Practical Entrepreneurship and Work-Life Balance
Date : April 13, 2021 By
This is an outline for a concept course I’ve been thinking about. I initially imagined this being an “in-person” class, but I think it can be easily converted to an online course roughly 2-3 hours in length.
Foreword
To fully appreciate the purpose and vision for this course, it may be helpful to understand what compelled me to propose it in the first place. Twenty-five years ago, when I attended BWS, it was no secret that I struggled academically. I thoroughly enjoyed my overall experience here, but my grades did not reflect that, nor did they reflect my actual intelligence. It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized there were many definitions for success and many interpretations of happiness. Becoming an educator has been an expression of true success and happiness for me.
Teaching entrepreneurship and customer development these past two years. and participating in the Brentwood School community, has given me a unique perspective on student life here — academically, socially and personally. Some things have changed. Some things haven’t. Last year I came to appreciate a deep rooted organizing principle for nearly every student at BWS, certainly in my course. This is the core assumption that the primary purpose of school is to get into college, and the primary purpose of college is to have a successful career. Of course this is a generalization and students vary, but I’ve observed it to be fairly consistent among the student population here.
This is not unique to Brentwood, it was the same in my day, and it’s the same throughout the country. To be clear, this is not a bad characteristic of the education machine. Certainly getting into college and having a successful career has its merits. But it’s not everything; and I fear it sets students down a life path that often leads to dissatisfaction and frustration. It did for me.
In contrast to this, I’ve also observed something incredibly special and endearing about this school. Administrators, teachers and students alike share a passion for being good natured, well rounded and happy human beings. I’ve seen this materialize in nearly every accept of school life, from curriculum to sports, cafeteria, to counseling, activities, arts and everything in-between. It’s quite magical.
The opportunity is to develop more courses and a curriculum that aims to marry two ideas that are all too often divorced — happy life and life success. Most people like to think they are synonymous, but in reality few people find a true balance. This course, and my vision for a series of future courses, aspire to expose young people to this fact, and give them an early start at blurring the lines.
Overview
This course is designed for the most curios students at Brentwood. At the core, the work in this class will encourage students to question their understanding of what life is like and what it should be like after college and beyond. The class will be centered around a book by Tim Ferris called The Four Hour Workweek and adopts a seminar style framework focused on class participation, culminating in a final project and presentation. Much like our Entrepreneurship class, students will be pushed beyond their comfort zones. They will be asked to dig deep within to understand what really excites them. But we should not simply tell students to follow their passions and promise that success will follow.
In reality, people tend to discover they are passionate about something once they’ve honed skills in a given area. This course will give students a framework for building practical skills that ultimately lead to a deeply satisfying life and successful career. Moreover, students will find themselves better prepared to examine their organizing principles and embrace the uncertainty they’ll find in college and the years following. Perhaps most important however is this class is about grasping then practicing skills, not simply being asked study the concepts.
From Wikipedia; The Four Hour Workweek is a self-help book by Timothy Ferriss, an American writer, educational activist, and entrepreneur. The book has spent more than four years on The New York Times Best Seller List, has been translated into 35 languages and has sold more than 1,350,000 copies worldwide. It focuses on what Ferriss refers to as “lifestyle design” and a repudiation of the traditional “deferred” life plan in which people work grueling hours and take few vacations for decades and save money in order to relax after retirement.
There is of course as much protest for the book as there is praise. But the fact remains that Tim’s work has become a bible for many and has spawned a movement among a wide range of people, crossing both social and economic lines. It is a source of inspiration for everything from personal passion exploration, to career opportunities and self actualization. It’s a great book and it will serve as a perfect foundation for this course.
Students will read (or listen to) the entire text over the length of the course and coursework will be designed around principles and practices included in the book. But we will go quite beyond the basic premise that life is not about having a career that affords an luxury retirement. For me, this book, has awaken spirits that have acted as a catalyst more than an operating manual. Serving as motivation, this book will lead us to a variety of other authors, research and text that will foster both curiosity and passion for the students.
My vision for students who take this course is that they come to appreciate what took me more than half my life to begin to internalize — that there are many interpretations of success and that happiness is an inside job. Hopefully, they will do more than understand the work, they will actually begin to incorporate it into thier daily life and start on a path of lifestyle design that is in harmony with thier values, passions and pursuits.
Student Comments
I recently interviewed a few students about the topics I plan to cover in this course. A few interesting soundbites are below:
“Retirement is when you stop having a job you don’t enjoy.”
“I don’t want to waste my youth doing something I don’t like”
“My dad comes home and tells me how much he hates his job every day”
“I want to make money so the rest of my life I can do what I want”
“In no way am I being prepared to figure this stuff out”
Source Materials
Students will read all or part of following books in addition to The Four Hour Workweek
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey
- Think & Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
- Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
- The Power of Habit – Charles Duhigg
- To Sell is Human – Dan Pink
- Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki
Structure
Specifically, the structure of this course will be as follows (assuming roughly 16 weeks of class):
Week 1
Introduction to course work and core text, exploration of current belief systems and organizing principles, exercises that serve to break down resistance to new approaches and uncertainty.
Weeks 2 – 4
Read part one of core text, understand how people end up where they end up in life, explore Tim’s examples and research others who have come to a realization and made change, develop a mini-project around a core passion, practice public speaking and work through constructive feedback from students.
Weeks 5 – 8
Read part two of core text, learn how Tim and others have incorporated passions, interests and impact into career, establish a baseline understanding of the concept of lifestyle design, develop a practical model that effectively balances work and life.
Weeks 9 – 12
Read part three of the core text, examine the methods Tim uses to run an array of businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors, learn and practice various skills including research, delegation, planning, ideation, project development, fundraising, creative and pragmatic writing, public speaking, motivation, habit building and focus, begin a framework of a lifestyle design reality.
Weeks 13 – 16
Explore and expand on personal passions, lifestyle pursuits, needs, and income goals, research and reflect on various people who have achieved success and happiness, develop a final project and in-class presentation for a functional lifestyle design plan and implementation simulation.
Homework
Homework will consist of weekly reading (or listening) to core text, various research and data collection exercises, video consumption, interviews, advanced search querying, outline development, video progress reports, project work, day dreaming. Students will also be required to start and maintain a blog with specific post assignments as well as updates on thier journey.
Skills
Students will learn and practice the following skills:
- Analytical reading
- Internet research
- Data compilation, validation, organization and normalization
- Surveys and interviewing
- Public speaking
- Presentation development
- Creative, business and pragmatic writing
- Project management
- Fundraising,
- Idea generation and exploration
- Resource allocation, assignment and delegation
- Various software tools: Slack, Evernote, Pivotal Tracker, Google Advanced Query, Keynote, Google Forms
Grading
Format: My thinking is that this class be offered as a non-credit elective in the first or second iteration as I flush out the curriculum. Later it could be made into a more traditional letter grade course as we better understand the rigor and value to students, particularly from a college requirements standpoint. I’m very much open to discussion on this front.
- Assignments 25%
- Class Participation 20%
- Final Project 35%
- Growth and Risk Assessment 20%
Target Date: Fall 2017, full curriculum to be developed summer 2017
Duration of Course: Semester
Prerequisites: None
Grade Level: 11 & 12
Meetings/Rotation: Normal
Course Difficulty/Rigor: Simple, but not easy. Workload is moderate, but will be difficult for students to know exactly what to do.
Grading Format: Letter Grade
Resources Needed: None