“When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.” Mark Twain
BY AMY ROSEN | May 29, 2014
For more than 25 years, the organization I run has been teaching young people — mostly high-school-age students — how to think like entrepreneurs. In that time, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) has exposed more than 500,000 students to the power of the entrepreneurship mindset.
Our curriculum is different because our teachers don’t just lecture or assign work. Our teachers guide students through the stages of launching a business. Students buy wholesale goods, retail their products and write business and marketing plans.
More than creating waves of fledgling businesses, we aim to empower generations of thinkers with the entrepreneurship mindset.
Related: Money Is Not What Makes Successful Entrepreneurs Tick
The first step in that mindset — the thing we lead our students to discover first — is opportunity recognition.
While the exact components and essential sequences of an entrepreneurship mindset aren’t accepted by everyone yet, most agree that the ability to recognize opportunity is the first step. It may also be the easiest to understand and identify.
Usually on the very first day of our classroom experience our teachers ask students to think of an idea and pitch it to their classmates. Knowing when you have an idea, and the ability to explain it to others, is opportunity recognition in its simplest form.
More is expected of entrepreneurs though.
We expect entrepreneurs to be innovators. We expect entrepreneurial ideas to be worthy of consumer and capital investment. In the technology sector, the benchmark is that an idea should be transformative or disruptive.
However good or investment-worthy an idea is, the “ah-ha” moment of inspiration is the on-ramp to entrepreneurship. And it can be learned.
Here’s how:
Go out and explore. In our classrooms we teach students to go for a walk. In some cases we literally take our students for walks around their schools or neighborhoods for the purpose of seeing what is not there. Or, more accurately, thinking about what should be there.
Related: This Simple Habit Could Be the Secret to Increasing Creativity
Quickly, students realize that a city block with four dry cleaning stores may not be the best place for another, but may be perfect for a retail accessories store. Or a home delivery service.
Ask questions. Those looking to recognize opportunity can also go grocery shopping. Talk to shoppers and ask what they are buying and why. Ask what product they wish they could buy but isn’t available. If you work in an office, sit with your company’s office supply purchaser and ask the same questions.
At NFTE, our teachers advise our students to start with what they know. We’ve found that those who know the neighborhood or their workplace best have an advantage in recognizing opportunity there.
The success in recognizing opportunity, though, lies in asking the questions about what is missing or what could be better.
Getting good at that mindset takes practice and habit formation. In a short time, students become young entrepreneurs who begin to see opportunity everywhere. Even though it’s just the first step on the path of learning an entrepreneurship mindset, the power of recognizing opportunity is transformative — whether you are in high school and begin to see your neighborhood and future differently or in a C-suite corner office and can visualize your product in a new way.
That’s opportunity recognition, and when you start doing it, you’re on your way to thinking like — and perhaps being — an entrepreneur.
Related: Cultivating The Mindset of a Successful Entrepreneur
A little about me and my expertise – video
commercial / investment real estate / Arizona land specialist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPs3kpKR4nY
I go to great heights to sell or purchase your land
http://walter-unger.com/?p=10118
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Phoenix,_Arizona_history
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Facts of Arizona – year 1848 to 2013
http://walter-unger.com/?p=9507
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Walter Unger CCIM, CCSS, CCLS
I am a successful Commercial Investment Real Estate Broker in Arizona now for 20 years and I worked with banks and their commercial REO properties for 3 years. I am also a commercial landspecialist in Phoenix and a Landspecialist in Arizona.
WHETHER YOU LEASE OR OWN
NOW IS THE TIME FOR YOU TO EXPAND, UPGRADE OR INVEST.
we are at on the a rise of the cycle in Commercial Real Estate. so there is only one way and it’s called we are going up and now is the time for you to expand, upgrade or invest in Commercial Properties in Phoenix. The prices on deals I may get you will not be around forever.
WAITING TO SELL YOUR LAND ? TIMES CHANGE / IT’S TIME
We barely could give land away the last few years, but times are changing. Even in those meager years, I sold more land across the state than most other brokers. Before the real estate crash I was a land specialist in Arizona with millions of dollars of transactions, but then I had to change and also sell other commercial investment properties, which was fun, but I am a Commercial Landspecialist in Arizonal, a Commercial Land Specialist in Phoenix and love to sell land, one acre to thousands of acres.
If you have any questions about Commercial Investment Properties in Phoenix or Commercial Investment Properties in Arizona, I will gladly sit down with you and share my expertise and my professional opinion in Commercial Properties in Phoenix or Commercial Properties in Arizona with you.Obviously I am also in this to make money, but it could be a win-win situation for all of us.
Please reply by e-mail walterunger@ccim.net or call me on my cell 520-975-5207 or Office:480-948-5554
PLEASE NOTE, I CHANGED BROKERAGES BUT CELL PHONE AND E-MAIL STAY THE SAME.
Thank You
Walter
Walter Unger CCIM
Associate Broker, West USA Commercial Real Estate Advisers
7077 E. Marilyn Road, Bldg 4, Suite 130
Scottsdale, AZ 85254
Cell: 520-975-5207
Office : 480-948-5554
Fax: (480-658-1172
View my listings and my profile at:
http://www.loopnet.com/Profile/14101172900/Walter-Unger-CCIM/
a little about me and my expertise – video
commercial-investment real estate adviser-land specialist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPs3kpKR4nY
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