This is a guest post from Harry Tucker of HarryTucker.com.
So I’ m Inspired, Now What?
If I were to view the actions of many people, perhaps their actions would be best be described as “Now I’m inspired, so what?”
Today we are blessed with incredibly easy access to an unlimited supply of inspirational material from a wealth of sources. It would seem that the plethora of material available to us in printed form, e-books, daily devotional emails, motivational speakers, audio books and everything else should be transforming us so significantly that we should be happier and more productive than ever.
That’s what they tell us, anyway.
Read more…
If you’re looking about what to do with your life, here’s a quick graphic for you.
How to be happy in business – venn diagram
Read more…
Listening to a number of Silicon Valley discussions on and offline and their culture is one where you find the one thing they deal with over and over again is: how does one deal with failure.
The most basic question is: What do you call a failed entrepreneur in Silicon Valley? Experienced.
Anywhere else in the US and you have to change your name, move to another town, or your parents are embarrassed. In Silicon Valley after hearing about your first failure they ask, “What’s your next company going to be?”
The main culture should be innovation, that change is the name of the game, that leasing office space to 20 year olds is not unheard of, that taking a $2 Million dollar check and building a company around solving a problem is THE most important part of a startup culture.
It needs to be the same throughout the US, in schools and universities, businesses, and government institutions.
Here’s a short notice of Ideakick.org, city of Denver version, of an event that will happen Jun 23rd. Here’s the link and here’s the when and where, ensure you register to get a ticket, even though it’s free:
Jun 23, 2011
Creative Density
1719 Emerson Street
Denver CO
6:30 – 9:30 PM
@ideakickDENVER
“Ideakick is a community that springboards budding entrepreneurial ideas and concepts.
Think of Ideakick as a thinktank for your business ideas. You can pitch a business idea that you’ve been thinking about or are currently working on. Gain valuable feedback, industry insight, and/or connect with someone interested in working on the same idea.”
Over 20 people are showing up, register at http://ideakickdenver1.eventbrite.com/ so you can get in and spout your idea out.
Check out my Coworking blog post.
Are your kids bored? Is it difficult for your kids to get a job in today’s economy?
Think outside the box, have them start a business. Think work, not job.
There is nothing like teaching kids about the value of money, taking responsibility, and serving others with their ideas that have been converted into products and services.
Here are some suggestions.
This is a start, so see if your kids can make some money and learn about life.
If you don’t believe it can be done, just take a look at BusinessInsider’s These 10 Pre-Teen Entrepreneurs Make Millions More Than Their Parents. They make more than their parents, but their parents supported them.
Image via CrunchBase
Any startup entrepreneur needs to make connections with others, primarily because they can’t do it all themselves, but it’s best they don’t do it all themselves.
Startup Weekend Denver occurred this past weekend at WorkBrite’s Coworking location. I’ll go into what happened and what I saw.
Purchasing a ticket to attend pays for food and drinks for the weekend. Great for those that “need to get things done” in starting up a business.
Friday Night’s agenda:
- Network – meet and greet with 52 Denver and the surrounding area attendees from all backgrounds and skill sets. One was even on his vacation and from out of state to join in the fun since there is not a SW in his area. Maybe he’s looking to start one? You just never know.
- Icebreaker – get your body moving and interactive with others in a Rock, Paper, Scissors game to win $50.
- Pitch – you have 60 seconds to explain your idea with 30 seconds of Q&A.
- Vote – everyone gives their vote to the project that they would like and narrow down the field to 4-8 teams around an idea. You choose which one you want to provide assistance to. Some required coding help, others did not, but most did.
Saturday’s Agenda:
- Breakfast, lunch, and dinner – continental breakfast, lunch and dinner and drinks to keep you “fueled up.” Coffee and soda drinks included where and anything caffeinated was the drink of choice.
- Build out your business – work toward the Sunday’s goal of presenting your efforts to the judges.
Sunday’s Agenda:
- Continue to build out the business.
- At 4 Pm a final push and at 5 PM the last pitch and selection of the finalists.
Overall Friday night is the most hectic as you’re determining the idea to follow and how you can contribute to it. On Saturday it came down to doing the work so it was gelling time, finding out where you fit into the team that you have selected to help out and then getting productive.
Clothes of choice were varied. Short, especially cargo shorts and flipflops were abundant, though, so you’d say it was Saturday casual wear, a notch below casual Friday. Coders usually had laptops and earbuds or headsets to keep focused on their tasks. Of course, laptops where all around.
As a Mac entrepreneur the one thing that I did see was about a 2 to 1 use of Macs over PCs for those attending. Startups know the right hardware/software combinations. So if you want to start a business, Macs are the computer of choice. Smart people use them.
Overall if you have any reason to start a business and have a weekend to learn, Startup Weekend is the place to be to get your feet wet learning about startups. Nothing like getting a baptism of fire for the newbies.
I’ll be attending the Personlize Media Conference at the Chautauqua in Boulder, CO on June 20-21, 2011.
The Agenda covers:
It should be a good conference, I’ll blog about it when I’m done. Change is all around and this conference will be a part of that change with technology being at the forefront of media and content.
