Bear Cam Season In Alaska’s Katmai National Park

Bear Cam season is upon us. Explore.org has setup multiple cameras in Katmai National Park in Alaska to watch the biggest salmon feast in the world. The cameras are set to stream live.

The exclusive LIVE footage from Alaska’s Brooks River in Katmai National Park has been set up for 3 years. Every year over a hundred Brown Bears descend on a mile long stretch of Brooks River to dine on the largest Sockeye Salmon run in the world. 

The bears, and the cameras that track them, have steadily grown in popularity since 2012, when the Annenberg Foundations’s Explore.org group first helped to set them up.

If you you want the best live show, look no further than the bear cam.

Bear Cam

Are you a student? Yup. Want to start a business? No. Well ya should!

With in this last year, 3 other crazy fools and I decided it would be a smart idea to start a business. Although it scared me, more than the Blair Witch circa 1999, I decided to quit my hourly job and go for it. It was something that was inevitable because like many people say it is in my blood. From my ADD background I always led myself to believe that my blood contains 100% Red Bull.

This has been my first business. So no I’m not a business startup expert (that’s directed to you twitter business snobs. You know who you are). But I have had some good things happen and some bad things. I researched the ish out of business startups and it only made me more of a mental patient on the topic. I scoured the Internet for advice, and with all the information I’ve come to find out that you can really never be too prepared for a startup. I just had to give it a shot, get out the building and start making things happen with mistakes and all.

For that reason this post is about why college years are a perfect time to start your own business. Since starting a business people always have asked, “dude how did you start it? I don’t know how to get it rolling.” I always tell them, “do it now! Just start dealing and doing!”

So here are my 5 reasons why college is the best time to start a business.

You learn awesome magician like management skills at a youthful age

Where else can you find customer relationships, branding, marketing, competitor analysis, financial analysis and managing expense skills all wrapped up into one? No where, that’s where! A startup forces you to learn these skills. Because if you don’t your business is a sinking ship and you’re going down with it captain.

Don’t wet yourself if your business fails. That’s what it is all about: starting, probably failing, and repeating. So even if your “insert-sweet-idea” business fails, every other company in the world values these skills.

The risk to reward ratio is highly in the rewards favor

I know multiple students and friends who have co-founded companies while they were studying at Universities and BAM, 5 years later, they have annual revenue of more than $100 million, millions of users, 800 employees, or even five offices across the country. What did they risk and put on the line for that success? Very little compared to a 40 year old dad of 3 wound up kids and a wife who controls his every move.

I promise when you are in your college years, you have nothing to lose because you have nothing. You can literally live off no money because you have no family to take care of, you haven’t entered a career, you are single or just barely married, and your only responsibilities are school and your 8-dollar-an-hour job at Wendy’s! Your risk to reward ratio is shooting out of the roof and it is begging you to take advantage of it.

When you make mistakes in the real world, it’s true, you lose real money. But if you have no money or job to lose then what are you risking? Being in college takes you away from the structured safe environment that most people have during the majority of their life. It is the time to take risks and fall flat on your face a few times.

As a student people will just straight up like you more

A lot of success in my business has come from the sheer fact that I am a student. I have yet to figure out why, but there is something in the phrase “I am going to blank blank university” that makes people listen and like you. They think you are this smart and amazing person for getting into school and actually staying there. Plain and simple society will just flat out like you more.

For example, when starting my business there were companies, management personnel, and successful businessmen that I identified as people in my particular space that I wanted to talk to. They were all very busy people but when I dropped the “I am going to blank blank university” line, they all treated me like a homeless dog and took me right in. It was some magical wonder.

Universities have secret resources for only students

Being a student really helped me in launching my business by having resources that I would not have access to outside of school. There are student deals you can get that the average person doesn’t have access to. Such as web hosting, PayPal credits, office rent, and access to research databases. Go ask around your university’s business school and you would be surprised at all the free crap they offer.

Plus you have the ability to mingle with other students and professors who have started a company or are currently starting one. It’s like a business brotherhood.

Students have way more free time during school than they think

Like I said above, starting a business while in college is less of a career risk since students don’t have a career. I always hear students complain, “uhhhh…I have so much to do and no time to do it”. Honestly if school takes 20 hours of your day, you need to pick up some Wyoming brochures and get the heck out! Students have so much time compared to people working a full time job. Sure maybe you are taking 16 credits and have to study, but realistically if you stopped playing modern warfare, got off pinterest and facebook, and spent less time impressing the opposite sex you would have enough time to do anything. Don’t lie to yourself; your life is just as lamely awesome as mine.

Start a business in college because you don’t have to leave another job in order to do it; instead, you can just work on your business on the side while still in school. That will give you time to figure out whether it is really a viable career option by the time you graduate.

Although college courses are important for student training, starting and running a business can teach skills you won’t get sitting in a lecture hall and performing a great rendition of the sleep nod. (you know how I feel about school from this post)

 

T.Rich’s Alternate Path to Success

When chilling on my computer during class today, I knew exactly what I wanted to blog about today: About how much I think school is pointless. I’m not talking about the basics of elementary or high school, I’m talking about the higher over-excessive education.

Background:

*Disclaimer* I’m mainly talking about school from a business world perspective. This post isn’t for everyone. If you are studying to be a doctor or lawyer or what not, you better know what the crap you are doing before you shove a scapula into my living flesh or protecting me against some serial rapist in court!

You also should know that I have the opposite brain of Albert Einstein. I think he was blessed with some genius mind cells, yet he was always saying, “I’m really not that smart.” I on the other hand am always lying to myself saying, “I am so super smart” when in reality I am not.

MY BRAIN has a comparable disease to an eating disorder that girls have. Except my disease is the complete opposite. You know the one where they look in the mirror and see a big fatty but really they are like skeletor? The opposite would be a girl thinking they are so gorgeous that they should be on people magazine’s front cover. Yeah, now imagine that for my brain. I’m like sitting in class and I’m like, “Daaang t-rich, you are so smart. You don’t have to study and read books”. And then I pretend like I’m getting A+’s on everything I do.

Now to the juicy stuff, WHY I THINK SCHOOL COLLEGE IS POINTLESS:

You can literally learn whatever you want, when you want!

Schools think for some reason that they are the only ones that have any information in this world. I hate to break it to schools but this isn’t 1979 when the best technology was the Sony Walkman, which was a $200 purchase. Back in 1979, this would be a different blog post. In 1979 I’d say that schools DID have a lot of the information.

Don’t know if you guys have heard of Wikipedia.com, but it is made of the gold at the end of a rainbow. Ask my wife, on a road trip one time I wikipedia-surfed for 6 consecutive hours. Don’t tell my professors but any report I do in school is stolen from there anyway, so why not just learn straight from the source.

Ask anyone how much he or she actually remember of his or her university studies and see what responses you get. I promise a lot of their answers will be a butt-load of “uhhhh”. There’s a simple reason that a lot of people don’t remember and that’s because they chose subjects that they weren’t passionate about and did not continue studying after they left. They think: ‘I did what I needed to pass and now I can leave it behind.’ We all just go to school to get a degree.

I don’t need a piece of worthless paper telling me that I’m qualified to do a job. Yet, for some reason, I’m still trying to get that piece of paper.

On top of it all university admissions have been consistently going up. Upon completing university students are now, on average, about $45,000 in debt. Trust me, I googled it. The post-school portion of students’ lives will begin with a huge financial burden. If you ask me I’d rather have invested that $45,000 into starting a company and maybe of paid Lindsey Lohan to do an awesome celebrity commercial! Ew…joke.

A degree is also not worth what it once used to be. People all over the business industry without degrees are as successful as those with a degree.

My mind-blowing list of examples: Bill Gates, Ralph Lauren, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Henry Ford, and a bunch of freaking rich Indians!

So you’ve studied for 3 years and what have you actually achieved? You sure are not as well off as those homies.

The truth is that you memorized a lot of information but applying that information was not part of the learning process. The business world is about experience. Everybody wants to hire someone with experience. Everyone wants to hire someone who has done the job before and succeed. For example if you apply for Lady Gaga’s new stylist she’ll say “So what freaky awful clothes have you dressed someone up in before?”. She wants your answer to be “I dressed Marilyn Manson back in the day”. So unless you have that baller experience Lady Gaga will want nothing to do with you.

So how do I land the Lady Gaga job and get to the point to where someone wants to hire and work with me? I need experience! We all need to just get out of the building and start making mistakes and gaining experience.

The world from my point of view is about faking it til you make it. In high school I used to be the BEST faker maker. I mean, I didn’t even think about it. It was just second nature. I’d walk around faking it all the time and making things happen. As my junior year math teacher. She basically told my parents that “t.rich is an idiot, but he will be someone someday”. From the little I’ve seen in the business world, it is the same. We need to sell ourselves. Not in the sleezy way, but the smart man way because sometime in the business world people get that confused (winky face)

Point of this is just to say that there are many different ways to be successful. Don’t just be another clone and assume that once you have your degree that you’ve made it. I’ve heard too many horror stories.

Like tupac says “dats just the way it is”.

This is basically just me ranting. Bad day at school I guess.

Oh and I really don’t want that Lady Gaga job. Just to clear the air.

 

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