get caught up in article titles and the content that is being written from a biased point of view and forget to question what we are reading or hearing. This assignment would be a good way to get us to retrain our brain to questions what news we are getting and look into the sources it is coming from.
Hello Jaycie,
ReplyDeleteI also posted about the book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.” We had some similar thoughts especially on the “aha” moment. I also thought that Scott Adams thoughts on making systems not goals was very profound. People can definitely be disappointed or feel empty when they are working towards something that could take up to 5 years to become a reality. Thus, the idea of systems is fulfilling and will help with self-growth.