$20 Boss is a nationwide program that lets students invest in money to start up their own businesses but also think about important life skills that will be needed in their future life. Initially, I was excited to invest in money and be given a huge responsibility that I knew I couldn’t abuse. My first ideas were coming from past ideas that were at the Christmas market last year that I liked. But I learned quickly that they were out of reach with a tight budget and with very little practice in making things like them. Right away, I realised it wasn’t the business that was the hard part, it was coming up with the idea that was. And even harder is an idea that people would be willing to buy. My team had a few ideas but none of them were good ones. Which is why we had to dig deeper than our comfort zone and really observe some of our everyday problems. I were to do this again, I would reach out more to our target audience and think more about what they would be willing to buy. I wanted to make resin jewellery but I wasn’t sure that people would be willing to buy a product like that. I was pretty good at the IDEATE part of the Design Thinking, our team was struggling for a good idea, but I was firing ideas for our business. I suggested the resin jewellery, I suggested the lip gloss and we were going to do beeswax wraps but then someone else did that. We also had a look on the PowerPoint to get a guideline of what they were asking of us, that was when we knew that the resin jewellery was the right choice. I wasn’t very good at the prototype part, because I didn’t think hard enough about how we would actually make this product work, I had no idea how to make resin, I had done no research, but I was still ambitious about this product. I used creativity when we were in the ideas process, because I was thinking outside of the box and how to make this product sellable. I could improve on this when we were thinking of how to make this, I didn’t do much research about it and was fixed on this idea that it was easy to make and cheap too. I could have never been further from the truth. I also used communication when we were in the thinking process, I wouldn’t make a change to anything unless I had a reason from someone else not to. I could get better at that if I let other people do a bit more as well. I would like to get better at persistence, when an idea becomes too hard, just not giving up and actually continuing with it like I was planning to do. I could do small tasks that include being persistence like painting a picture until I can do big things and still want to do them.
