Family Members: Brandi

Lessons learned

I thoroughly enjoyed the videos this week. As always, I have to listen to them on double-speed. Plus, I had to search online for the video version of the “True Blue, Through and Through” talk in order to listen at double-speed, because I’m still in so much pain that it is pretty excruciating to look at the computer or phone screen to read anything. So, I have a great time listening while coloring quietly, which helps the information quickly absorb even while I’m in pain.

The Making a Living and a Life talk was terrific and very appropriate for our own lives. We are starting a new business venture and the things that were said were in line with what I’ve set as our core mission for our business. Since I cannot “work” in traditional jobs any longer, I have to get creative and find things to work on during the very few days a month that I’m functional. Since my energy is so much more limited, I have to be extremely critical of how I spend those “spoons” of energy. There is not enough money in the world to make it worth wasting my energy on people and businesses I disagree with or that goes against my values. I don’t even care if we make any money, as long as I’m out there helping others online, as much as I can within my limitations. The 10 Must Haves for a Start-Up was very cute and I got a giggle out of the talk. We definitely have “skin in the game” because every business we’ve built has been bootstrapped from the bottom up with our personal funding. We definitely agree that putting your own funding in changes the way you think about those funds being wasted or misspent. Every financial purchase is considered carefully because we know that we cannot afford to lose that money on wasteful spending. Ken Zolot sounds a lot like myself, as I struggle with autism and ADHD and the experiences he spoke about really resonated with me. I can definitely see where those have become a strength over my career even while I struggled to “conform” to neurotypical ideals. I have always been someone that was considered different and I struggled to pay attention, always very restless, always the outcast. I loved his question of “who cares?” and I often teach that very same concept to the people I help. As far as the formula for happiness….I have spent the past 10 years seeking “my oil”. What it really boils down to is “self-reliance” is my “oil” and everything we do, in our personal lives as well as our new business venture, focuses on self-reliance as the primary goal. We want only to help others become self-reliant in whatever way they can, starting where they are even if its in an apartment in a huge city. While I cannot “get up early” I tend to “stay up late” getting work done at night after everyone else has gone to bed and the world gets quiet enough to hear my thoughts. I’ve always worked hard, so that’s never been an issue. I absolutely hate the idea of formal education, but I’ve instead fostered the “lifelong learning” model and voraciously devour everything I can get my hands on. It’s very much time to make my mark serving others.

 

The Last Lecture

I seriously hate most videos in school, but this one captured my attention and my heart the entire time! Randy is so animated and so much like myself! He’s hilarious and intelligent, snarky while sweet. I believe he achieved his dreams because he had really firm goals and a family who supported him.  I feel like I also had very firm goals but lacked the supportive family to get there. Instead I had an incredibly abusive family who gave me certain advantages while crippling me at the same time. Randy had the ability to be creative and find different ways of achieving his dreams, pretty far outside the box, by just creating a new box!

I think dreams are critical. I’ve always been a big dreamer. Without that there’s really nothing to do. Without dreams people just wake up, go to work, come home, eat, go to bed, and repeat it. Dreams allow us to have something to aim for, which like my beloved Air Force says, “Aim HIGH!”

I had so many childhood dreams! One that was shot out of the air pretty quickly was that I wanted to be a fighter pilot.  That could never happen.  Apparently, they get all persnickety if you can’t see! But, I still dream of flying, so I tend to find myself near airports and flight lines very often. Just today I was at the flight line when a couple of fighter jets took off just a few feet away! I was immediately transfixed! I keep trying to talk our daughter into joining the Civil Air Patrol as a highschooler so that we can join and I can get my pilot’s license. That’s something I started working on in high school and never finished since my parents pulled the funding and refused to authorize the flight hours after I passed the written exam!

 

Lessons Learned

I’ve already read (or listened to) all of the books from this class, but I can’t wait to go through them again to see what new nuggets I pick up this time!  I see the value of the Entrepreneurial Journal and I can say that I “fell off the wagon” as far as posting in WordPress, but I always carry notebooks with me in my purse to take notes at all times. Plus I use online tools like Google Keep, Docs, Sheets, etc to take notes pretty regularly. I struggle to read text but I have a tool that I can use to read it to me if the Audible isn’t available for purchase. Long ago I started a journal for our Farm and I added to it nearly every day for a while before things started going further downhill with my health. I’m excited to get back into the practice (and reinstate my farm blog)!

Lessons Not Yet Learned

I’m looking forward to the “Life Plan” portions of the class. I have had one for many years, long before I took a similar BYUI course back in 2018. But, I can always use the new, updated information with new technologies and really dive deep into updating our plan and making sure we’re still on the right track. I love that my husband is doing this course with me so that we can be on the same page with all of our projects and plans, as we do almost everything together.

A Reference and Categorization Method

I can use the tags in WordPress to keep track of different topics within each post. That will suffice as an index as I can have WordPress automatically handle all of them for me. The great aspect of WordPress is that I can create posts on the fly from my phone or tablet at the time I’m thinking of it. They can be saved as drafts and formalized when I’m back home, at my computer, but they don’t necessarily have to be formalized at all. Separate goals or projects can have categories or tags, to better help organize them. I have so many WordPress blogs at this point that I need a centralized management system to handle all of the updates (I’m using MainWP just to keep everything working smoothly).