Teach Failure to Succeed……

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One of the biggest debate today is what should we teach our kids? Interesting topic huh, some say make them aggressive as they cannot survive without it. Or some say they should be good in sports, from early stage if they will be good in sports they can rake money :). Offcourse they should be good in studies much better than any others. The list goes on and on….

So what should we teach them? Sports? Best in Studies? Music? Dance? Anymore…

I think the right answer is “FAILURE” we should teach them how to fail and get up and try again. If you fail again getup and try again, again and again ….

 

 

Now why we should teach them to fail?

As a kid no one knows what they like or what they want to become, even for us its difficult to really understand what we like or what we want to acheive in next 5 years. Yes usual answer is to rake lot of money and retire but it never happens not because we make the money, but someone has much more money than us and hence we want to get to that level or next level….

So what can help us best, imagine if you have no fear of failure or our kids have no fear of failure ( And we support them in failure ). They can try out new things without giving second thought that if we fail what will happen? And this is the only skill you have that if you fail you get up dust your hands and start over..without thinking or having any regrets..

You will be the happiest person because you will keep trying, keep trying and you will achieve more and more. But we are too ingrained with all crap that we should always succeed and never fail, we should always be best in everything. And we want our kids to do the same!

So lets teach our kids how to fail and pull up and try again..i think if we can teach this one thing attribute they will succeed in their lives ….

Missed buses in life….

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Today i learnt an important lesson from a small incident of a school boy. He would not be much older than my son around 8-9 yrs boy, crying in corner of a parking lot in our apartment complex. He was trying to get his school bag out of his bycycle as the bag was entangled into the cycle. It was a soft and long cry thinking that he has missed the school bus and was worried what will happen next. I helped him, took his bag and took him to bus stop, were we figured the bus was yet to come, i asked him to drink some water and brought his tiffin which was left in the cycle.

After knowing the bus is yet to come he stopped crying and i left him there waiting for the bus.

This got me thinking if he would missed the bus what worst could have happened ? he would have not gone to school today or his parents would have scolded him and dropped him to school a bit late. But in his mind it was the biggest problem as if whole world will collapse and he need to somehow catch the bus!

I think all of us somewhere are trying to get into that bus, our own buses, which is really good. But what happens if we miss our bus, we all will cry in our own way or get worried or get so desparate oh! why it happened ? what will happen now ? but if we look back and see how many buses we have missed, what have we gained out of it. Sometimes its much better to miss the bus instead of getting into the bus. Also in life there are lot more buses than we usually can see, we get biased by our own short view, as if something huge will happen and we will not be able live beyond that….

So lets keep trying, keep falling, keep failing, yes we may miss today’s bus because of 10 reasons which is not in our control, but someday we will get our buses and than yet again another will come…

 

Decisions or Determination leads to success?

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Is it the decisions u take or ur determination that leads to success?

Decisions: shall i give this exams?, whether i should participate?, shall i join this company or that?, there are so many decisions that comes in our way but does each decisions becomes so critical that we keep muling over it every time. We always keep pondering whether we have taken right decision or not. That analysis keeps on going on and on…

So here is the question: does our decision or our determination / hard work is more important for success? Whether its success in terms of job, money, career .. Go thru any of your past decision and think even if it was wrong decision but you were determined to work and achieve something you would have done it.
May be not in first attempt but if you really want something and are determined to achieve it. YOU will achieve it..

So its your determination your will to achieve something that will decide whether you succeed, not your past decisions, or for that matter future decisions and or failures! Stop pondering ur pasts, and work hard to achieve what u want..and dont worry on wrong decisions..

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston Churchill

Why almost all IT persons want to do a startup?

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Why almost all IT persons want to do a startup and nobody tries it?

This seems more like Quora question let me try and answer it here.

So you have been in IT for past some years ( Varying from 3 yrs to 10+ yrs) and are visiting couple of college friends or colleagues, whats the discussion like girls/travel or starting a IT startup and get big bucks..

I bet startup is one of the main discussion point and everyone seems to have unique ideas that can be converted into million bucks Ah! if we had some money or time we would done it for sure!

It seems the main reason to do a startup is to get crazily rich in much shorter time, and hence everyone gets attracted to it. Grass always seems greener on other side, so when u r in job, it seems the owner of ur company has such an easy job running the company….

Why nobody tries it?

Not a right time and never will be, abhi to muskil hai yaar. Have to pay my new apartment EMIs, buy a car, or getting married thousands of excuses comes in mind.

Is it mainly money constraints or fear factor…

Let me know what u think?

Startup steps…

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3 steps to grow an startup:

1) Product match with market : Build a product that match or solves something in market.

2) Scale : Get as many users as possible for that product.

3) Monetize: Monetize with help from users…

Simple huh 🙂

Building brand…

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Dont bounce off looking at the topic, this is one of the most discussed topic and everyone hates it 🙂 . A startup specially internet startup spends most of the time/resource thinking how to build brand ? how to increase direct traffic ? blah blah…..

Here i do not want to get into 10 steps for building brand but rather would like to ask some very obvious questions, so when next time there is a brand / direct traffic meetings with a brand consultant, you know what to look for..

Do you know what user wants? This is the most important question and should be answered completely before even getting into any meetings forget brand/direct. If you do not understand your users, what they want? why are they coming to you? and whether u are able to answer their queries. Go get this first, talk to users/read analytics/understand them.

One example stands out for me: We were suppose to have a consumer call with one of our power sellers, this was in one of the marketplace website where power seller can sell products to users. We were about to release a major enhancement which all the power sellers were aspecting and I was very skeptical about the meeting. I was aspecting a good bashing about the feature not yet released and loses the power seller is incurring because of delay in release etc. Guess what he was waiting for a minor bug fix which was not even added in our release cycle, it was a simple address switch based on country selected by users, so that buyers are comfortable with this seller. Infact he did’nt wanted any of the hi-fi feature we were building and told me upfront in the meeting. Moral of the story is talking to the power sellers (Our user/customer) made me realized the actual user problem and solve it much faster making him happy customers. Now that builds brand!

So next time you walk in to any of the brand meetings ask What does user want? If none is aware, initiate a user interactive session, that will be much more productive rather than brand consultants and these unnerving meetings with no conclusion.

As the saying goes “User is the king”!!

 

Story of a marketer..

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How a story of a marketer can change fortune of an internet company. There was an internet company that was doing its bit of struggling, trying hard reaching traffic numbers, and trying to scale to the next level. It got good funding after struggle, funds was raised for marketing , building brand and increasing direct traffic to the website.

And than came the marketer he was like “pied piper of hamelin” with all sorts of bells and whistles. Guess what would have happened once he is in and started taking marketing. Whole traffic / direct /free dropped because of pied piper, and he still continues to kill the traffic but imagine the traffic still persists.

Everything than started falling and at the end company was no more……

Guess whats the moral of the story ?

 

How to learn from your mistakes….

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Lot of us think that this is such a small thing, we learn from our mistakes do we ? Step back and think when was the last time you had done mistake in office? In your home? And have you learnt from it ? What did u learn ? At least for me it goes blank …

Ever wonder why we don’t even remember our mistake forget learning from it. I think its because we do not accept responsibility for it, we dont accept its a mistake and next time we will not do it again. Or do it much better. One of the main reason we ignore mistake and do not accept is fear of failure.

And because of ignoring the mistake and not accepting we keep doing same mistake again and again, Whereas successful people they accept it and learn from it and rise….Remember this:

[quote]Mentally strong people accept responsibility for their behavior and learn from their past mistakes. As a result, they don’t keep repeating those mistakes over and over. Instead, they move on and make better decisions in the future.[/quote]

Its all about people…..

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Being in startup companies from past 10 years, have come to realize success of a company is all about people…

Have you ever wondered why ? I think the single most important reason is how the team tackle failures and that’s why a cohesive team plays significant role. To coup up with failures & pressures etc people and their trust in each other is critical. Skill set / Education/ History etc etc all goes for toss once you see failure, all these might help you stand but what lets you go further and further is ur colleagues ur friends and their trust in you..

Also these are the scenarios which makes or breaks the company and real leaders emerge out of it. A person attitude in this case is single most important criteria, in general seeing a failure people get scared and run away from it including all of us.

Hence hire or get a team with good attitude rest will follow…