During the last few days I observed a series of incidents which have a common bottom line to tell us.“It’s all about attitude”.
Chappel Incident, Marathon Incident, Safari Incident and many more. All these incidents tell us that it doesn’t matter whether you fail to give the right (or you can say as per expectation) start to your journey but you can achieve whatever you want to. And the key is your “attitude”.
In 2010, when we started thinking about entrepreneurship, we never imagined that we would have to park our very first idea due to various reasons. Following are to name some:
1) An idea is an idea only: It’s up to you how and in what shape you want to mould it. Start execution, because the journey of execution will tell you what your idea is all about. We always focus on the shape of the idea. But our idea can solve the same business problem in some other manner. So the focus should be the problem solving capability of your idea not the shape of your idea. Sally Hogshead says “Any idea is only as valuable as its ability to solve a problem”.
2) Vision and Technology Goes Hand in Hand: If you have a vision and no technical expertise, then rethink before execution. You need the vision of scalability as well as technical expertise to execute your idea.
3) Attitude and Passion are different: There is very fine line between passion and attitude. Try to differentiate these two pillars. Both have their own set of advantage. But it’s only your attitude which makes the difference between failure and success.
4) No plan of execution is fool proof: If one plan fails, make another one. There is no limit and no tax on planning. But when it comes to execution do have at least two or three plan to realize your idea. Aim should be rigid, path can be flexible.
In 2010, tired of my monotonous job and facing repeated failure in MBA entrance exams, I did some “manthan” (introspection), it took 6 months and a lot of brainstorming to figure out what I really wanted to do. So I came up with a thought of doing something of my own and then I started thinking about entrepreneurship.
Reading a lot of stuff like biographies of businessmen, turnaround of big giants of the industries, following entrepreneurs (Alok is one of them), and many more, I got constant push to become entrepreneur. And one bright sunny morning I gave birth… “To an idea of course”. After discussing the same with my friends and getting their responses, I quit my job (there was lot of research and feasibility study that happened prior to the decision making) and here I was, in Gurgaon, with a dream in my eyes.
Chakka Ghooma. Vendor Selection, Architecture Design, Functional Specifications, Blah BlahBlah. All activities started with a set time frame and we decided on a launch date for our product.
During all these things we took our technical expertise for granted and relied completely on vendor for technical development of our product (The weakness of an entrepreneur is that he/she feels that everyone can take care of your idea in the way you do). Into the final month of the development, and we came to know that after spending almost INR 3 lakh (believe me it’s a huge amount for salaried people like us) and a hell lot of time (almost 5 to 7 months) we got only 40% of our actual product. We immediately stopped the development of the product for we got to know that we had been made“mamu” and we did not have the capability to track it down.
We were so depressed that we stopped thinking about our product and almost completely gave up our entrepreneurship journey. But thankfully till the time we were blessed with a great change in our thinking and in our attitude. There was no feeling of defeat or griefs for the product post that. We parked our product and moved on without giving up on entrepreneurial dreams. We restarted our journey with another idea and this time we are doing fairly good and can now see our growth in positive direction.
An entrepreneur can do everything to save his/her idea. So one fine day I woke up in the morning with an idea to realize our first brainchild. I discussed the same with my partner and after a go-ahead from him, for next 30 to 40 days, we did a hell lot of research for the Product and modified the offering and pricing of the product. And this time we changed our product completely (but still it addresses the same problem and the motive remains unchanged).
We have now again started developing our product and this time around we have technical capabilities in house (thanks to our first venture).
What I learned after this complete Mahabharat is that it’s all about your attitude. If you think that you can’t make it, believe me “BRAHMAJI BHI AAKE AAPKI MADAD NAHIN KAR SAKTE”. But if you think that you can, you will see there are more than 100 ways to achieve what you want to achieve.
“Attitude is all that Matters”.
Kunal Chaturvedi
