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Erik Hanberg As Guest Speaker

We had the opportunity to have Mr. Erik Hanberg as a guest speaker, coming in to talk and share about his experience being an entrepreneur. He talked about how the idea of being an entrepreneur started when the idea of having a business running without him being there while working as the director at a local theater. Erik acknowledged as much as the idea was motivating his passion to become entrepreneur, it was also dangerous as it takes away one’s motivation to work for others. I think one of the most common asked question among us students was: how did he overcome the fear of failure should he failed to obtain success from being entrepreneur. His answer was obviously from his little idea while working at the theater; on top of that, around that same time, his wife was also having success earning income by being an entrepreneur, and that gave him inspiration as well as guidelines to start his journey. Mr. Hanberg’s first talking point is that to be an entrepreneur, we’d need to practice delivering to customer, hence his emphasis on ‘Shipping’ in his title ‘Entrepreneur Shipping’.

I think one of the most surprising things for me to learn from Mr. Hanberg is that fact that even though he’s only an entrepreneur at the South Sound area level, his success is nevertheless very impressive. Coming into this class, I’ve only had the perception that being an entrepreneur means being incredibly successful, popular, or coming up with something extraordinarily innovative. Growing up in this culture, in the tech world specifically, I’ve only heard about successful stories of people who now own big corporate companies, companies that almost everyone knows about. I think Mr. Hanberg’s presentation really drove away the myth: being successful entrepreneur means it must be big. It also made me admire people like Mr. Hanberg, who’s found success through doing what they love (writing books and podcasts) and taking advantage of opportunities at the grasp where they see them. Overall, the presentation was an eye-opening experience for me and I look forward to knowing about other guest speakers’ experience.

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