Portmanwho? Quizan

1) Quizan

2) Quizan - (adjective) to take things easily

3) Used this for with friends and family. Mostly with my parents. 

4) For a couple of weeks when anyone was on top of me for not doing what I was supposed to be doing I would respond with a "quizan man" which mean take it easy man. Mostly when my parents told me that I wasn't up to speed with my lectures or I was late for work some days. My parents did not start using the word at all. On the other hand, with my friends it was a different story, they took the word in almost instantly, when one of my friends was pissed off at something, I would say "quizan primo" primo means cousin which is a word used a lot in Bolivia, its not something new making up new words here, my friends do it all the time I guess this is why they took they started using my word almost instantly. 

Halfway Reflection

1) Tenaciousness is a competency

In the spring term of this year I took 3 online courses so I can say that I've had experience with this type of courses. Right now I'm also taking finance which is a tough course and I have an internship in a firm here in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. So I knew right from the beginning that I had to manage my time well and get my assignments due on time (the grace period has been great).

2) Tenaciousness is also about attitude

I felt like giving up during the week I was studying for my finance exam. I was under a lot of pressure at work, plus having to study for finance, and finally having to interview people in a country were people don't speak english is exhausting. I was not comfortable at all to have to go around asking people if they speak english, I would get all kinds of stares. This is a big reason why I haven't done all the assignments that require interviewing people. I believe I've had a tenacious attitude all along but the fact that this is an online course offered to people all over the world doesn't make much sense when you have to interview people in a Spanish speaking country. My motivator is the fact that I like to get good grades and the fact that if I don't do well in this class I will have to take it again or take another elective, which at this point is not an option. 

3) Three tips. What are three tips you would offer next semester's student about (1) fostering the skills that support tenacity and (2) developing the 'tenacious mindset' ?

1. If you are in a place were people speaking English you are going to have a better time with this course, as Pryor has stated people often like to help college students. Furthermore, the fact that there are other people's blogs out there shows you that the class can be done. By looking at some of these blogs you'll see other peoples tenacity while getting their assignments done, this served as an encouragement towards developing my own tenacity. 

2. Get to know your TA, this is someone who has been in your shoes and is there to help you get through your journey. 

3. I would also recommend to start talking to random people without interviewing them or recording them, this is going to help you lose that awkward feeling when approaching someone you don't know. I've had a really hard time in my home country because people here usually don't speak English. Its safe to say that probably 1 out of 10 people in the street knows how to speak English and you don't know how that person is going to respond, because people here don't usually want to interview you in english. So, in order to lose that awkwardness you feel when you approach someone, just approach people with your mind set in completing your assignments.  

Reading Reflection No. 1

I decided to read "The Wright Brothers" by David McCullough, this is a very detailed book about the Wright brothers and how they came along with creating the airplane. The book is extremely detailed, it contains personal information, notes the brothers sent to their traveling father, notes they sent to their sister from Kitty Hawk. The brothers went to Kitty Hawk to test their gliders and the first flyers because it had lots of sand, hills, and wind. 

What surprised me the most was the fact that neither Wilbur or Orville had any type of higher education. The two brothers were able to create one of the greatest innovations man kind has ever created and they did it without being engineers, on the contrary the furthest they went academically was a high school degree. It also surprised me that neither of them got married or had children.

I admired a great deal from both the brothers. Their achievement is remarkable, I had limited knowledge about them. But now I know everything they went through, from Wilbur's incident with who would end up being a serial killer (which cost him years of his life and his going to Yale) to their family losing their mother at a young age to tuberculosis while having a father that was away doing church work. Their dedication was remarkable and I believe its what I admire the most, they proved that Lilienthal's, Langley's, and Chanute's supposedly reliable calculations and tables - data the brothers were basing themselves on could no longer be trusted. The brothers were at one of their lowest points in life as they had to go on and crack the code of aeronautics on their own from that point on. There perseveration was incredible, I think that to be an innovator one has to posses a plethora of qualities and the brothers possessed them all. 

What I least admired was the fact that the brothers couldn't fully commit to their cause at times because they didn't have the financial stability required. I also don't think that their not going to college was a good thing because they started their pursuit in aeronautics when Orville was 29 and Wilbur was well into his 30s. The brothers hadn't amount for much before that. They made their bikes and sold them, in a time when there were a bunch of bike producers. On the other hand, they did ok for themselves until they found their true purpose. 

Yes, the brothers encountered adversity at every step of the way. What they did about it was simple but also hard. They tackled every problem and persevered, at one point they their second glider performed poorly, their wing warping system of which they were so proud of didn't work well, and besides all that the long-established, supposedly reliable calculations prepared by the great engineers of the time (Langley, Chanute, and Lilienthal) were all wrong, and those were the tables the Wright brothers were using to guide themselves. They also encountered adversity financially, at times they had to stop their pursuit because they didn't have the financial means to stop working and fully focus on the aviation. I found it kind of frustrating how Langley received so much money and financial backing by the U.S. government and failed, and the Wrights' who were making much more progress didn't even get media coverage. 

The brothers displayed many competencies, without being engineers of any sort they proofed to be as mechanically capable as any engineer. They actually proved that calculations and tables of engineers of the time were wrong. They went on and cracked the code of aeronautics because of their perseverance, dedication, and mechanical knowledge acquired by making bikes for so long. 

Many parts of the reading were confusing to me, at one point keeping up with who was who was a task because the book talks about so many people you lose track of who they are and their relation to the brothers.  

I would ask what was the real reason they decided not to have families of their own and I would also ask them why they never attempted to find any type of financial backing, I would think that by having an investor or backing from the government would have helped the brothers a lot. I would also ask a third question, how was it really that they never gave up and kept fighting towards cracking aviation. I would ask those questions because the book doesn't really focus on why they didn't get married or have kids, it also talks little about why they didn't accept money from investors, it also talks about how they wanted to do things on their own. 

I think that the brothers opinion of hard work was everything. The brothers were hard workers their entire life. None of all that they achieved would have happened if they weren't hard workers. Working hard, dedication, and perseverance is everything this brothers had, and they went on to create one of the greatest machines of all time, and yes I have to say that I share their opinion on hard work. 

Idea Napkin No. 1

1) My name is Nicolas Cronenbold and I'm an international student from Bolivia, which is in South America. I'm currently in my home country but I am in Gainesville for both the fall and spring terms. Some of my talents include playing soccer, racing in rally cars here in Bolivia, and helping out in the family business. I have lived out of my country for a total of 4 years and during that time I have lived in Austin, Tx. Miami, Fl. and Gainesville, so I know some big cities in the U.S. I see this business as a nonprofit organization. If I were to start it would take a lot of my time off my hands. On the other hand, I see it as something that needs to be done. After covering all my costs I would like to donate the money raised towards animal shelters here in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. 

2) My product is a pet tag that you can attach to your pets collar. In this tag I would imprint the pet owners information so if the dog escapes and gets lost, anyone can grab the animal look at the owners info and easily get in contact with the owner. This is a very simple and convenient idea, actually no one in my home town sells this and you can see a plethora of strays in the streets every day. There isn't a place were you can get tags for your animals here in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. 


3) All my costumers have one thing in common, pets. To be more specific the group I am targeting is not the group that owns pets, but the group of people that own pets and actually care about them. So any person who has an animal that they care about and doesn't have a pet ID tag, that’s the person I'm targeting. 

4) If they care about their animal and they have $4 to spare, then they certainly will buy the product. 

5) There is no market for ID pet tags in my home town, so by starting this business I would be the first and only provider in the market. 

I believe that all these concepts fit together because I think I posses what is needed to start this project. My business is not something new and it isn't something that is hard to develop. Its just something that no one cares about in Bolivia, so that created and opportunity for me, everything that has to do with my project related to the love for animal a pet owner can have. I think that it all ties together nicely, there is a market for the tags, otherwise there wouldn't be so many strays in the streets, and "lost animal" signs all over the place.

Tweaking the Innovation

Tweaking the Innovation

My product is a pet tag that you can attach to your pets collar. In this tag I would imprint the pet owners information so if the dog escapes and gets lost, anyone can grab the animal look at the owners info and easily get in contact with the owner. This is a very simple and convenient idea, actually no one in my home town sells this and you can see a plethora of strays in the streets every day. The sale of the tags and animal collars are the revenue drivers. The items are the different types of pet tags, some of them have the shape of a bone others the shape of a paw they also come in different colors and sizes. For the collars its basically the same thing there are different colors and sizes, some have nice things printed on them. 


The benefit of my product is being able to find your lost animal much quicker, or actually being able to find the animal (many animals are never able to return home!)


The tangible is very basic this is a metal tag that has either the shape of a bone or the shape of a tag that comes in different colors which you can attach to your pets collar. 

Since this is an initiative mostly to help strays and their owners, and its something I'm starting on my own with my own capital. The only augmented benefit I can offer is that for every four tags bought you get the fifth tag for free. So I hope that people will incentive their friends to buy tags that way the fifth pet gets his tag for free and as easy as that there are five animals with tags that previously didn't have any. 

As far as innovation goes, there are a couple of ways in which I can alter my product to attract repeat costumers that would like to upgrade to a more durable or a more fancy product. There can be benefits for people that want to attach a fancy and expensive collar to their dog, so importing expensive collars would be something I could do for costumers that want to order something in advance. Also, more models of the actual tag can be imported. For the product itself the one I want to start working with, I guess I could somehow alter the packaging to make it nicer, or probably even give some type of gift boxes so that someone can buy a pet tag as a gift for a friends dog. 

Elevator Pitch No. 1

So I am continuing my idea of implementing pet tags that you can purchase at a convenient price and at convenient locations throughout Santa Cruz, Bolivia. I decided to call the business UTAG.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QhxAB9hD78