Week #13

Lessons Learned

President Monson’s talk regarding gratitude was really important to me because I think having an attitude of gratitude is a great way to remove your problems from your life. If we think about the people he outlined being grateful for like mothers, fathers and teachers then we can also think about how they would look at us, and hopefully, we are acting in a way that they wouldn’t be disappointed in us. The things we are usually grateful for came at a sacrifice to them so to honor their sacrifice, we can live our best lives.


I liked hearing about Randy's journey out of Harvard to eventually starting and running a VC group. I can't imagine how challenging it was to balance his family life and run a business that essentially nurtures young businesses into hopeful successful models like Yahoo or AOL. The thing that stuck out to me most about Randy's story though was eventually bringing on Carl Nichols to the business. I have had about 2 people I "worked" with that I would love to work with again in this type of capacity. One was while on my mission and the other was while working in Education Technology. 


I really think finding someone that compliments you in business is a unicorn of sorts and if you have someone like Randy had then it's worth the 15 years struggle to get them to come over to work with you. I see a lot of parallels between Randy and Carl though to me and my Co-worker from the Ed Tech job. I have a small hotdog cart and if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have even considered it as an option. One day we had a hotdog cart come into the office and provide lunch for the staff, then he came another day to sell to the staff in our office. We sat there, saw this guy just really like what he did, and ran the numbers as we chowed down on some grub and figured it was a solid business venture. 8 years later and we were way off on our projections, but I would absolutely love to be in a position financially where I could bring him on to work along my side.


Stan Christenson talked about avoiding being super good at one thing because it will limit your long term. This was important to me because I think a lot of times we hear people talk about passion and being focused but get that confused with the idea that you should hyper-focus and be super good at one thing. But in Stan’s example of being really good with excel, it isn’t going to benefit you a lot.

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