Treading To The Middle Way There was and will always be enough opportunity to pursuit, but do it when you are ready for it.
By Ritu Marya
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As we concluded our recent annual Entrepreneur India convention in August this year, it was truly entrepreneurship at its finest where ideas and business bloomed in a congregation of over 500 young and veteran entrepreneurs. It was a fast track two days of constantly moving between two extreme states of living the entrepreneur's life, from ideating to executing, from being on top of the world to hitting the bottom ground, of bootstrapping to getting abundantly funded, from too much calm to extreme chaos but one thing that struck me was that while an entrepreneur may live lonely in his world; but he cannot be isolated from it.
At any point of time, entrepreneurship will demand you to wear the hat, which is perhaps exactly opposite of your state of mind at that point of time. More then anything, entrepreneurial success is about being able to minding one's mind to deal with the situation at hand and make the best of it.
More than being the most intellectual person in the world, it calls for you to be the most flexible. Most of all entrepreneurship is like a sport where you may be pushed to the extreme side of the court very often, but you also know that in order to win you need to be heading to middle of the court as fast as possible.
If you have missed to be at the big event, we have the tried to cover the best takeaways for you in the ensuing pages where experts share future trends across the most meaningful sectors in entrepreneurship spanning across tech, consumer, urbanisation and society change weaved together through capital and best practices for brilliant entrepreneurship. The power of entrepreneurship is spreading to every nook and cranny in our nation. The startup mood is well and truly upbeat in India.
The wave, as expected is now spreading to small cities of India as I repeatedly get invited for events in Bihar, Chandigarh, Hubli and there is a big romance building around starting up. Every state government in the country is doing their bit in building the start-up ecosystem in their region. I also feel that capital is real and it will follow good ideas and talent and look for big returns. However, there is a greater need, which would become omnipotent in the coming year and that is to save the failure rate of startups. The Government needs to take that into account. Failure cannot be glorified, there are lots of young careers at stake.
A couple of years down the line, it may not be easy to deal with young disillusioned Indian youth, who may not find themselves optimum as entrepreneurs, but overqualified and therefore easily bored in a job environment. Just a look into founders lives in the last four years will tell you that after their company was acquired, their fire in the belly was less and the motivation of growing their business was not as high, most of them eventually moving on.
While in no way, my objective is to tell the youth not to pursuit their dreams of being their own boss, but my message it to be real about it. Your ideas should emanate from your need and drive to find your own path, based on your inner calling and not based on where you see the world going. There was and will always be enough opportunity to pursuit, but do it when you are ready for it.
This article first appeared in the Indian edition of Entrepreneur magazine (September 2016 Issue).