After a lengthy discussion with Tania Luna of Renegade Campus about entrepreneurship education and marrying up specific skill sets (medicine, engineering, the arts, music, etc.) with entrepreneurship, I got to thinking of some skills I wish I had or some things I wish were invented:
1. Cat Communicator: I took six years of Spanish as a kid and while I see the necessity of learning the language, I now spend more time trying to decipher what my 18-year-old cat, Bob, is trying to tell me. See, he’s been peeing on the floor and while I suspect he’s not sick, I do think he’s pissed about something. For all I know, he could be saying, “Hey lady, can I have the keys to the car so I can go buy some better-tasting cat food,” or “How are your shoes smelling today after stepping in my urine? Maybe tonight you won’t push me off the bed.”
2. Plumbing: I have a broken gate valve. I know it’s a broken gate valve because I looked it up online. Actually, I looked up a lot of different types of valves, starting with the ones listed as covered items in my home warranty protection plan. As a layplumber, all I know is that in the morning, I hear screams from Syd as all of the water in her shower shifts abruptly to the kitchen sink that fills the coffee pot. Have you seen a gate valve? While it might not look like much, I believe there’s welding and special tools involved and I don’t think my Deluxe 25-piece hand tool kit can handle it.
3. Website Design: If you’ve been to this blog before (and that excludes all of the bots or spammers or whatever they’re called that leave me gibberish messages about jewelry, sunglasses and Levitra) you’ll notice the theme appearance has changed and is continuing to change. I didn’t grow up with computers or the internet like some, but I’ve dabbled with them since the early 1990s. One thing that escaped me was learning how to code (although I did take shorthand in high school and it kind of looks the same.) Syd and her friends seem to have mastered MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and texting, but I have yet to hear any of them have a discussion on HTML. (They’re of no help to me.)
I use my website for my business and need to constantly update it, but I’m dependent upon my website guy for changes. And every little change costs me money. HTML for Dummies is good, but I’m even dumber than that with this stuff. Someone please create a specific guide with the exact coding and where to put it. I don’t need an explanation of what anything does, just something I can copy verbatim.
4. Auto Taxi: I spend more time in the car than I’d like to with the majority of it schlepping Syd to and from school and extracurricular activities. If we lived in Ethiopia, Syd could be driving legally now. Considering that’s not a likely probability, an auto taxi might be.
Sure, public transportation works relatively the same way, but we live in Phoenix and we’re not too keen about standing outside in 115 degree heat and waiting for a bus to come. Now if someone could invent a car that I could program to go pick Syd up and take her to where she needs to go, I’d be all over it, even if it came in minivan form. (They don’t call it a people mover for nothing.) Besides, the early 1980s brought us the fantasy sci-fi show Knight Rider and KITT and David Hasselhoff. And we now have GPS. Totally doable.
So what’s the point to all of this? As I told Tania, entrepreneurship isn’t black and white. You don’t have to become just an entrepreneur or a doctor or a lawyer. Every single industry dabbles in the business world and it takes more than just entrepreneurial skill sets to innovate and bring new products to the market that solve problems.
Right now, Syd wants to study Journalism in college. She knows that she can either become a journalist and be an employee or she could start her own media outlet. Like Oprah. She understands marrying up journalistic skill sets with entrepreneurship.
Kids, if you want to become an engineer, an artist, a teacher or a scientist – Do It!! But combine it with business education and experience, too. There’s an abundance of opportunity just waiting for you.
Success to you.
Melissa
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Almost peed my pants when I read the Cat Communicator. I have two cats and I can’t understand a word they say.
I never thought about entrepreneurship mixed with other career choices this way and it hit home because it’s so logical. btw, great website and brilliant product.
Hi Melissa,
I don’t know a lot about cat pee, but I do know something about websites. If you’re paying a web nerd every time you need an update to your website I may be able to make your life a little easier.
Modern websites are built on Content Management Systems (CMS). They make updating the website brain-dead simple once the site is built. There are differing levels of complexity and cost depending on what functionality you’re trying to create on your site (blogs, forums, e-commerce etc…)
Wordpress is probably your best bet. It’s relatively cheap to set up and easy to learn. You don’t have to know anything about HTML. It’s all built right in the browser.
Lots of people think that Wordpress is just for blogs, but you’d be surprised at the number of sites that are built in Wordpress. It does some pretty impressive things.
Where Wordpress gets soft is at the enterprise level. It doesn’t scale well and there is a top limit to the functionality you can get out of it. If you need a bigger, more functionality driven site, you might want to look at Drupal.
If you need help finding a reputable Wordpress or Drupal developer, just let me know. I’ll be happy to help.
Good Luck!
James.
Wow…it’s early :\
As I was typing that, I was thinking “but this looks like a Wordpress blog…surely she knows about Wordpress”…then I looked at the footer. (I’ll have coffee soon and it’ll be ok)
Nonetheless, Wordpress isn’t just for blogs. Look into getting your site rebuilt in WP and you shouldn’t have to worry about HTML anymore.
James.
Thanks James for sharing your expertise. Our main website (www.bizinaboxx.com) was built on CMS and then we changed “web nerds” a couple of times for maintenance. This blog and our forum are built on Wordpress and I just upgraded to Thesis for a premium theme. Little did I know that in order to make the blog more unique, I’d need to know some coding, although it seems that the Thesis people can help provide that. My issue right now is figuring out all of the backend channels so that I can even paste code in there.
I did like the original CMS platform because I could mess up the site easily, but at least it gave me an opportunity to fix it too. I have no clue about the backend now except it needs HTML coding to change things. Our web guy said we could change it to Wordpress, but we’d lose some of the aspects of the original site.
Thanks again for your input. I’m sure it will help a lot of our readers.
Oh, and I don’t know much about cat pee either except for it really smells.
Melissa
I always thought that entrepreneurship as a college major was a bit “off.” Like you, I think entrepreneurship should be integrated with another field such as engineering, computer science, fashion design, etc. Since I’m a CPA I think just about everyone should take a Business 101 class or maybe even Accounting 101 in college. I know it won’t happen, but I can dream!
Carol, I read an article not too long ago about a group of college art students who graduated and had wished they had the business acumen to monetize their work. Some of the grads had to take jobs in fields unrelated to their passion just to pay the bills. They didn’t know how to make a business around their artistic skill sets.
We’re all touched by the business world, either as employees, employers or consumers. It makes no sense to leave business and financial education to the college years and beyond.
We have the same dreams.
great one