The human mind has always been attracted towards unpredictability. Life becomes mundane when you know everything about your future. A sane person loving to earn a fix monthly salary through employment may sustain the predictability of the routine job, but a true entrepreneur loves to make his life unpredictable even to the extent of not knowing what will happen tomorrow.
The human race has a normal tendency to get carried away with the flow. E.g. a child has a tendency to become a criminal when it is grown in a company of criminals. Similarly a student while planning his future gets influenced by what his classmates are planning. If the trend is to work hard to get placed in a good company and earn a fat salary every month; the human mind which by this time has got used to think with the flow; hardly try to find other ways of shaping the future. That’s why people always raise eyebrows when someone chooses entrepreneurship over placements.
What could be the reasons behind someone opting for entrepreneurship? How the entrepreneurs are different from others? What are the qualities of their personalities which are responsible for their choice of unknown, unpredictable way of entrepreneurship over the regular safe way of placement?
There can be many answers to these questions. Let me mention some of them which are very close to me.
One of the reasons that the entrepreneurs don’t want to follow the trend is that they feel so common doing so. Either they are not common or they don’t want to be common. In either case they wont follow the trend.
Another way to look at it is the fact that you struggle a lot to achieve something. But when you actually get it, the importance of the thing you were struggling so hard to get gets lost. So cracking a competitive exam is the most important goal of your life at some stage, but when you crack it you ask yourself, ‘fine you cracked it. What next?’ When you are a student of a top B-school, its not at all challenging to get placed in a good company. Everyone in your class would be getting placed. So what is challenging?
The answer is entrepreneurship.
There is a phrase in hindi – ‘Khudko aajmana’ – to test yourself, your abilities. When you get placed in a company everything is already planned for your there. Sure, there are some challenges in any job, but a system is there to help you, to guide you, to support you. But in entrepreneurship you have do everything from scratch. Entrepreneurship is more challenging especially when you don’t have anything except your brain to start with. So the entrepreneurship here becomes a question: do you have a potential to generate a successful business from nothing?
Sometimes down the line everybody asks this question to himself: what have you achieved in your life? A successful entrepreneur looking at the business he has generated, the employees earning salaries from his business and the satisfaction on the face of his customers will say, ‘I may not build my own army and concur lands, but I can become a king of an empire where people earn their living with satisfaction and which helps to bring a positive change in the lives of many people.’
4 comments:
Yes, Rightly said...Its really difficult to follow the different path in your life when easy placement is attracting you. Wish you all d success for your new venture.
Good thoughts.. well written.. At one stage in life, many of the great businessmans are just like other common mans. In fact there are few CEOs that I know(not saying they know me:-) ), who were very unsuccessful compare to common mans. For Example, Bill gates(Microsoft) and Steve Jobs(Apple Inc) did not managed to complete their college studies, even though we see millions of common peoples earn degrees every year. Steve was thrown away from apple, but he is CEO again.. I think, what metters is, your cosistency, hardwork(not necessarily in studies but in your interested filed), and never-die attitude.
by the way, I know you were never 'common' and never wanted to be 'common'..
I was just surfing the web and found this blog. I have some questions about this article.
One definition of the word entrepreneur is a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, esp. a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.
I think good entrepreneurship is not just about not knowing what happens next, in fact it is mostly not about that. It is about doing something new, something original, something important for the society. Just because someone rejects a B-school placement and opens a business, does not make him a good entrepreneur. It merely makes him a businessman - a very very common entity in the world, very much in the flow. Most of the characteristics explained in this blog are of businessmen in general. Businessmen want to make money.
For example, if someone opens a business in education "industry" in India. At the present time, this seems a low risk business area. There are many young minds participating in the so called "rat race" of education and they need guidance. There are many many businessmen who provide this guidance and make good amount of money. The important issue is what this education is doing to these young minds? Is it making them serve their country (Army, IAS, Doctors)? Is it helping them in doing world class scientific research? Or is this business merely giving these young minds another "placement"? I personally think that it is much better to take the B-school placement offer than to open a factory of more such placement offers.
In any case, all the best for your future. I thank you for invoking some good thoughts about entrepreneurship in my mind.
Would like to know what you are doing
-Ritesh Raushan
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