There's a movie named Anchorman with that quote in it. The main character Ron Burgandy says this after his beloved dog Baxter is punted off a bridge by an angry motorcyclist. It's a hilarious scene with him balling his eyes out. Not that losing a dog is by any means funny; just the way he's talking in the telephone booth and carrying on and on. You really have to see it to appreciate it I suppose.
I've been reminded of this scene several times over the past month or so. I left Sarasota a couple months ago and had to say many tearful goodbyes. Saying goodbye is always so tough, especially with those who you've shared so much life with over a long period of time.
It's not that I won't see them again. I will see them in December when I get married on Siesta Beach. It has more to do with that I'm not moving back to Sarasota in the foreseeable future. I'm not ruling it out entirely, but it most likely will be years before I move back to the states full time if I do at all.
The nice thing about an entrepreneurship school is it's easily transferrable. Insomuch as the basic premise goes I should clarify. Your purpose is to equip young people how to launch and run their own businesses. It's as simple as that. The main problem with starting one in America would be the start-up capital needed to do it here.
In Myanmar, we provide small loans to help people get their business ideas off the ground. These are usually $500 or less. I don't know a lot about businesses in the states but I'm pretty sure they take more than $500 to start generally speaking. Of course, I did read a book entitled u $100 startup about how a lot of businesses had started for $100 or less or there abouts.
Maybe if I start a business school in the states I could largely use that as a model or at least part of the curriculum to encourage people to start lean. I'm not saying I necessarily want to start a school in the states someday. It's just been what a couple people have said when I share my vision for starting an entrepreneurship school someday in the developing world. A couple of friends have commented that we could use something like that here in the states.
Small business is the backbone of any economy. Small businesses provide the lion's share of the jobs in this country and really any country besides communist ones. It gets more difficult as they scale and create space between themselves and their low man on the totem pole.
As technology continues to innovate and replace more and more jobs, entrepreneurship will again be very important in every country should they wish to continue creating jobs. Many people at stores have been laid off due to the rising use of self-checkout lanes. Even jobs that require a person are likely to be outsourced.
So, how do you create jobs in a world that is ever-changing rapidly due to technological innovation? It starts with looking at our education and teaching people how to think critically and creatively on how to solve problems. Some people think education will be fixed if we use just enough technology but I simply don't agree with this idea.
The core of education has to be teaching students a love of learning. No job that pays decent is going to require no amount of ongoing training as the years pass. We must teach students how to teach themselves if we expect education to be successful.
Unfortunately, this is not the direction education is heading in this country. We falsely believe if we can just get enough data that will solve everything. As a result more and more of teachers' time is spent testing and analyzing data as opposed to doing what they were hired to do, that being teaching.
Testing and data analysis can be useful of course, but I dare say we have started teaching our students as if they were robots of some sort. Take this test, analyze results, work on weaknesses, retake the test, and repeat. The stuff I read lately for personal development and to help me think about business all say to work on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
It seems as though education in our country at least foregoes this logic and instead focuses tremendously on weaknesses. Obviously we need our students to be basically proficient. If we take away the very things they enjoy about school like the arts and PE though, aren't we doing them a disservice? My old school had parents sign a release form for taking their students out of specials classes like music so they could spend more time on a computer program that was supposed to get them ready to pass the dreaded FCAT.
That was one of the things that showed me it was time for me to move on from elementary education. The teachers who choose to stay I have the utmost respect for. I simply couldn't hack it anymore. So much bureaucratic red tape in education these days. It was almost like our full time job was teaching and our part time job was devoted to more and more paperwork every year.
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