Who is the father of invention?

For last two years, I have become very passionate about reading. Self help, motivation, management, leadership, entrepreneurship, spirituality, biographies, I am reading as much as I can. Subbu, my boss at Hitachi Data Systems, a great friend and mentor always used to tell me “Someone has written his 30 years of experience in 300 pages and if you don’t have time to read 30 pages of that wisdom in a week, you are doing a crime.” It was very difficult initially to develop this habit but now I realize how true his words are.

Sometimes, even a great amount of time spent on thinking, introspecting and reflecting on hindsight doesn’t necessarily provide useful inference but a single sentence in a book provides the desired clarity in a flash. That Aha thought, that eureka moment, awesome!!!

I have recently started a venture and one day during introspection I wanted to relive the entire episode in my mind, verbatim. The first moment when the business idea came to mind, what prompted it, how it became a passion so strong that I left a quite comfortable job and eventually started a small venture “RISAN”, dreaming to be the next Wipro.

I found the answer in two beautiful books: "Winner’s wisdom to succeed" by Jim Stovall, where he narrates the story of an ice cream vendor at the world’s fair a century ago. He had such a great demand from customers that he ran out of spoons and bowls. Next to him was a waffle vendor, who laughed at him for being ill prepared.

Out of frustration and desperation, the flash of genius came. He bought all the waffles formed them into what we now know as ice- cream cones and rest as we all know is history.

The ice cream cone would have made this gentleman a millionaire but what really inspired his genius was not only necessity but also the desperation. If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation must certainly be its father.

There’s another amazing book called “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. On page number 122, he describes an incident about the fire department commander who enters a house where the kitchen was on fire. When he and his team try and douse the fire with water it doesn’t abate, in a split second the commander says “Let’s get out, now”. Moments after they get out, the floor on which they were standing collapsed. The fire, it turned out, had been in basement.

It was a split second decision and when he was later interviewed, he couldn’t describe how he got the intuition. He said that he just felt something was wrong.

But later the interviewer forced him to think and the commander came up with “The fire didn’t behave the way it was supposed to; kitchen fire should respond to water, it didn’t. It was extraordinarily hot for a kitchen fire, it was a quite fire and normally kitchen fires are noisy”.

Now, all these reasons he could gather only in retrospect. At that moment, he didn’t think about all this and he didn’t have time to think, he just felt that something was wrong and this feeling saved his and his team’s life. But, all this reasoning and logic was there somewhere in the subconscious and it helped in that intuition, that gut feeling.

Amazing stuff!!!

When I read such books and relate these to my own experiences, I feel mesmerized.

So many times, we think that we took a smart decision and pat ourselves for our thinking brilliance, completely forgetting that the experience of every moment lived on this earth, something gained from every person we met/ spoke/ saw or read in a book or watched in TV/ movies, a necessity, a desperation, a dream, a passion, everything has contributed to that decision.

Life is so full of opportunities to learn something new; one just has to have an open mind. As an old saying goes “Power is not in giving, power is in receiving”

Entrepreneurship: Necessary, possible and impossible

Entrepreneurship is a subject that is very close to my heart. I have deep respect for entrepreneurs and sincerely believe that the world is what it is, because of entrepreneurs.

Many of my friends have turned entrepreneurs. Some are doing quite well and some are in the process of doing well.

I read somewhere “Start with doing what is necessary, then do what is possible and soon you will achieve the impossible”

Many people call it the “Mid –Life crisis” but I feel it actually is “Mid – Life opportunity”. When one is around 35- 40, one is reasonably well off financially, is still young enough to work hard and has achieved acceptable level of maturity. In most of the cases that I know, people around 40 are quite well poised to take this call and create something new.

Few days back I got a chance to attend a TIE (The Indus Entrepreneur) Face to Face event with the Founder of a very large specialized retail chain. The company is 180 stores in five years and should hit 500 in next 2-3 years. This company is adding lots of value to one of India’s key sectors. I have been his customer for over 6 months now.

The founder is a remarkable man. After 25 years at top positions with some fantastic organizations, he decided to retire and play golf but soon got bored and decided to do something much bigger. He started this company at the age of 45 and is 52 currently. He also shared that despite being so well networked, what was the kind of struggle he had to face and how friends stopped taking his calls. But this man trusted his vision today he is building an amazing organization.

I have been fortunate to witness many more such inspiring stories that are full of passion, energy, determination and a desire to add value to the society.

The same evening around 9pm, I was taking a stroll after dinner near my house. Due to some reason the street lights were not on and there weren’t many pedestrians on the road. I noticed an old, frail man of around 80 pushing a cart and selling tender coconut. It looked like an extremely difficult task for him and in his feeble voice he was shouting “Gola” (Hindi word for tender coconut).

No people in sight, dark road and a very feeble voice!!!

- Did he really expect to sell or

- Has it become a habit for him to shout mechanically after an interval of 10 seconds?
- Is it only the poverty that is making him work for 50-100 rupees a day at this age or
- Is it the never say die spirit and a very small/ failed but true entrepreneur trying to fight the adverse circumstances come what may?
- How does he buy the inventory? I could see him carrying almost 70% of his inventory back.

I don’t know answers to these questions but someday would like to find out. I am amazed at the contrasts life can present and God’s bizarre ways of teaching and humbling us.….

Struggle, importance and butterfly...

Thanks to LinkedIn, some days back I reconnected with Dr. KRVS of BITS Pilani. He later turned an entrepreneur and now heads a company called “Radix Learning”.

I was sharing my last fifteen years of corporate struggle after 4 beautiful years at BITS Pilani (1990 -94). I happened to mention that after spending first seven – eight years in insignificant companies at inconsequential roles, I finally found reincarnation at VERITAS and since then have made rapid strides in my career.

He told me what only a “Guru” knows: “Sunil, what you have gone through in life is the pretty much the story of a vast majority of BITSians over the years from 1970’s till now. Many begin their career in what they think is “insignificant” and “tentative roles”. But over time, they reach positions of importance.”

It is so true. When we reach some position of importance we think that our initial years of struggle and learning were waste of time. We forget that initial years are the foundation on which the rest of the life is built.

We always visualize sunrise as the beginning of a new day and the sunset as the end. What we do not know is that without darkness there would not have been a new dawn. Like wise, without problems we would never know the value of life.

This advice from Dr. KRVS reminded me of a story that I had read.

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could, and it could go no further.

So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon.

The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

What the man, in his kindness and haste, did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God's way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives. If God allowed us to go through our lives without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. We could never fly!