The power of not knowing
Transcriber: Minh Ngo
Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
If you ask someone who has created their
own business, built an empire,
created something from scratch or
made their dreams come true,
they’ll all tell you how important
and powerful blindspots are.
When I started my business,
I thought it was just a matter of decision
the day I decided from there
on it was only up hill, maybe i’ll
face a few difficulties.
But things will happen exactly the way
I want, how I want and when I want.
But what a joke that was. So I want to
share with you
my first five blindspots
as an entrepreneur.
My first blind spot was I thought that
I would work for the first two,
three years of my life and then I would
never have to work a day in my life.
And when I started my business, when
we started building step on step,
I realize that when you create
something of your own,
it becomes such an important part of you.
It’s in your mind all the time.
It’s in your heart all the time.
It runs through every single
cell of your body
and there’s no going back from there.
So maybe you don’t feel like you
work a day in your life,
but there’s no way that it can
get out of your system.
My second blind spot was I thought I knew
how much money it took to start
a business. I had twelve thousand rupees
in my account and I thought it was enough.
My third blind spot was I thought
I could do it all alone,
but soon I realized I needed people
for emotional support.
I needed people who could
help convert my dream,
my vision into a reality I knew of,
people who could help me execute.
I needed critics and I needed friends.
My fourth blind spot was I thought,
just because I love what I do,
that I work for myself every single day,
I’m going to be equally excited,
passionate and brimming
with energy to work.
Sorry to break that bubble,
but that’s just not true.
There are days that I worked
36 hours straight.
And then there were days I just
could not get off my bed.
There were days I walked slow, there
were days I walked fast,
and there were days I just could not walk.
And my learning was that it’s
all a part of the process
and that it’s just all looking.
My fifth blind spot was I thought,
life is fair.
So if you did the hard work and produced
good work, you would be successful.
So when we had our first big client,
we did everything we could
to work with him.
We put out the best presentations
we were working towards it day and night.
We spoke about it
for breakfast, lunch, dinner.
We got people who were not working
with us, but had 25, 30,
35 years of experience to come together.
Help us with this and with all of that
preparation and all of that hard work,
we shipped our work and it bombed.
Nothing worked out.
It was so disappointing. But
just then, 30 days later,
we get an opportunity to
work with another farm,
a bigger organization that was
working internationally.
We prepared the presentation
in about 45 minutes,
had a conversation with lasted
about 12 minutes,
and we had our first ever biggest client.
And till date, he remains one
of our bigger clients.
My learning was that hard work
is not the recipe to success.
It is only a recipe to success.
And there were so many things
like perseverance, consistency
and so many other things that
come at play when you are working towards
your dream. But every single time that
a blind spot came in front of me,
I had two options. One, to continue
doing what I did the way I did.
Probably see somebody else do something
and apply the same thing here
or to walk through my blind spot.
With fear, anxiety, all that I had and
give my dream a chance to become
a reality,
I was scared, so scared
that my knees hurt.
I was so scared that I did not
know where this was heading.
I thought probably this was my
last chance before I failed
or my last chance before I succeed.
So I muster up all the courage and
walked through each blind spot.
Saw things that I had never seen before,
felt things that I had never felt before,
became open to being vulnerable,
and if I have to put my lifetime of
learning in a single sentence,
it would be this
magic happens when you
decide to jump into the unknown
and realize that it’s a featherbed,
that the only thing you ever had to
do was look at your blind spot
and walk through it. And the
magic begins to happen,
and that’s when you realize that
the dream that you had all this time
is now becoming a reality.
Thank you so much, guys.