Solution to all problems and living in a higher state is very simple though under-rated – it is surrendering. Surrendering to an idea, a cause, a desire to knowledge, or just any work you are doing in day-to-day life. Thats what will make a life complete. Care for the impacted ones. This is true work and way to live. This is Karma Yoga. Religions like Hindu assigns a Karma if a being is unclear on what to do. But an entrepreneur choses his Karma and associates so strongly with reasons behind those Karma that it becomes very easy to surrender. This is the fastest path to Karma Yoga and it becomes easier for him to connect faster.
Category: entrepreneurship
Making disciplined effort is extremely important. Pick out the projects that matters to you most and keep dedicating small or large time to them everyday. Fix amount of time you will dedicate. These efforts gives back compound interests rates. Working distracted on multiple tasks never give you compounded value. True for relationships and money also.
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Being industrious
There is no way to be happy, rich and wealthy without being industrious. We need to let go of every distraction idea and focus on being industrious on one thing at a time. Having the right focus and vision is the foremost requirement. There is no get rich fast technique.
Restlessness is the most anti-productive feeling. It is only beneficial for people who are just put on work to show restlessness to get work done. Also, that is a very bad way to get work done. It is sometimes seen as positive for organisations with small goals – like an outsourcing company at a certain project stage but is generally very bad for long term.
In restlessness, humans keep getting burst of moments when they can be productive and can focus on a particular thing. Then restlessness superseded all the thoughts. Its like heartbeat, but the duration is little more than that. In those small moments, if a human is super performant and self motivated, he tries to snatch every second to put to work, but such is a misery of restlessness that it takes him over. Then after some time, he has a chance to take over. Distractions occur very easily and humans might end up with just one or two moments of productive work.
It is generally never seen that people actually observe themselves in such situation or take some time to relax. Rather they would be eating, drinking or smoking in breaks. Deep breathe generally helps as it lowers blood rush. A low blood rush helps in focussing and focussing helps maintain that low blood rush. Similarly stress brings restlessness and restlessness ensures persistent stress. What works again is detaching yourself from moment, observing you as such and then getting back after correcting.
[Also published at nextbigwhat here: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/aap-startup-scaling-up-297/ ]
We have been seeing many thought leaders and risk takers failing in industry. They are able to gain good traction in the initial days of startup but fail to make it a sustaining phenomenon.
The same happened with Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and results are out there, putting Mr. Kejriwal to be one of a good person to be part of the next failcon. Although, we will still wait for Mr. Arvind Kejriwal to take timeout and get out with his failure experience notes but here are some of the points we have observed which are very critical for a startup to consider while in process of turning it into a business.
Too many Co-founders
CoFounders beyond 3 makes decision making tough. AAP was a party of cofounders and failed miserably in taking any decision. Where it lost was lack of leaders having controlling stakes in the decision process while it scaled too quickly to multiple cities. There was no control structure at place.
No Ownership
There was no responsibility ownership inside the organisation and the end result was blame games. An organisation structure is necessary to be made mainly for defining responsibility owners who can not play the blame game. They have to extremely cautious and ready to accept positive or negative blames and act on it.
Too Much Focus on Competition
AAP origin was into picking out problems with other parties. With so less time for go to market, AAPs main concern was always to thrash competition only and not focussing on internal core values and user propositions. This led early adopters to a confusing state since competition was too much strong with strong user propositions and user base already. Result being early adopters too migrated to established players avoiding any risks for future.
No Vision
Its always advisable to explain your startup in one or maximum two lines. AAP never had any such vision or mission statement. Agenda provided by AAP was also very lose showing indications of lack of any research done behind that.
Too much PR too soon
It is not a hidden fact that AAP was too much of PR hungry than focusing on execution and planning. PR is useful but hunger for PR led to bad marketing as well since there was no media planning as such.
We appreciate Arvind Kejriwal for poking the nation out of slumber but what party required was a better entrepreneur too.
[Published on nextbigwhat.com here http://www.nextbigwhat.com/user-persona-ideation-and-product-attributes-297 ]
In the initial days after I passed out from IIT, used to have dozens of business plans everyday, and was already working on few of them in a given month. Later I realised those were not business plans but cool ideas, thats all. After I was done coding, I was hardly able to find users of my app except myself for couple of days. End result is a failed startup – failure will come very soon and is much assured to come. Series of startups, at one time also made me think I should start a consulting outsourcing businesses. Happens.
Then came a little matured stage when idea of solving problems was the key. This was a stage when I was actively looking to find problems in ecosystems and came up with solutions rather discussing with people who are facing problems. End result is a failed startup. You try to articulate reasons for failure but the reason is it was not built for anyone. Your product was a solution to a problem but a solution which was not desirable. Its an assured failed startup too. Know before you fail what you missed in your product.
Then came an interesting stage. Stage where I knew I came up with ideas which are also solutions to some problems, problems not that big but interesting to have solutions of. Identifying problems for which people were not actively looking for solutions but were surprised and excited to find solutions. There were users. I could name those users when I am coding. I had that amazing feeling while working and much more reasons to work now. But the competitors were growing fast, my product lacked somewhere. Problem was solved, but there were too many solutions already. I created and showed people the problem, and was outrun before I could even imagine this would happen. Obviously I lacked somewhere. The answer was sales. Interestingly it was always sales. Even the user requirements gathering, design elements, product delivery, money collection, user on boarding, user retention, competition watch – everything is part of sales. Naming a user and selling to that named users are two different things. But with a good procedure followed to name your users, idea evolution to product is a stronger process for your startup.
[Published at nextbigwhat.com here]
The frustration of finding an innovation is killing your innovation. The frustration of thinking how your competitor or peers are coming up with those innovative ideas and you striking hard, trying to prove point is exactly taking you away from the innovation process. You need to get out and follow time tested principles to create disruptive innovations. During the starting of my professional life, I had the same frustration. After founding two companies and doing a successful exit in Plustxt recently, I have realised and have started ritualising experiments on the process to bring a disruptive innovation out to the market. Like most of our talents and skills we have acquired, disruptive innovations are made happen by you following a process of loop to learn and execute. They are not EUREKA moments. Would share my experiences along with learnings borrowed from books I have read and videos I have watched which I have always tried to apply when thinking of disruptions.
The first thing to know about disruptive innovation is, disruptive innovation need not necessarily be a technically advanced or complicated solution, but it can be more accessible, cheaper, fast or easy to use.
A disruptive innovation happens when people have job to do. There are people who have a particular job to do but they don’t find a better solution to do this. There are two kind of people I am referring here. One are the direct consumers who are already trying out ways to do their job. Others are non – consumers, who are not trying to do this job, they think they don’t have much problems doing this job and are less demanding. But their life would drastically change if they start doing this without any factors inhibiting them consuming and they don’t know about it. They still have job to do. Innovations which focus around people of first type is sustaining innovation. Real disruptive innovations happen when you start focussing on non – consumers too.
[Update: check Steve Job’s video at the end of this article]
To most of the discussions happening at the time, big data is another fad. Serious players know that world is now changing, and will be driven completely by data in near future. With consumers (and organizations) going from Mobile Present to Mobile First to Mobile Only, Google Search will not really be the biggest thing happened ever over internet as it is today and the context driven actions done inside the apps will be the future. Human interaction ( Going to Google and searching for How to tame a dragon ) will not be required and behavior will change.
42% of organizations have more than 50TB of data with 6% of them having > 10PB (credits: IOUG Big Data Strategy Survey 2012). This is the data of whats happening with physical and online entities as well as human behavior. This is the data which will tell how much time you spent over apps / websites doing what, how many products were sold in your shop at what time and what else was happening in the world which triggered the sale, how much time you spent doing sex and how vigorous was it (check this ), is human race getting dumber or smarter and with what pace, how many cars crossed a particular spot on road in last n years etc.. Data will be infinite out there. 32% of companies use this data by pre-processing it and then loading data warehouse for integrated analysis and 14% conduct big data analysis separately from traditional enterprise analysis (credits: IOUG Big Data Strategy Survey 2012). The current setup, thus is exactly like what retail commerce was in 1990s. And world is changing so fast that analysis done by Big Data as a separate process might be stale to use it for next day.
This is the best story I have ever heard. Story is famously known as leaving the city of regret. Don’t know the original source, so just putting it below.
I had not really planned on taking a trip this time of year, and yet I found myself packing rather hurriedly. This trip was going to be unpleasant and I knew in advance that no real good would come of it. I’m talking about my annual “Guilt Trip.”
(published on nextbigwhat here)
If you are really hurt by reading the title and planning to share this with “wtf”, please hold on and read more. You might be struggling from last 2-3 years building an ROI positive company and the title might be insulting. But let me tell you, you are the most respected person in my and article’s eye, for you are still pursuing the dream and this article is probably for you only apart from others who are planning to startup or even those who have already built an ROI positive company meeting targets they always wanted.
This is a story involving Sally and Amanda who are very good friends since childhood. Amanda’s father is very rich but she is married to a not so poor guy and has preferred to not take any help from her father. She misses being rich though. Sally and Amanda have ritualized daily yoga in Sally’s garden after husbands of both leave for work. They are discussing about entrepreneurship as Sally’s husband is thinking of quitting job and starting up an e-commerce company. Amanda is moved by the idea that even high salaried people are quitting job to get time for building their business where she is forced to be free for the whole day, apart from preparing amazing food she is fond of. She is disturbed, yet thinking positively out of the thoughts invoked in her. She is thankful for the conversation.