Farah’s entrepreneurship talk taught me a couple important lessons that I will carry with me throughout my business journey. Farah’s entrepreneurial journey is very impressive, so I truly value all of her words of advice. Her first message is to start NOW. I think this is awesome advice because we spend too much time thinking about why our idea won’t work, without even trying it to see if it does or not. If it doesn’t work? How can I fix it. If I can’t fix it? I tried, so now I’ll move onto something else. It’s a simple way of thinking that instantly raises your potential ten fold while teaching you skills on how to run a business that you can remember for the rest of your life.
From what it sounds like, my team, unlike other teams, did not take long at all to decide on a business idea. We thought that our time would be better spent working longer on one certain product, rather than fielding 20+ ideas, paralleling Farah’s start NOW advice.
During our cross-cultural team exercise, our team flowed very well. We brainstormed as a group, agreed and disagreed on particular ideas, and maintained a respectful working environment. Having two Moroccan students that major in English made the language barrier invisible, allowing us to fluently work on our idea with no difficulties. I would say that my groups biggest challenge was actually having too many ideas. At some point, we had to take a step back and realize that we are not building an iPhone, at the end of the day it still has to function as a water bottle first. Because of this, we thought about only the most valuable features that would still separate us from the competitors, while providing the classic bottle functionality.
Overall, I found our presentation entirely to be a great success. I’m sure if we had more than one hour to work, we would have found flaws and challenges within the idea, however, none in particular arose. If you had listened into our brainstorming conversations, you would have thought we had known, and gone to school with each other for years before hand, which I think is super cool. Without speaking for everyone, the best part was for a moment, I think us Americans felt like a local Moroccan, and the Moroccans felt like Americans.