Mastery

This week I finished a book entitled Mastery.  This book along with the videos and articles on habits went a long way to impress the fact that to gain true success in business you have to be willing to stretch yourself and grow outside a comfort zone.  To be successful you have to develop habits that may not seem easy or comfortable.  You need to look at your success in the form of a lifelong process not a dollar value goal.  In terms of business while the bottom line is a measurement of success, it is not the end result.  The bottom line is just a measuring stick to guide you through your path of improvement. That is not the common way of thinking in the world today.  It was a lot to think about and find a way ti incorporate it into my own life.

Entrepreneurial and Family

Somehow, this week's lessons and my life coincided. While a great deal of our material spoke about making time for your family and remembering what is most important, I had a very sick child at home with me this week and chose to spend a lot of my time with him.  He is a teenage but it felt more important to sit and watch TV with him or read his homework to him so he could stay current than worrying about my business responsibilities.  I still did my work while he slept and did my homework late at night but I am glad I spent the majority of my work hours with him.  Being in business for myself, in the service industry as I am, I have a bit more freedom to arrange where and when I do some of my tasks.  This is in contrast to someone opening a boutique of some kind.  The type of business that you decide to open can impact how you can arrange your family time so make sure you take a long hard look ant the company you are starting before you begin down that road.

Mastery

It has been quite a week in class.  We had a great deal of information given to us and all of it was really good.  I was most impressed with the opening chapters of the book entitled "Mastery".  This book discussed becoming a master of a skill or talent, but it was the description of a master that caught my attention.  To become a master you must enjoy the times of no progress.  You must not look to the nest break though but revel in the time when little or no progress is noticeable so as to master that stage of the learning process.  I had never thought of it that way.  The thought of using the plateau in your progress as a time to master the skills learned so far makes a great deal of sense.  Honing your skills as you advance means you do not have to work harder as you learn new things.  I like that.  In a video we watch it talked about making your decision not about you while they are about you.  This sounds like an oxymoron but they way I figured it, if we make decision about aspects of your lives that effect us, we need to consider others first and how our decision will affect them.  In this way we address the big picture in our lives and now just focus on "me."  This is always a good view to have.

What are my goals

I have had an eventful week which has lead me to be behind in everything I had to do.  Which makes this week's lessons all the more applicable and in my eyes, humorous.  This week we looked at our plans, both short term and long term, and who we want to be in the end.  As we considered these questions we were tasked with creating our own personal constitution and goals, both long and short term.  I am on the downhill side of my working life and am swinging into grandparent mode so many of the goals I had early on in my life have been fulfilled, so I looked to my retirement years and the eternities.  Since I am in the more endure to the end stage of this life I now look to gaining those attributes and talents that will aid me in the hereafter.  Since I have no concrete idea of all I will need, I am going to work on an overall goal of being better tomorrow than I am today.  I know this all sounds vague but inch by inch it makes sense to me.

Ethics in Business

I made it through the third week.  Not only did I do my class load but I am also back east visiting a very sick family member.  It was enjoyable to share the study material with my sister as we caught up with each others lives and family.  As I watch videos and read the articles assigned to me this week, we talked about the talks and the implications they have in both our work and personal lives.  My sister is a homemaker while I am a business owner.  I talked about how if I am to be a success entrepreneur I needed to be an honest, reliable, and principled.  I mentioned how if I wasn't an ethical business owner I would not be in business very long.  My sister said, as she watched a few of the videos with me, that she felt the videos should be shown to new moms as well.  She said that when ethics start at home then they come naturally in the business world.  It was a interesting thought.  She joked that she was the business owner of her family and maybe she could use some of these classes for herself.
In an article titled "Making a Living and a Life", the author described a grading scale for a business man.  As I read the article I could see that his perspective was not from a purely numbers view but from a personal integrity standpoint.  Evaluating myself as a business owner based on his criteria I was satisfied to see that I could say I was an A- to a B+ business person.  While there have been times I have had made business decisions based on a purely monetary focus, for the most part I have always had my subordinates in mind when I reviewed and proceeded in with a decision.  While I think this balance does not allow me a classic "A" per this authors outline I do think it was the best recourse for the situations I was faced with.
After this week's lessons I feel really good about how I have conducted my business decisions.

Living Our Dream

I am in my second week of class and so far I am enjoying the material but not yet finding a fit for me in it.  This week we are talking about our life goals and dreams.  So many people live their lives with no purpose or plan in mind and so they waste precious time just wandering.  As we focused on planning ahead and living a life with purpose I found myself looking back not looking forward.  Have I lived a life a purpose so far?  What more can I do with what is left of my life?

Like so many others I did not have a plan when I started out.  I had an end goal in mind but no real path to reach it.  I wasted time meandering around hoping someone else would set up my path.  I was in my 30's before I started actively guiding my own life.  I still did not have a plan but I was going to do something.  I worked to teach myself how to manage a business and run an office.  I used my desire to help my husband in his dream of being a business owner to give myself a purpose.  I took my love of math and organizing things to set up his office and track in money.  It took me a while to find a job that I learned to love and excel at.

Looking back I can see the choices and decision I made that got me here and I am please with the journey.  I met and helped a great number of people along the way and guided others looking for purpose.  It was an adventure that I do not regret.

Looking forward I am content to do more of the same.  I have no great aspiration for wealth, I just want enough to live comfortably and help others that need it.  Running our own business has allowed us to give jobs to young single adults looking for a way to pay for school.  It has also allowed us to open our home to people who did not have anyplace else to go.  In this way our money was sufficient to meet those needs and I am satisfied to continue this path.  I am going to college purely for the selfish reason that I want to learn and this is a good place to start.

I am living my dream.

The Beginning of it All

It is September 15th 2016 and I am starting a new adventure.  For 25 years I have been a business owner with my husband.  We have had many great successes and a few failures.  Through it all we learned as we went.  Neither of us had any college training in business.  We learn through trial and error, advice from other business owners and research.  This was a grand adventure and we learned a lot.  Today I have started a formal college adventure.  I am going to go find out what more there is to know about running a business in today's tech savvy world.  I am looking forward to learning from peers and mentors and also being able to share my thoughts and experiences.

The one thing that has always been a constant in running your own business, no one else will do it for you so go get it done.  That thought has the drive behind all of our successes and guided us through the trials.  We always knew that if we wanted to be a success we had to make it happen, no one else was going to make us successful.  I intend to use that same philosophy as I embark on the journey of obtaining a bachelor's degree in business management.  I look forward to it.