Random realizations from a non-blogging year
So this is the kind of post which comes after half an hour of trying to figure out what your WordPress password was. And this one apparently falls in the anniversary week of my last blog post! Terribly bad! At least not how i wanted it to be like when i booked this domain. But I would blame laziness, twitter & confidentiality, in that order, for not having written posts on subjects which interested me in the course of last one year. I like writing though, in fact writing a book has long been on the bucket list alongside a lot of other weird things like directing a movie, both of which i guess are pretty far away.
In the last one year, a lot of things around me changed, most of them for good. “The small little world around me” has become slightly bigger & is hopefully growing faster than inflation. A lot of reflections & realizations, a bunch of interesting conversations, a ton of ideas, a huge amount of travel, fair bit of execution, a lot of internet data consumption & most importantly a handful of new friends & connections. I gauge change by the actual change of 2 things. Change in mindset & change in routine. The latter has changed completely. The former has been through a lot of revisions over regular intervals of time mostly in tune with the lunar cycle!
I generally hate being on flights, being disconnected from the rest of the world, having to sit still all the time & I can’t sleep for short bits. Power naps are a distant dream for me & the cause of jealousy when i see people around me fall asleep just like that! No, let’s not go there… So the flight durations are mostly dedicated towards a bit of reading & thinking or more appropriately called dreaming. Richard Branson, through his books of course, was my co-traveller, in a lot of those otherwise boring flights. (btw, there should be blind dating services on flights, idea courtesy Sherin & Anoop) A lot of things that dude did was exciting & fun and his views on business or rather businesses were obviously inspiring.
The first of the many realizations of the last entire non-blogging year (ya, Q2 to Q2!) just on one of those flights. See.. There are fundamentally 2 types of people. BTW, I’m talking about people who do big stuff or at least want to. Ha.. So 2 types. The first kind can do one thing so well that the sheer passion & effort will put others to shame. They wouldn’t mind doing that for their life time. They improve & innovate & even reinvent. And the second kind, who likes doing multiple stuff and likes being challenged from multiple directions. It’s just what makes you happy at the end of the day. The fact that we were never a single product company & that we always reinvented ourselves across multiple verticals, made me ascertain the fact that Richard Branson & Yours Truly, had similarities in the way of thinking! If anyways you are always multitasking then why not multitask multidimensionally? A breath of fresh air in the flight & the restless wait for the thing to bloody land, safely of course!
Fast forward a year & now there are a few more small entities that we are associated with in one way or the other, either subsidiaries or joint ventures or startups or small investments. Most of them small but beautiful & having a primary entrepreneur running the show on a day to day basis. And the excitement & adrenaline rush is back to how it was during college days while bootstrapping. What goes around, does come back around i guess. It’s been tough but refreshing. (more on each of the start-ups later) The biggest strength, has of course been the team around. More so because they are all fundamentally entrepreneurs themselves. Every single person in the team, in their own small & big ways, help us chase more dreams together. And like in a lot of other parallels, the fun is always more in the chase! 
Now the bigger dream is to create an eco-system. One that empowers more minds & spawn dreams in them. An eco-system of do-ers & go-getters. And an economic slow-down, like the one that’s most likely to happen now, is always the most fertile ground for a start-up.
The challenge is the focus & the resources. Both are always limited. Time, the most important of resources, is the biggest luxury for a man. It’s easy to say Dream BIG, it’s more important to strike the right balance so that execution doesn’t suffer. Growing in spurts is good. Helps you set goals you can see & aim at. Just don’t get stuck to them for too long. Always revise & reinvent. Nothing survives without that. We, as a country, have always been referring to the reforms of 1991, as the reason for the India growth story. True. Totally. But only till this far. To grow further, you need a totally different set of reforms. A 2 trillion economy (by March 2012) can’t run with the policies which were created to help the country reach the then target of 1 Trillion. Applies to everything!
Basically, identify yourself. What sort of a person are you? What makes you happy?
Dream BIG, but then chop them into cute smaller ones and put them in a sequence.
Be quick to get them done one at a time, Time waits for none.
Reinvent & Adapt. Keep listening. Keep learning. Keep discovering.