Once upon a time, the vast majority of students in my capstone entrepreneurship courses wanted to start their own businesses. Many had already done so while at university. So my courses were primarily geared toward helping them apply the various entrepreneurial concepts, methods and tools to their own “passion projects”. Students learn best if the subject matter is about something they really care about.
All the core entrepreneurship methods and tools were initially created and validated in the context of starting up a new company, so my capstone “Advanced Entrepreneurship” course content and assignments included most of the major business, strategy and entrepreneurship books and concepts including:
- Ideation and Opportunity Spotting
- Customer Discovery and Validation
- Persuading, Selling and Growth Hacking
- Design Thinking and Lean Startup
- Business Model Canvas
- Strategy and Business Planning including Business Management, Financial Forecasting, Financial Analysis, Marketing, Operations Management, Competitor Analysis, Value Chain, SWOT, PESTLE, Strategic Group Mapping…
- “100Steps2Startup”, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship”, “Running Lean”, “Value Proposition Design”, “Business Model Generation”, “Effectuation”, “Designing for Growth”, “Entrepreneurial Mindset” and other books.
There are many different (and sometimes conflicting) business and entrepreneurship books, tools, methods, principles, techniques, ideas and mindsets. My job was to help provide a way for students to learn all these and figure out which tools to use as they ideated, started and grew their new ventures. I provided what entrepreneurship educators call “cognitive scaffolding” to help students understand how all these pieces fit together and when to use the various different tools.
This seemed to go very well for many years and stimulated me to stay on top of the state-of-the-art in website design, eCommerce, prototyping, growth hacking, A-B testing, interviewing techniques, use of social media to drive traffic and other relevant advances in entrepreneurship education. Students responded well and I won every teaching award that my university offers (Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), formerly Ryerson University). I started teaching other university professors how to teach entrepreneurship through various European Train-The-Trainer organizations like ConneeectU and entreTime and have taught over 300 professors these concepts over the years.
Then my students started to change. Many were no longer interested in starting their own businesses, at least not yet. The previous assignments seemed to lose their resonance. Some students no longer seemed interested in ideating new opportunities, interviewing potential customers, building websites, and applying entrepreneurial tools and concepts to their own projects. Or sometimes they just faked it. They went through the motions during the course, but without any intention of learning the material or actually starting a new venture.
For the first time in my life, I had several students fail the course. Not because the course was too difficult, but because they just didn’t do the work and didn’t seem to care about the course content or the assignments. Increasing, I learned that many students just wanted to finish their degree and get a job. They had little interest in the courses they were paying for. That was new to me.
Modelling the behaviours I try to instill in my students, I used customer discovery to understand why students would enroll in an entrepreneurship degree program or course if they had no interest in starting a new venture. Many liked the idea of learning how to be creative, innovative, resilient and adaptable but had no interest in starting a company – most also had absolutely no idea what they wanted to do after graduation, or at best, a vague interest in something like sports, cars, fashion or being an influencer of some sort. Their degrees were increasingly seen as being an end in themselves, but not as something useful to be used to achieve their values after graduation.
Most of these students had no plans for how to discover what they were interested in or what to do with their lives. The most common goal was to take a year off, somehow “find themselves”, and then start to think about getting a job of some sort.
This “Entrepreneurial Career and Life Design” (ECLD) workbook is the direct result of my attempt to help these students “find themselves” while still in school by learning and applying entrepreneurial ideas, methods and tools. The goal is to learn these entrepreneurial concepts by applying them not to the startup process, but to your career search and your day-to-day life.
However, just like starting a new company, you need to actually do the work. You can’t just sit around and think about starting a company, you need to actually roll up your sleeves and get busy. Entrepreneurship is about DOING. It is an experiential learning process. In the same way, you can’t figure out what you want in life by sitting around and thinking about it – you need to “Get Out of the Building” to search, explore, and discover what makes you passionate!
Unlike a self-help or career-planning book, this workbook is designed to go along with a university-level entrepreneurship course and so it is structured around several graded assignments and course deliverables. The goal of these courses is to learn entrepreneurship tools, methods, principles and concepts in addition to applying them to your career and life.
In addition to this ECLD Workbook, I’ve created 20+ YouTube videos that go along with this book and which I hope you will find engaging, relevant, useful, and at times, humorous. In my courses, I also provide an extensive assortment of ppt slides, videos that provide detailed feedback on previous student assignments, and other resources.
I’ve published this book and these videos as a free Open Educational Resource (OER). That means this content will be free forever to anyone who wants to use it so you can come back and reference this material anytime you want. Other educators are free to link to and/or cut and paste from this OER in order to use any of my tools, images, figures, ideas, assignments, text or videos in their courses (provided they at least mention where they got it from).
You may be reading this because it has been assigned in one of your courses at TMU. It may be used for an introductory course like ENT101 or in our most advanced undergraduate course ENT78AB. Or perhaps certain tools or assignments or chapters have been assigned by professors from another university. Because this book is used by such a diverse audience, it is possible, or even likely, that some sections of this workbook may not seem to directly apply to you, your life or your specific course. Some sections are intended for absolute beginners, but other sections are really more intended for my advanced entrepreneurship capstone students who have already taken over 6 previous entrepreneurship courses. Other ideas and concepts may be more appropriate for graduates of our degree program who may continue to refer to this Open Educational Resource in the future. You may want to re-read certain sections (or re-watch certain videos) later during your life as your design challenges change.
This OER thus has content related to teaching entrepreneurship, design thinking, positive psychology and life design theory and providing cognitive scaffolding in order to integrate, understand and apply concepts from other authors (e.g. Value Proposition Design, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, 100Steps2Startup, Design your Life, Business Model You…) in addition to trying to help you figure out what you are interested in and how to achieve it. So it may not be obvious to you why I’m including certain theoretical ideas or foundational principles the first time you read this book or apply its ideas. You may be tempted to just skip to the detailed Step-By-Step Instructions and Tools but my previous students have clearly demonstrated that this is a big mistake. I even added section 3.1 titled “Beware of Following Step-by-Step Tools & Methods – the Need for Principles, Attitudes and Mindsets” to help you avoid this temptation.
I may seem to jump around a bit between the content in the videos (which were filmed, edited, produced and uploaded to YouTube in the early days of the pandemic) and this version of the workbook (which is published as an OER by TMU in late 2022). I believe you really need to watch the videos in order to fully understand the workbook which was originally created as a supplement to the videos. The workbook has gone through at least 4 different versions (v 0.5 in 2018, v 0.6 in 2019, 0.7 in 2020 and 0.8 in 2021). During this time, I’ve chopped the number of Tools down from 50 to 10, re-arranged the Tools and added to the Step-by-Step descriptions, included previous student examples and added additional references and theoretical concepts.
In this ECLD workbook, I’ve organized the content into five incremental assignments designed to help you get feedback (from your professors or from your design team) on your progress during your journey of self-discovery. The goal of the workbook is also to help you stay on top of the weekly activities during any course you may be taking.
Assignment #1: Start Where You Are – The Wheel of Life (Tool #1) and Goal-Setting (Tool #9)
Assignment #2: Refining Your Career-Related Search Using the Design Thinking Diamond (Tools #1-4, 9 &11)
Assignment #3: Make Progress on Your Career-Related Design Challenges (Tools 5, 6A, 6B, 7 & 8)
Assignment #4: Make Progress on Your Life-Related Design Challenges (Tool #10)
Assignment #5: Final Report (Update and Improve Assignments #1-4)
TMU is the largest entrepreneurship program in the world with 75+ different entrepreneurship courses, 10 on-campus incubators, over 300 start-ups per year, grant programs, business plan competitions, Startup School, Zone Learning and the world’s #1 rated university-based incubator – the DMZ. Any TMU student with an interest in entrepreneurship will be exposed to many of the major ideas and methods such as Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas, Design Thinking, Value Proposition Design, 100Steps2Startup, strategy, business management and how to make an investment pitch.
This workbook provides a guide for when and how to apply these different courses, methods and tools to all areas of your life. It augments, but is NOT a substitute for these courses, methods and tools. It will help you put these ideas into context and give you more advanced ideas around entrepreneurial principles, skills and attitudes. It will help you build an “entrepreneurial mindset” that you apply all the time to all situations in your life to increase your overall happiness. I hope it will inspire and guide you to read further depending on your interests and design challenges.
Entrepreneurial education is not something you learn about from a book now so that you can perhaps become entrepreneurial in the future. It’s about practising and building entrepreneurial skills and attitudes NOW, every day, in every situation! In this workbook, I will be asking you to apply entrepreneurial tools, methods, principles, skills and attitudes to all aspects of your life. I’m asking you to do this, first of all, in order to personally and selfishly benefit yourself and guide you on your career and life journey. Secondly, the experiential nature of entrepreneurship education means you need to apply these concepts in order to learn them (e.g., you don’t learn about resiliency by reading about it, you learn resiliency by falling down and getting back up again repeatedly).
To use the guitar analogy, this workbook is about practising the guitar – it is not only about learning music theory or scales. It is about how to practise, how to play and how to improve but you still need to pick which songs you want to play (i.e., you need to set your own design challenges)!
Some of you may already be working on your own entrepreneurial project, side-hustle or start-up – these assignments will help you do that better, as well as apply those ideas to other areas of your life.
Some of you want help finding a job – these assignments will help you do that, but will also help you build your human capital and social capital to get the next (better) one through side-hustles and/or volunteer positions.
Some of you have no clue what you want to do after you graduate and others know exactly what you want in some level of detail (to be a real estate agent, work in wealth management, work in your family business…). These assignments will help you either find direction or refine your search and find clarity in other areas of your life.
Some of you are looking for a way to find more balance and happiness in your life – these assignments will help do that by building better habits, self-talk, goal-setting and time management skills.
Some of you may not care much about anything – these assignments will, I hope, help you discover something to care about, or find the inspiration to try.
Assignment #1 is a short exercise (comprising Tool #1 and Tool #9) to help you get oriented, select your priorities and get some practice setting goals. In Assignment #2, you’ll do your first “loop” or “design thinking diamond” and get some practice with the basic method which includes setting a design challenge, discovering divergent alternatives, making convergent choices, making progress toward resolving your challenge, setting next steps (with a revised design challenge that sparks the next loop) and self-reflecting on your learning.
Assignments #1 and #2 are short (normally completed during the first 4-5 weeks of a 13-week course) and designed to give you quick feedback and coaching before you start to dig into your major career-related projects for the term where you will be getting out of the building, conducting life interviews, attending networking events and getting involved.
Assignment #3 (and #5) is where most of the practice and learning takes place and where you will go through several “loops” or “iterations” on your career-related design challenges while applying new entrepreneurial principles, tools, attitudes and skills. Everyone has a different starting point, different challenges and will be doing something different, so a one-size-fits-all approach cannot satisfy everyone. Different design challenges will require the use of different entrepreneurial tools. So you may need to use either qualitative design thinking tools or quantitative lean startup tools, depending on the nature of your design challenge. This is explained in more detail in Chapter 5 and the ECLD Module 5 YouTube video – User Centricity.
The workbook will focus on giving you advanced entrepreneurial ideas, principles and attitudes and a range of examples. For each assignment you should be the judge of how well you are doing and whether or not you are making progress. In my courses, your grades are based on how well you “Help Yourself” and how well you “Help Me to Help You” (each course will have its own Grading Rubric provide on D2L).
Most of your time, effort and final report documentation should be related to this externally-focussed portion of the course. To use the guitar analogy, this is when you are playing songs and when you are using “conscious practice” not to just flail away at a song, but consciously practise your scales and theory in real time. This is when you practise pitch control, this is when you practise playing that lead in the scale of A minor and then trying it again in A major, this is when you practise harmonizing and staying in time to the beat. Reading a book about guitar playing does not make you a musician – you still have to get out and play! At least 2/3 of your time should be spent playing! I cannot tell you which songs to play (i.e., which design challenges to pursue), but I can guide you towards making them better.
An important concept here is the idea of “conscious practice” during this experiential learning course. Pick a specific entrepreneurial idea, principle or attitude, consciously apply it and practise it in a specific area of your life, and learn whether that makes things better or not. Don’t take my word for it, discover for yourself if practising curiosity (or empathy or some other attitude) during your job (or while browsing social media) makes life better or not.
Assignment #4 will help you take control of your character, habits, emotional responses and happiness to provide life-long opportunities for personal growth, well-being and meaning. These ideas may seem a bit too abstract or advanced for some of you at this stage of your life. I get it. It’s hard to focus on character, well-being and happiness when all you really care about is getting a job, earning some money, moving out on your own, finding a partner, traveling and hanging out with friends. However, I have discovered from my previous students that as you make progress on your near-term design challenges you will also notice that other (more important and foundational) happiness-related challenges will emerge.
Assignment #5 is the final compilation, refinement and improvement of the first 4 assignments once you have received feedback and have had the opportunity for further practice.
During this experiential learning journey, you should deepen your existing knowledge, skills and attitudes about entrepreneurship. You may already know many basic ideas and tools around researching, interviewing, active listening, building empathy, iterating, being creative, brainstorming and “getting out of the building” to engage with people. These standard tools and skills from design thinking, lean startup and introductory business and entrepreneurship courses can be learned more deeply by applying them to other areas of your life.
I will also try to help you learn about and apply more advanced entrepreneurial principles, attitudes and mindsets. I’ll show you how all the different tools and methods relate to one another and how to select which tools to use on your own design challenges. You may also learn a few new tools and techniques and/or teach me a few new ones along the way.
I started teaching many of these ideas over 15 years ago and my students tell me that they have had a tremendous positive impact on their lives and happiness. I remain in close contact with many alumni of my courses after graduation and I’ve learned a lot about their lives and their careers. They have given me feedback on what has worked for them, what they struggle with, and how the content of these courses could be augmented to help them improve their lives at different stages of their careers.
Although this workbook is primarily designed for 20ish-year-old university students who are seeking productive careers (not just a job), it is also aimed at anyone who wants to be more entrepreneurial, take control of their life, has lost their job, is about to enter the workforce, is considering a mid-life career change, or is searching for meaningful productive engagement during retirement. However, even the best job or career will not necessarily bring you happiness. So this book also sets the foundation for helping you with other important life-related design challenges and gives you entrepreneurial tools and concepts to help you achieve well-being and happiness over the entire course of your life.
This workbook and the 20+ videos I created since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic is the culmination of these efforts so far. Please help me and your fellow students/alumni with any feedback you have on what might improve the current version of this book.
I shot all the videos myself on an iPhone 11 at HD 40fps using a ring-lighting system, RØDE VideoMic Me-L Microphone and green screen in my home studio. Final video editing and production used Adobe Premier, Final Cut Pro or Camtasia. Additional tools included Photoshop, Adobe Creative Suite, PowerPoint, AstroPad, Sketch and Notability. The intro and outro music “End of the Line” and “Asynchronous Jam” was played by a group of TMU professors, including me, called “Professors in Lockdown” and edited/produced by Dr. David Valliere. Both music videos include classic Canadiana and are available on Dave’s YouTube Channel.
I’d like to thank the Business Innovation Hub (BIH) students for their help with the videos. https://ryersonentinstitute.org/business-innovation-hub/. I think you will agree that the videos have high production quality. They are almost all under 20 minutes each. Please like and share if you find them to be useful.
