Rag Ball Challenge

Can you make a better soccer ball from scratch than this banana leaf one from Rwanda, Africa? Obstructions: you can only use what you find as free cycle in your house or neighborhood. Bonus points for making it look like and feel like a soccer ball when you kick it. Now trying selling it for $5. If you can do that in a week, see if you can make 2 more in less time without sacrificing quality. Sell 2 for $7 or cut profit margins to sell more faster. Name your company. Make business cards. Keep track of customer satisfaction. Then ask your little brother or sister what they would do to make it better.
Check out and network with the kids making balls for Rag Ball International.

Could Acting Class Make you a Better Entrepreneur?

Could Acting class make you a better entrepreneur? Check out one of my favorite actors Jeffrey Wright on entrepreneurship. He ties it to a critical skill in acting: the suspension of disbelief. Note: Wright does social entrepreneurship work in Sierra Leone. What's that? A social entrepreneur solves social problems on a large scale. A social entrepreneur focuses on creating social capital usually to help solve a social or environmental problem.

Challenge: Dream a job for yourself that doesn't exist right now but will create value for many people. Suspend your own disbelief. If this job doesn't exist in your community, you'll have to dream it into existence. Write it down. Give it a name. Act it out. Tell your best friend about it. Look for role models doing something similar. Risk sharing your dream with people who could make it happen.

Super Challenge: Imagine you can leverage social capital among your friends to solve a social or environmental problem. What's the problem? How could you use social interactions to problem solve? How can you leverage the internet? How can you use storytelling or acting to solve world problems?

Beat Jacks - the origin

Around the age 12-14, (maybe even earlier) we can begin to spot inefficient or outdated methods in the lives of the adults around us. And we want to because it's fun to see and innovate off our parents' and neighbors' vulnerabilities. It's power. This blog is all about our innate drive to beat the system by seeing its loopholes and innovating. It's about challenges and ways to overcome them and become entrepreneurs.

My idea comes from an article in today's New York Times called "The Vending Machine Kid." The article reminded me of when I was sophomore in high school (14) and wanted to make my dad's job easier. (There I am in the photo with my dad. He was successful professor of medicine, doctor and the head of a small hospital for the terminally ill. He was also super disorganized with a mountain of old memos on his desk dating back years. Dirty spoons at the bottom of the 2 year pile...) To complete my computer science homework assignment, I asked him what if hospitals had desk top computers, how could they make hospitals run better and help more people? He said his hospital didn't really have a good system for tracking incoming patients, so I began designing one in C programming language. It was super easy programming by the way, and after I finished the code for my simple database program, my dad's hospital still didn't have anything to easily track in-coming patients. And there, little did I know, was a new opportunity waiting for an entrepreneur to help people.