The Rodinhoods Open House on 8th June was the biggest and the most inspirational open house that I have attended. Particularly, I was both impressed and inspired by the number of enterprising young 20-somethings who attended the event.
Someone in the audience said that he wanted to be an entrepreneur because he preferred working 14 hours for himself rather than someone else. That ensued a short discussion about the reasons one would want to be an entrepreneur. Kanchan Kumar made an interesting point that “being your own boss” is the worst reason to become an entrepreneur. Then Alok talked about the merits of being a successful professional with a corporate job.
That made me introspect. That made me wonder about the “why”. I’m not a genius and there are many people who are much smarter than me but I do have a decent education and can get a very good and stable corporate job. Why am I crazy to start-up? Why am I ready to risk everything? I closed my eyes for 10 minutes and the answers were staring right back at me.
“A start-up gives birth to an entrepreneur.”
They say that a child gives birth to a mother. Similarly, I think it’s a start-up that gives birth to an entrepreneur. No, I definitely cannot relate to the amount of pain that a woman goes through during child-birth. But I think there is a reason it’s called labor pain. It’s the pain you need to go through to create something beautiful and amazing. Entrepreneurship is not easy. You can feel some kind of pain daily. Yet you can feel immense love and attachment towards your start-up, that turns into passion, and that can eventually be a source of immense joy. The joy of getting that first paying customer can only be matched with the joy of watching your baby walk for the first time. It’s one of the most exhilarating and emotionally rewarding things in the world. You get addicted to the joys of being an entrepreneur and are ready to go through the pain to feel those joys again and again.
“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything that I wanted” – Jack Kerouac
A start-up is like an empty page. You can write your own rules of disruption and turn them into a product or a service. I think that, at our core, we humans are inherently creative beings. Creating something useful and amazing can give us immense satisfaction and happiness. It’s not only about creating an awesome product or a service but also about building a great company from scratch. Entrepreneurship gives you a lot of opportunity to be creative because you’re basically starting from zero.
I think it was Steve Jobs who said “We don’t make great products because we want to make money. We make money because we want to make great products.” Money is a commodity that can help you build great products and a great company but money shouldn’t be the reason to start-up because the probability of making money at a start-up is very low.
I read somewhere that entrepreneurship is like heroin addiction. You know that it can kill you but you can still long for that shot again and again. I love being an entrepreneur because I get immense happiness and satisfaction out of creating something. It’ll be awesome if you could share why you love being an entrepreneur in comments.
I also write at https://karmik.me