Creating a successful company is like a creating a beautifully orchestrated symphony.
A beautiful creative experience, a satisfaction and fulfillment in the process itself as opposed to just the result.
Dance to it, we all do.
Even those born well to-do.
Engineering , we all did.
But adieu to it, we all bid.
When the clock strikes twenty-five,
Every girl and boy does become terrified.
For in this society,
they play a tune.
To fulfil which, they promise you the moon.
They want to see you dance to it,
Whether you want to or not to skit.
Demands! Demands! and more Demands! By Jove!
It’s called “ a marriage” and “a job” by those you love.
So , considering the demise of the so-called “fixed marriages” slowly but steadily, you could say that the westernization of marriages has befallen this wonderful society of ours ( notwithstanding the stereotypical US educated – MS graduate who regularly plunders the society for eligible females/males to carry back on their victory lap to the United States) .
But for the rest of the not-higher-educated ( And no, studying M.Tech is not considered “higher” in India yet) how can you possibly go about finding a spouse in this densely crowded country of ours that along with our friendly neighbor China constitutes 33% of the world’ population.
If you ask me, well, it’s simple really. I just use the basic logic and analytical approach that I would for any reasoning problem.
1. Using demographic data to calculate the number of potential mates in your geographic area.
2. Then , you should set aside a bit of time for “calibration” — dating as many people as you can so that you have a sense of what the marriage marketplace is like.
3. Then you enter the selection phase, this time with the goal of picking a permanent mate.
The first woman you date who is a better match than the best woman you met during the calibration phase is, therefore, the person you should marry. By statistical probability, she is as good a match as you’re going to get.
See. I do it all for science.
One thing an entrepreneur should not or must not do at any cost is to think that ideas are going to save him. It would be well to remember that Ideas are dime a dozen. It’s the execution that matters. Hoarding ideas is most often than not useless. But if you have got a novel idea, it would be wise to pitch that idea on trusted friends with the right perspectives , not on strangers who have a track record of grand execution.
In fact, the habit of sharing ideas must be cultivated actively and consciously. Because not everyone who you tell your ideas to, will think it’s worth their while, not everyone will immediately drop everything on their hands and focus on your idea and certainly most won’t have the execution chops to raise your idea to great heights and create a late moving competitor.
So that is why I always share ideas, share my contacts and introductions with friends, share wealth as and when I can afford it with charities and share my time with non-profits focussed on clean energy, to lend them my execution chops.
Every resource, tangible and intangible, is like a river; the more pathways you create the more freely it flows through you.
Perhaps it would serve us humans to remind ourselves, from time to time, of the inevitability of the fragile lives that we lead on this blue mass, we call Earth.
To perish. That is the inevitable outcome.
And when we and all that we create does perish, at 75, 85, or maybe 105 years old, none of your critics’ or peers’ will matter the slightest to you. Some of them , you’d be happy to know, won’t even be around to compare, contrast, appreciate, criticize or condemn your success or failure.
So what does matter then?
To cultivate your relationships with Family, dearest of friends (focus on the “dearest” because it’s hard to find real trustworthy, friends who stand by you , help you and take active interest in your success), and success ( on your own terms, irrespective of the society’s standards, which are as ephemeral as the whims of a young woman).
It’s good to get your priorities right, once in a while. Especially when times are good.
The following was one of the best advices I ever received from a very established entrepreneur recently . I was spellbound by the simplicity of it, to say the least.
You are 25 now and want to start a company. If you have faith , persistence, courage, a will to tolerate ambiguity and an odd desire to thrive in insecurity for a decade, you will build a sustainable organization by 10 years. If you work really hard with unswerving determination for 10 years after that, you will build a billion dollar company. If you keep going full throttle still you may realize what it takes to build an international organization in the next 20 years. And if you are really lucky, you may realize that a man’s worth in his grave is not what he accumulates in wealth but what he leaves behind in his legacy, within this limited time of 40 to 50 years. So choose wisely.
What he meant by that (to the best of my comprehension) is “Whatever you do, don’t do it for the money. Do it for your legacy. Your time is limited”
Period.
So we celebrate yet another revolution of this tiny planet filled mostly with water and a smattering of land, around a lonely yellow star in a far away , one-among-a-million galaxy in an accidental universe.
But the good news is time is what we make of it and it is relative. It is an illusion.
One man’s century is another man’s decade. But time is the only tool of comparison available to humankind and humans, since time immemorial, have stuck to something stationary just so they have something to compare against. That is all time is; a tool for comparison and convention.
So don’t let into the panic afflicted crowd's interpretation of how you are becoming “old” or are richer/poorer “relative” to your peers or how you will become unhealthy as you grow “older”.
Conventions are to be controlled by man, not the other way around.
