Expanding the Vison

The end of my first semester is here and while I have learned so much I am also relearning lessons that I want to be through with. Organization has always been a weakness. Throughout my adult life I have gone through so much difficulty and regret as a result of not staying organized. I choose to write about this now because I can make this a turning point. The close of this semester will be the opening of a new one and with a new start I can be a new student and a new person. Business is about failing forward and getting up more times than you are knocked down. I recognize in myself this weakness that wants to be embarrassed of what  I lack and the embarrassment makes me feel like it is easier to ignore than to face head-on and try to fix it. I have to be the person who can find the weakness and fix it. I have to be strong enough to understand that I am weak and still believe in myself and my ability to overcome my weaknesses. The Lord says, if you come unto Him, He will show you...

I used to have a very different idea about jobs. I always thought that the kind of job I could get would somehow define me. I left a lot of jobs without giving two weeks of notice because I felt that I was better, inside. I didn't like my superiors and felt that I was more capable sometimes. I guess in some ways it is true, the type of job you can qualify for does resemble your discipline to some degree. Those who are willing to go to school are showing that discipline and their degrees are reflections of that. However, the job itself does not make me. Over the course of this semester we have read different stories of people who go from job to job and there seems to be no shame in that. That's how I saw it before. I felt like it was some kind of failure to move from one thing to the next. These different people instead do it because they are taking ownership of their lives and they are being responsible with how they use their time. I can see in their decisions that they are wo...

This week has been a real turning point for me. Things are starting to make more sense in my mind, but more importantly in my heart. I have feelings and dreams about what I am meant to accomplish in this lifetime but I have never seen the path that leads there. To sense the end but be at the beginning has left me with my inexperienced and only barely educated mind to try to imagine the means to that end. I know I am a creator in some sense, like my Father in Heaven. I know that what I am meant to create will bless the world but I always thought of that as something separate from what I would need to do to have a career. In my mind, I had to become really successful at something worldly so that I would have enough resources. I still don't quite understand what I will do in the future and how, but I know now that business can and should be service. I know that there is the way that the world thinks about business and there is the way that God intends for it to be, to build Zion. I kn...

I never thought of budgeting as something that I'd like to be a hallmark of my success. Lamely, I thought that budgeting was mostly for the poor. Don't rich people have so much money they don't have to worry about where it goes? Isn't that the meaning of financial freedom? No. Financial freedom comes after financial conditioning and training and now I see that starts with budgeting. Even though I have been less well to do than I'd like to be I still have not learned to budget. My form of budgeting has been to watch my account and try to spend less than I make. Recently my credit has gone up and so has my credit spending. Now I am pausing to reflect and focusing on paying them back down. I wish I had had a budget from the beginning and after seeing James A Ritchie's video on budgeting I am more excited about having one than ever. I read The Richest Man in Babylon and it opened my mind to possibilities that are limited to no one. I saw that saving and investin...

This week we read an interesting paper from Harvard Business school that talked about entrepreneurs and administrators. Suddenly I am unsure about where this Business Administration degree with an emphasis in Entrepreneurial Management will take me. I know that I will come to challenging ideas and situations along my path and I am prepared to remind myself that I am on the right track. Reading that paper though, did cause me to pause and reflect. In my patriarchal blessing it says that I will work in administrative roles with adults and children. I have always wondered what that meant as I have, for a long time, struggled to know what I am supposed to pursue. A couple ideas crossed my mind: 1) I made a mistake, this is not what I am supposed to be doing. (Upon thinking this I quickly reminded myself that I have already received a spiritual witness that I am in the right place.) 2. Well maybe I was only supposed to be put in this place so that I will read this article and know what admi...

After last week, we read about the three kinds of students- those who have a bone to pick with someone from their past that can use that as a driving force for success, those who experienced significant hardship and are therefore not affected harshly by set backs or failures along the way to success, and lastly those that had things easy and sheltered and enter the real world flinching at difficulty and totally embarrassed by failure. This last type of student also happened to be the type that was 100% of the time, unreachable, or so the readings said. This last type of student also happened to be me. I have thought about this and how it has manifested in my endeavors. It is true. I was at the time that I went off to college, unreachable and unwilling to suffer for any success. Why? It had always come easy to me, my parents had always done the harder things for me, and I even had help getting out of situations because of special privileges afforded to one whose parent works at the sch...

I always knew that the way I was raised had set me up for failure. Well, that's not completely true. I found out my first year in college. I have known since then. I am the youngest of 10 children and the way I see it, my parents were kind of "done" when my time came to prepare to launch. It was mostly my father who handled these kinds of things. Teaching me about money, what I could and mostly what I couldn't afford. How to get into a good college, meaning, just let him do it and I'll have a better chance. Don't worry about jury duty, I know how to get you out of it. You need a physical? Go get me the phone book and I'll find a doctors name to forge. My dad had it all figured out. Too bad for me, it was my life that was about to begin, not his. My first semester in college was a total failure and it took me several years to recover. This week in the class readings I read about the three different students. One had something against someone and could us...