Awarded the
“Rodinstar” Post
of the week!!
I have been always scared of doing a lot of things in my life, right since childhood. I was scared of making friends at school, was scared of speaking English, was scared of appearing for my exams that I might fail. I’ve been afraid of doing everything in my life. You will not believe that I was even afraid of writing this article that people might laugh on me after reading it. What the heck! 😛
The reason why I’m posting this is because we live in a world full of fears. Believe it or not but even you could co-relate yourself with some situations.
Here are some situations which changed my life and helped me overcome my fears.
1) Fear of speaking: I was always afraid of speaking to anyone. One day my dad asked me to travel alone from Andheri to Churchgate and travel back home and handed me 50 Rs note. He wanted me to pick up a form for something. This was when I was in 7th grade. I was shit scared, I must have called my dad on his office number about 10 times..”bus pakdun ki rickshaw?”, “how much will they charge?”, “kaunsi train pakdun?”, “which platform?”…my dad got annoyed, he literally shouted at me and told me “kisi bhi aadmi ko poochega toh woh tereko khaa jayega kya?”..just ask someone man!…figure your way out. I somehow managed to do the job and since then i’ve never been afraid of speaking/asking about anything ever.
Since that day I spoke so much that today I can speak 7 different Indian languages and 1 foreign language. And now I approach random people and can talk random shit for hours.
Lesson learnt: Talking to different people makes you learn a lot.
I still appreciate my dad for pushing me to do that.
As I grew older I had a new fears entering my life.
2) Fear of selling: After my graduation I had to find myself a job as I had no clue what i’m supposed to do with my life. I got on to Monster, Naukri and multiple other job portals and saw maximum openings for sales.
Sales is something which is always target oriented, you achieve you survive. And people always scared me about the tremendous pressure a sales guy has to face. So i decided no sales. 1st 3 years of my work life I managed to get myself a desk job and found it not so interesting and was always fascinated by the fact that sales guys make a lot of money.
Everyone wants to make more money, right? So, during my tenure at Media2win I went to Namrata Balwani the COO and KK (Krishna Kumar), CEO asking if I can try doing Business Development. They said, are you really up for it? And then I asked can I give it a shot? Meaning I will keep doing what I do i.e. managing digital campaigns and also do BD. They said alright! and appreciated the fact that I was courageous enough to take up something challenging like BD.
So I started cold calling random brands managers, checking outdoor advertisements, newspaper ads and then one day managed to fix a meeting. I had no laptop or a presentation to show, no clue what to speak and was not dressed formally. All I did was talk, managed to crack a small deal.
It is then I understood that selling is nothing but throwing logic at people, and at the end of the day logic is the only thing which sells. Being an executer I knew more then a sales guy.
I always have this habit of discussing both my success and failures with my dad. So I went back home and told him about the 1st sales deal I closed, which i was very proud of. He told me that the whole world thrives on commerce, and commerce is nothing but people buying stuff from each other. Sales is the way of life, if you read history currency originated due to the need of people buying things for a value and that value was later calculated in form of a currency.
Lesson learnt: Selling is the way of life, if you can’t sell anything you cannot survive. Even in a job interview you have to sell yourself to the company, otherwise they won’t buy you.
Till today I appreciate the fact that Namrata and KK gave me a chance to learn BD at Media2win and let me learn the art of selling.
And then after doing a couple of more jobs I wanted to start-up but was scared.
3) Fear of Starting-up: Since childhood I have been taught by my parents “Beta! bada hoke accha job pakadna” and live a happy life. Well I did a lot of jobs and wanted to do something different. I often used to question myself “till when will I depend on a company?” I wanted to be independent and depend on myself for a change.
I was always worried about this challenge of starting-up it took me 1 year to come to my senses and figure it out. So I took a calculated risk, I started working for a start-up web portal called ticketplease and along with it started a service company Farasbee
The reason why I did that was, because I wanted to train myself in starting up and was too afraid about not making any money. But I was wrong I could have learnt it just by concentrating on one thing and still made money, in-fact more money.
ticketplease went on becoming a disaster as the private investor pulled out the plug, and I moved on from the political grounds to finally concentrated on my own start-up i.e. Farasbee
Since then we have been able to make some crazy products and deliver good services for our clients and yes we do make some money to survive 😛 and we are bootstrapped.
Diabeto is one of our products which is a bluetooth powered hardware device which enables the transfer of glucose reading from your glucometer to a Mobile app. Its a Diabetes management product. We also got a small funding from the government Chile, as a part of the Start-up Chile program.
Sometimes I think how in the world did we ever come up with this idea. But we made it.
Lesson learnt: Starting-up is not difficult, if you you have the fear of not making money and still have a dream of making it big. There is a contradiction in your thought process you might wanna cross check your confidence levels again.
After doing all this with my life so far, I still live with fears. Which is why I have concluded that our life is a scary dream and only if you overcome your fears you will be able to survive.
Life constitutes experiences. It’s made up of you as the experiencing subject and the world which is the object that you experience. The union of both makes life. Its you who can make every experience good or bad. If you learn the art of making every experience good you will be in peace.