W01 Reflection: Entrepreneurial Journal Blog

 This week I read about how some find it important to keep a journal and how that can apply to an entrepreneurial journey. One might need help remembering a specific lesson that they learned in a class, but keeping a detailed journal of everything that had been taught could enable them to find that information. I've never found note-taking time-worthy, nor journalling for future recall (although I do frequently link https://www.ryanmercer.com/ posts to people to save me the time of (re-)explaining something to someone). 

A perceived point for takeaway from the material was that this should be a consistent practice. Writing a journal regularly, whether every day or once a week, was indicated to help keep track of progress and learn from good and bad experiences. If it is made a habit, one can track their own growth and understand how they got to where they are. I see this as a bit of a myopic line of reasoning, though, as we are the sum of all that happens to us, not a snapshot of a single class. 

A concept that was presented that I agreed with was the importance of curiosity. A journal might not necessarily be for writing down what one knows but could be a place to ask questions and try to understand "why" which I've done several times on https://www.ryanmercer.com/ such as with a thought experiment looking at how Pokemon Go might be used as an intelligence gathering asset (as it was funded by In-Q-Tel, the VC arm of the American intelligence community): https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/7/11/pokmon-go-funded-by-the-cia, or when I sought to understand how much data could be stored in a gram of DNA which took me down a rabbit hole https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2013/3/28/dna-data-storage.html. 

I will freely admit that I see this exercise for this class as nothing more than busywork. I will likely not revisit it at any point after or during the class except to satisfy assignment requirements. While this may be effective for some, I know from decades of experience that it is not a useful tool for me to learn new things, but I do acknowledge that some can and will benefit considerably from this. My brain simply isn't wired that way, however.