Greg Vandagriff

I think a key attribute in fostering entrepreneurial thinking is learning to adjust one’s perception of risk to include an awareness of the opportunity lurking behind that risk. I think an individual becomes an entrepreneur when he starts to fear his missed opportunities more than he fears the risk in front of those opportunities.

As far as I’m concerned, a failure to pursue an opportunity for the sake of “security” is nothing more than an illusion created to comfort those who are afraid of facing failure. Do I fear failure? Yes. But I’m also becoming a lot more comfortable with it as I stumble through my experiments and learn from the outcomes.

I feel somewhat validated in maintaining this blog now that it finally ranks in first place (as of 6:09pm) for the name “Greg Vandagriff” according to the useful rank checking tool available from Aaron Wall over at SEOBook. It took long enough, you wouldn’t think it’d be that tricky to rank for such an uncommon name, but it just goes to show that it takes more than a perfectly matched domain name to claim top spot on Google for that term. Another example of this phenomenon? Utah Magnetic Signs. Go figure, although I am starting to rank higher on that particular term than ever before (big money here I come!)

After doing some research and thinking about it, I’ve elected to keep my personal blog right where it’s at. It’s simply not worth the headache for me to move this to a subdomain, even though Guy Kawasaki does it. Maybe once I’ve harvested a few successful business ventures I can start to worry about having subdomains branded with my name. Until then, branding be damned!

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You know, it’s been a real interesting experiment running this blog thus far, I must admit. It’s certainly gone in directions that I never anticipated and gotten reactions that I never would have expected. From cyborg sunglasses to blasting SuperDell to the highly “controversial” VDI, it feels like I’ve been all over the place. And therein lies the problem, I think.

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So I think I’ve come up with the next big thing: a cross between American Idol, Professional Sports, and a Dance Contest. This revolutionary new sport would be called VoteBall, as this descriptive title will help the less observant among us to understand what it’s all about…

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Lest you mistake me for a totally ignorant fool based off of Part I, I will now briefly play the devil’s advocate and provide some reasons for the behavior which I previously marked as being indicative of an insecure professor:

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I think the ultimate measure of how secure a professor is in his ability to teach can be found in his grading policy: the less a grade hinges on class attendance, the more confident he is that his lectures are worth attending for the sake of mastering the subject itself. Why do I say this? Because by penalizing students for failing to attend a lecture, a professor implies that the content of that lecture doesn’t carry enough educational “weight” on its own to merit attendance… that is unless he attaches a concrete, tangible benefit such as “points”.

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Well, it’s that time of the semester again. I actually don’t get all that nervous around finals for some reason… in fact, I kind of look forward to them as they represent the classic chance for me to salvage my grades and get them up to semi-respectable levels.
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So as I had written earlier, I was planning on living in student housing called “The Colony” this fall/winter semester rotation, in spite of the poor management, higher rent, and scarce living space. Well, I was willing to look past all that, willing to forgive them for their random and unannounced inspections of my apartment every two weeks the last time I lived there… but then they called me up a couple days ago and told me that they were “cancelling” my contract.

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Well, I’m working on it enough now that I might as well “officially” launch my credit education website, EquiDash. Right now the only thing that’s really on there is the Credipedia, an ever-growing glossary of credit terms, jargon, and laws. Expect more content to come online for it down the road as I continue to work on it.

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