My Entrepreneurial Imperative and Some Lessons I Picked Up Along The Way
Entrepreneurship is the only way of living a meaningful life and we have to bring entrepreneurship to the fore of how we structure our lives in the AI age.
Ever curious, when I sat down to write this article, I thought of an experiment by Utsav Mamoria outlined in his beautiful take on ‘how to live an intellectually rich life’. He starts his article by explaining how clicking on the first hyperlinked word of any Wikipedia article and repeating that eventually lands up on the Wikipedia page for philosophy. And thanks to Packy McCormick’s Not Boring post for leading me there!
Let me try it out for entrepreneurship, I thought. This is how it went. Seemingly pointless, but curious, so it’s a game!
Defining Entrepreneurship Leads to Philosophy
Wikipedia says entrepreneurship is the extraction of economic value. In economics, economic value is the benefit provided by a good or service to an economic agent. Economics is a social science, which is one of the branches of science and science is a systemic discipline that builds and organizes knowledge. It is an empirical method, where the evidence is obtained through sense. Evidence for a proposition is what supports it. A proposition is a central concept in the philosophy of language that refers to the philosophical study of the nature of language. That finally leads to the page on philosophy, which is defined as a ‘systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language’. My curiosity paid off well, at least in this case, with seven clicks to a structured way of looking at entrepreneurship.
One thing led to the other, I pulled out David Deutsch’s ‘The Beginning of Infinity’ from the bookshelf. Since entrepreneurship is essentially an empirical method, I had to relate it to what Deutsch says about empiricism. That’s a book in the depths of which you slip and fall and get lost in, never-ending, and you love it, thankful you fell in!
The Indelible Capacity of Humans Rooted In Experience
Referring to the vastness of the universe, Deutsch talks about how science is remarkable in its ability to locally create theories of enormous proportions about things going on in the farthest reaches of the universe. No human has been to a star or a black hole, yet the theories we have define them. In physical terms, it is nothing more than how our brains process electrical impulses from our eyes of light emitted far, far away and a long time ago. A lot more happened there, but we didn’t see all of it, only the light that managed to reach us. But we developed a theory of most or all of it, the explanations, which we mistakenly believed to be derived from the evidence our senses gathered, also known as empiricism. The point here is that the discovery of knowledge was the passive entity, not the actual action where the knowledge was created, showcasing the marvelous ability of recreation we have as humans.
In other words, our senses are powerful beyond imagination to structure, what we aren’t in the thick of, accurately. Imagine, what we can achieve if we let our senses engage in an unfettered way.
That led me to meditation and the fallacy of the biased mind.
Letting Go of Bias and Rooting Ourselves in Emptiness
As a product manager, I learnt early on that the success of the product I was ideating was directly proportional to my ability to cut through bias. My own, especially, but also those of customers of my product. Life is one continuous chain of sensory schooling from the moment we are born, and there is no point in trying to become unbiased because the process was triggered long before we could do anything about it. It was necessary for survival. So it makes sense to be more mindful of the bias and then deal with it. And that leads me to mindfulness and meditation.
It was back in 2013 that I started meditating. My girlfriend discovered Headspace, and that seemed to be just what we needed. I still marvel at how simple Andy makes it, to meditate, and my current ability to meditate without guidance for more than 20 mins is something that I owe him. But I didn’t get there without the push I needed, and it came as a part of starting my first business in 2015. I was ill-prepared, and, amidst circumstances that had little to do with me, my body used to be in this continuous state of stress. Trying to figure out ways to deal with it, because I gave myself two years to try it out at any cost, I started meditating daily. I remember this time in Ooty, in the middle of a very short break, where I was sitting outside the hotel room and meditating, somehow the serenity and the meditation coincided to make me feel a calm I had not felt in months. That is when I got hooked, and I have since kept up with the practice. That day, it was almost a superpower that I found, the ability to deal with nonsense from within, without the need to try and change what was outside.
My family is the opposite of being mindful. For example, it often used to take calling out the names of nearly everyone at home to finally call out the intended, something I have done as well. So mindfulness doesn’t come naturally. I bet it did somewhere in past generations, from the stories I have heard, but we lost it somewhere. However, I started developing some mindful abilities long after I started meditating. What caused this I am not sure, but I think it had a lot to do with survival. I get uncomfortable as a person when I am dealing with what I cannot understand, and in order to figure out that phase in my life, I really had to pay attention!
It Eventually Comes Together and That Keeps Happening As A Continuous Process
It took me three years to figure out my entrepreneurial journey. I was the first person from my family to get a job, but finally when I started my own ‘shop’ the business family background did not help. It would, later, though. The multiple roles from my Accenture stint would also help later, apart from potential investors considering the Accenture tag as pedigree. So what did I figure out?
I would say that I am still figuring out. It’s cumulative, and the process layers one lesson on top of the other. The perks keep appearing along the way. If I look back in time, what I really needed to remind myself and keep doing was to fall in love with the problem.
It’s a Process, Testing Our Limits and Getting Better at the Prize
With time, the approach and nature of my opinions have changed. Remember, when as a student, it was so easy to fall for the passion of a cause without really understanding the cause in its entirety? Nearly everything in life is a part of a bigger picture, which we nearly never have a complete view of. But as we learn and experience and get a larger view, we get better equipped at chipping away at the problem. I haven’t read ‘Fall in LOVE with the Problem, Not the Solution’ by Uri Levine yet, but I look at the book when my mind is daunted with the problems at hand that only get bigger as I learn more because the look of that book is like a lighthouse. And its cover is yellow, which always cheers me up.
The Decision to Stand Out is Ours To Make
Price’s Law was also at play in how I wanted to do things, although I did not know of the law per se back then. It states that fifty per cent of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people participating in the work. When I was working as an employee, it was clear that large organizations really moved ahead for the effort of a handful, and others were anywhere between deadweight to mediocre paper pushers. Everyone wanted to feel important though, and I have been on both sides.
Lurking where I suffocated was also the opportunity to challenge myself to become one of those few who created organizations along with opportunities and employment. The need to do that became so strong that the difficulties did not stand in the way of trying. If the world moves on the efforts of a handful, being entrepreneurial is one of the first steps in being a part of the handful. So my logic went. Later on, there were moments when I knew I was right in my approach. On the worst days, tired and burnt out, I asked myself if I would have done something different, as in the choice of entrepreneurship, and the answer was always a resounding no.
Nuts, Bolts, and The Grease On Bare Hands
But as I have learnt, entrepreneurship is essentially getting my hands dirty. There was eventually a lot of ‘managing’ when I worked in the corporate world, but I realized that was a bad place to be in! As an anecdote, before I took my entrepreneurial plunge, a close friend and I were trying to figure out when life became less fun. And we realized as we blurted out our answers at the same time, that happened when we started managing people! The corporate system wants you to believe that is the end goal for anyone in their early career, but just ‘managing’ does everything to take one away from where the action is and the real learnings happen! When I started my first business, that also made me stay away from anyone who wanted to join my team to ‘manage’.
Entrepreneurship Is A Mindset Before Anything Else
Entrepreneurship is also difficult. It is not easy to create something from scratch and make it tick. Suddenly, there are a hundred plus things to deal with, chaos, egos, a whole lot to deal with, but then, what is better, I often asked? Was it better to be alive in the madness or to be one with underutilized human potential? I am not referring to becoming an entrepreneur here in absolute, but also to being entrepreneurial, something that I have seen quite a few around me practice as I travelled to meet clients for my startup. It made me happy to see that, in stark contrast to larger organizations where many were still living through their days in the pursuit of how they could ‘manage’ to look good in front of their ‘managers’. I consider that an outright insult to human capabilities, but then I do not know if there is any solution to that.
Combining the above with what Dr. Norman Doidge says in the introduction to Jordan B. Peterson’s ’12 Rules for Life’, that ‘the foremost rule is you must take responsibility for your own life’, I did that and gave myself little choice, and that came at a cost, of letting go of a comfortable life, but I never complained.
I have been told by multiple people that my eyes light up when I talk business as if that is the only thing that matters. I agree, that is how I feel and behave, but the journey is not easy. It’s walking through a minefield, stepping on a few along the way, but I also carry a supply of magic potions of hope and madness that help me get back in the game. The mines are of many types, from those who drive better narratives, to imposter syndrome, a lack of well-rounded knowledge, the expectations to live a mediocre life that is safe, and many others.
There Is No Better Time Than Now. It Has To Be Now!
So, that is my entrepreneurial initiative. I hate giving advice, although I have opinions, and it is my definite opinion that with all the options that exist today, enabled by macroeconomics, politics, technology and the general development of humanity, every person needs to become entrepreneurial.
The future is not going to adhere to the industrial era template as we have seen till now, that every living human today has grown up in, but it is going to look a lot like each fending for themselves and working hard, in different ways, because the securities that the last two hundred years ushered in through industrialization as going to be gone soon. This also means we have to figure out different ways, similar to how it looked long before we were born, before the industrial age, to be relevant.