Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Teaching as Learning

When I was in high school, I took a beginners' statistics class over the summer at the University of Michigan.  The class was catered towards high school students, and the professor told us that, rather than just teaching statistics, he would teach us how to learn anything we wanted to know.  And, he said, it only took three steps:

Step 1: Recognize what you need to improve

Step 2: Gather information and make plans

Step 3: Repeat the skill until it is second nature

The steps were fairly intuitive.  But our professor went one step further.  He said that, if you could succeed in a fourth step, you could bypass the initial three steps altogether:

Step 4: Teach the skill to others

That last step, teaching the skill to others, is the ultimate test of mastery.  In the statistics class, we were challenged to teach our lesson plan to friends, family, strangers, and anyone who would listen. 

I took the last step to heart.  As an student entrepreneur, I want to discover more about entrepreneurship, and the best way to do that is by teaching it.  I hope this blog, The Eclectic Entrepreneur can be a way for me to glean entrepreneurial skills from a wide range of sources - and also be a resource for other entrepreneurs starting out on their journey.

For you, I want this blog to be a single location for the latest start-up news, entrepreneurial concepts, and case studies on how businesses got off the ground.  As Guy Kawasaki might say - the mantra for The Eclectic Entrepreneur is distilled entrepreneurial analysis

My current plan looks like this:

Monday:  This Week in Entrepreneurship, a distillation of the week's start-up news.

Wednesday:  My Take on entrepreneurial concepts and lessons from my own life.

Friday:  Start-up of the Week, analysis of a start-up and what we can learn from it.

So what's the future?

There are several future opportunities for The Eclectic Entrepreneur.  I envision it being a way to learn about, and connect with, the global entrepreneurial community.  I want to promote entrepreneurship across international borders and between industrial sectors.  And finally, I would like this to be a resource for me to connect with other bloggers and readers and learn from them as well.  So feel free to reach out.

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If you have any suggestions for blogs to follow, news to gather, or start-ups to check out, email me at TheEclecticEntrepreneur@gmail.com.