Tag Archives: Relationship

Love You Too: Relationships & Entrepreneurship

Posted on March 4, 2014 | Leave a comment

Relationships in our journey for success have the capacity to break us down or give more fuel to our engine. Unhealthy relationships often seem to slow you down and it’s more complex to get back up after having to deal with that situation. It seems many are not new to this area and go through the same battles day in and out. How do you handle yourself when being in a relationship? Are there expectations or roles that would be assigned?

I began to have a discussion with a great professional that has thorough knowledge in this environment and reached for his advice; knowing that I’m young, about dating and entrepreneurship. He gave me great links to articles that review over the pros and cons of it but we got down to the deeper side of things.

I’ve learned that relationships for entrepreneurs can turn into one of the hardest things. It’s a lonely road we get it, and we need as much support as possible. The chances of hitting depression are high and your spouse or loved one needs to understand the risks, and pain you are willing to take to fulfill your idea and get it done.

He or she needs to have a clear understanding of why you are doing this. If you are married with kids, the risks are much higher and therefore should execute a plan before moving into action. One of the most recommended readings is by Steve Blank called “Epitaph for an entrepreneur”. Where he explains what he did when he was running several companies and raising a family at the same time.

As a young guy I don’t have spare time to go to the mall and buy new clothes to please other people. I understand there will be days where I will wear the same shirt for a week and not notice it. No surprise there.

Unhealthy relationships creates more work, more stress, and destroys you little by little your ambition for getting your company going. Distractions come into play and mess around with your mind, should you have done this or that? And take you away from what you should really be doing.

Having the correct person that is willing to understand what you’re doing is key. With so many talks about divorce, and many people embracing their relationships that of a celebrities (majority lasting a few years), there really is no time for that.

Acknowledge there will be many risks and failures. Will they hang on when we start with nothing? Will they hang on when we have so much we lose everything? Their support to what you’re doing is the fuel that keeps you going.

Strategize for what each other’s roles will be. Set it up so that it doesn’t have to be confusing or too business-like, but let it flow smoothly.

Relationships during our entrepreneurship journey can be either good or bad depending how it fits the person in that situation. How has your experience been with have a relationship and business at the same time? How did you balance it out? And what would your advice be for those figuring out how to handle the balance situation?

Leave a comment

Posted in Business

Tagged , , ,

Explaining To Someone What Entrepreneurship Is

Posted on November 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

Recently I had the chance to speak with my uncle who I find as such a great person. He’s very motivational and inspiring, but we had this long talk about him wanting to see me instead complete school and find a job, living happily ever after sticking with that job. It was quite difficult getting to him that the way the school teaches us is off course to what the real world experience will give us. I told him I’m a very entrepreneurial minded person and only focus on what I know will benefit my present and future. Still couldn’t get it! How would you explain to someone that has no point of view of what the entrepreneurial side looks like?

To get started, as an entrepreneur I feel I’m unemployable. It’s uncomfortable working with others I can’t get along with and don’t have the same mindset I have. Applying for a resume and they ask for skills. What skills may I have? Does leadership count? To some yes, to others no, they’re looking for a seat to be filled. The feeling of having a job just brings a chill down my spine, all I would be doing is helping complete someone else’s goal(s) while being paid at a reasonable price for that period of time. I’ve learned that the way society works is that we end up depending on a job, and while the job may be something to be proud of, there’s always that minor point of being laid off. All that hard work and time well spent gone out the door. What do we do after we lose a job? We go berserk, we panic, we feel desperation coming and the negative emotions start taking over our mind. At the end of the month, that income that we are comfortable seeing being deposited no longer comes in. We start making late payments because of expenses we can’t handle, and banks start calling in for mortgage payments being late. The life is ruined! Or is it?

As we got more deeper into the conversation I wanted to let him know that his idea still is reasonable but I couldn’t see myself in that category. As an entrepreneur, life is always filled with experience. There’s no depending on one person for income rather it turns into self-reponsibility. Having switch into this mindset there always has to be room for learning, whether consuming it from books, audio, video, conferences, networking, you name it; continuous education is priority. But there’s still that debate if school should be an option. School is always an option, except most people rather skip the school part and start what they always dreamed of. Why waste the time on learning something that may end up not being used once graduating. The sources of where we can learn from have expanded dramatically: Learnable, Audacity, Coursera, Udemy, those are just a few but there are so many places one can learn from. I’m so in love with the world of business, everyday I have a business lecture or podcast playing while I go for a drive. Darren Hardy best stated this when he said a year’s worth of listening to material you’re into is about the same year’s worth in a graduate class. Your mind is never-ending and you see so much beauty into this.

Next, we move into what happens if our business doesn’t work? There’s fear and experience, but never failure. To fail means having the mindset to not bounce back up and be comfortable where that failure landed you. Learning from a system that didn’t work and tweaking it up and make it work to call it experience. And I think this is where experience becomes more of value than a paper stating where you went to school. I’ve witnessed people completing their masters, unemployed, yet they go back to school to change their major. To me it feels like it’s time wasted. Why not go out and prove you created, accomplished, and failed some businesses instead?

This is where the mindset of fear comes into place, we deal with fear almost non-stop but as entrepreneurs, once we learn to control fear, there’s nothing stopping us. What is there really stopping us? The quote says it best “What would you do if fear didn’t exist?” I love this quote because it’s not something everyone is capable of controlling, a majority are used to being comfortable. Working all week, going out on a weekend to spend everything they made that week, and repeating the cycle. The upside to this is they value money over themselves, something I’ve learned from Pejman Ghadimi is that money does not equal value, rather value equals money.

Later into the conversation he did agree with what I had to say except he’s never been exposed to the life where one has complete control of it. My response was that I too think I wouldn’t have known about this side if it wasn’t for my parents, although they see their customers as their boss instead, this makes them happy.

How have your experiences been explaining to an individual what entrepreneurship is? They have no understanding, but what are some easy ways that you did to describe it to them? Do you think it’s important to aware people about the possibility of having control of their lives?

Leave a comment

Posted in Business

Tagged , , ,

Consequeces of Holding Someone for Too Long

Posted on September 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

Have you been in a situation without thinking of what the consequences are when we hold on a team member that loses interest with the entire team and isn’t showing any enthusiasm any longer? Recently I had a conversation with my mother that runs a business about working different ways this situation could’ve been handled.

The discussion was mainly about how one of her team staff was just lacking in her work ethic. She was slow, non-energetic, and throughout the day the manager would be very stressful due to her speed of work. She would on occasion try to motivate her, talk her into giving more passion for her work so they could speed things up and leave customers satisfied, but over-time, it just wasn’t working out.

She mentioned she didn’t want to let her go because she’s been a part of the business for too long, with all the experiences she’s gained and if she were to let her go, finding someone else would seem too expensive for her.

I started to notice something going on here, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to let her go because she was a very experienced member, but rather she’s become dependent on her.

When we start to become dependent on someone for too long, it creates this barrier keeping you from stepping up to take the lead. That person of who we become desperately dependent among will not only notice it, but will take it to advantage and this is where I think starts to get ugly.

Why you may ask? Because a shift in power starts to happen and now the one who is being dependent on starts to play it as a game, sort of like a “you’re nothing without me” type. This will drag the organization down slowly and other team staff will become aware and I’m sure most would start to take off in different direction.

This as leaders makes us weak without hesitation, and we must not be carried into this playing field. What I suggested is that this team member should’ve been let go quickly. The ‘hire slow, fire quickly’ mentality.

When we hang on to a person that doesn’t bring value to the organization any more, they are robbing us- our time, our team, our customers, and our money.

I understand also that there is fear about what happens when we aren’t prepared to let someone go in that moment?

What happened during this situation was that the manager couldn’t handle it anymore and told her how she saw it. She blamed her for being too slow, wasn’t doing quality work and was wasting their time. That staff got upset and at the end of the day she decided to quit.

Soon after they all came to a meeting, they weren’t sure of who they were going to hire next. It was a clueless situation, there was no one in mind for the following Monday to hire. They quickly began post hiring ads everywhere and you could sense the stressful situation they got themselves in. On the opposite side however, they were the ones walking away laughing because they knew she was needed.

So what can we learn from this?

When there’s a person that doesn’t bring value to the organization any more, we have to let them go promptly, but before we let them go; we should prepare ourselves to have a plan of those who can replace them following the termination. This will reduce a lot of hassle and once you’ve found a replacement, it’s best to not go all out on a member in front of everyone, but instead at the end of the day have a one on one discussion with them about their work performance and let them know they no longer will be bringing their contribution to the team. It’s much more organized and saves a lot of time.

What strategies do you tend to use before letting someone go in your organization? Have you ever had to wait onto someone for too long and just decided to stick with it? Was your outcome good or bad? And what experiences have you gained?

Leave a comment

Posted in Business

Tagged , , , , ,

Bringing A Mentor

Posted on July 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

For some time now, I’ve began to start wanting to have a mentor. A mentor who gives you more specific guidance into the direction you want to go. A mentor who has faced the experiences, and informs you what is to come. There seems to be like there are great benefits when you bring a mentor into your life.

My father has been the great mentor in my life so far. He’s taught me so much about life, leadership and business, but now I feel that it’s appropriate to add someone else into my life to guide me even further to push me. I believe in order to go after what you want, you should also seek the help from another who’s been through that direction. You may ask why do I need one?

One of the reasons I look at it is because of further motivation. They seem to know the process clearly and hearing what they have to say will give me a much more needed boost in motivation, telling myself “now that I’ve committed to something, it has to be done.”

Secondly, because of the knowledge they contain. Some mentors are so informative that they soak your brain with all this knowledge you didn’t know existed. By taking notes and capturing their experiences I think you start to think (except for their experiences) in the mindset of their level.

There’s always that fear within us though, of being trapped and lost because we are nervous about whether if we are making the correct choices or not. We shouldn’t shy ourselves from finding further help, instead we should make it a habit to find it. That’s why I began analyzing myself that I should bring a mentor in my life, but where do we find them?

I know most speakers are such great mentors. Having a great relationship with them opens up opportunity. Business owners that I’ve spoken with have offered to give guidance as well. Looking for mentors isn’t a difficult task but finding the correct one is.

Have you included a mentor into your life to help guide you more towards the goals you want to accomplish? Has it benefited you immensely? What did you learn about having a mentor and what opportunities have you gained or created? Remember that we shouldn’t isolate ourselves; no man is on an island alone.

Leave a comment

Posted in Business

Tagged , , ,

Eye to Eye Avoidance: Conflict at Church

Posted on April 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

Many people come and go for those that have attended church for so long. We meet great people and the not so great. Something that came to mind was that over time I’ve seen drama explode inside the church and people making their decision to part ways. People part ways for the reasoning of a disagreement they had with someone, gossiping, or perhaps loss interest and failed to solve the problem.

If we ever accidentally see them again at a restaurant, church attendees house or anywhere outside the church facilities, there are three things I’ve seen occur. They come over to warmly greet you being accepting, they acknowledge you and move on not to start a conversation or they’d simply ignore you not see eye to eye. So what I ask is for those that ignore them, are they still upset over the argument they had? Could they not move on from the past? Is it simply the fact that they feel ashamed when they look at them or are they holding a grudge?

Going to a marriage accompanying my parents, I got the chance to greet old friends and people I grew up with when I was young. These people to me are great, they learned so much, grew and went their ways to improve the lives of others. They are the ones who left the organization for their own reasoning but are always loving with open arms happy to greet you warmly. And then on the other side there are those that left because of rough arguments and gossip. Their expressions on some of their faces was priceless, that surprised look and quickly looking down pretending they haven’t noticed us. I wouldn’t know what’s going through their mind, but maybe it’s an embarrassment feel because they look as if they’re hiding. This is the part where either one of us has to step up and lead. Going up to them, they have this cold facial expression, they’re not too pleased of the greet. Their body language is not showing interest rather moving away. So I spoke with them how they’ve been and their responses were very short. My thoughts are what’s going on? Are they still upset over the argument?

I don’t have a clear remembrance of the speaker’s entire quote, but i captured one important statement. It is stating that “Hate is a waste of time.” When we keep hating someone, we are putting valuable time thinking about that one person and instead we should use that time benefiting from something else. We are not all perfect and we may have disagreements about a certain part, but we have to learn to move on. I’ve seen people where they have disagreement about a certain topic although they may have the same agreements about other issues. After battling it out on one certain issue they no longer see each other eye to eye nor speak to each other. They perhaps are waiting on one another to see who will step up and take the lead.

What are the process you do to solve this issue? Is there a certain time given before you start speaking with this person again after having a conflict? Did it go good or bad? How has it benefited you learning from this experience? Hope we can all come to realize that when this occurs, you have to take the lead.

Leave a comment

Posted in Church

Tagged , , ,

Ways To Grow: Having a Better Relationship With God

Posted on April 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

Growing up in church I never really understood how people knew so much of God. How they knew verses and people from the Bible. How their connection with God was big and how they always seem to go for more, displaying such a positive feeling, and fulfillment in their lives. Of course the new comers were easy to spot, they would always stand still, stare around the crowd, and perhaps that being because they have little knowledge on the word of God. I would be in that same position also. so how do they grow unto God mentally and spiritually? In what ways did they do to improve their growth even more?

Of course after we accept God into our lives, we feel better, but overtime it may become the usual almost going back to our old habits. Sometimes we care not to attend church ever so often because we feel demotivated to go, tends to feel like a job that we are forced to go. I understand there are things we have to get done as well, but I’ve also acknowledge that there are people who will ask them in a meaningful way why didn’t they attend church that day. It almost makes them feel like they should be ashamed and yet as stated above, it starts to feel as if we are forced to go. Instead if we are more informed about God and have greater connection with Him, worrying if we are going to church or not won’t become an issue because we always tend to want more.

Not until my late-teens/young adult life I began to have a more focused approach on the word of God. I began to ask questions and study what it meant to really have God in my life. I’ve still yet to learn, but I’m far ahead now from where I started. Not that I’m trying to be a “Jesus-freak” but I desire to have a more knowledgeable approach to God. Being used by God and having a better relationship with Him.

I’m sure there are many ways to improve ourselves in God, but I took down three qualities that have improved my relationship with Him and hopefully can improve yours’ as well.

  • Purposely learning
  • Be with people who know
  • Improve areas needed

First most, when we want to have a better connection/relationship with God we have to understand that we need to be informed about his teachings. Not that we should know the basics, but rather we have to have the need to always learn more about Him. We can’t just accept God into our lives and expect Him to use us in ways without having capable knowledge about Him. I’ve been one of those people that have always knew the Adam & Eve stories and Noah’s Ark growing up, but I never understood how these members in our church were touched or how they had great visions to share with us. I found out as we further read into the word of God, we start to have a better understanding of how God uses people, and as you continue to understand these events you become aware that when you want to have a deeper relationship with God, it vastly improves. It’s not an overnight result, more of a day after day event.

Being with people who are fulfilled with the word of God brings you closer than with those who have no knowledge about Him do. Why do they bring you closer to Him? Because they share insights with you and help you become a better person. Kind of like with that saying that states if you want to become something you’re interested in, be with those that are in the same field. Same applies to here as well. Not that I’m saying abandon your friends right now and find new people, rather cherish and spend much time possible with those that know the gospel. I have great friends I grew up, the amount of time we spent together is endless, but I have learned that when I speak to them about God, they are not informed. I want to improve my relationship with God, so what I do is find people that know His word. It might sound like a meaningful approach, but it’s a way I see it in order to improve our connection. And of course I know we can all find a balance between the two.

The third quality I’d like to share is that as we are learning more and having a better relationship with God, we should value what we’ve learned and look for areas that are needed for improvement. What I mean by this is I’m asking myself “What are my weaknesses that are needed to be improved for having a better relationship with Him?” I know I have weaknesses that are still needed to be improved. What I do is try calling them out and plan on ways to improve them. There are some people that may not be very good at casting a prayer or translating a message from the Bible. And then there are those of the complete opposite where they can say a prayer, up to 30 minutes or so, it’s to be acknowledge and valued. It’s such a great quality they’ve gained, it should be used for even bigger growth.

The three qualities I’ve described are what I use to improve my relationship with God. Over time it’s really helped me and hope it can help you as well. It’s played such a role in my life that, as I continue to understand the gospel clearly, it’s become such value to me. I understand there are other ways that help people improve as well when i spoke with other people in the same situation, and what are those features? What helps you bring you to that level where you have a better relationship with Him?

Leave a comment

Posted in Church

Tagged , , ,