Thus spoke

Posted on March 16, 2013 by V

“I am law only for my kind, I am no law for all. But whoever belongs with me must have strong bones and light feet, be eager for war and festivals, not gloomy, no dreamer, as ready for what is most difficult as for their festival, healthy and wholesome. The best belongs to my kind and to me: the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts”

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Murmurs at Desk

Posted on November 20, 2012 by V

Something I had to share , if only for the tranquil imagery it transports me to every time I read it.

“A rustic spring, a little fire,
Amid white clouds.
We sit and drink fragrant tea,
Admiring this mountain.
Below the cliff our boat is tied,
But we can’t bear to leave.
Flowing water in a green stream
Murmurs at dusk.”

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One Look

Posted on October 24, 2012 by V

All through our unmindful talk, I glanced at her kohl-lined eyes,

One look and  devastating, her beauty seemed

Creating islands of longings and beautiful scars.

One look and  those kohl-lined eyes ,

Could persuade me to make love,win hearts and wage wars.

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Lost in a Hemingway

Posted on September 24, 2012 by V

Yes. Currently I am lost in a Hemingway.

A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rainfreshened skin, and her hair black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St. James. I was tired of rum St. James without thinking about it. Then the story was finished and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph and then I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she’s gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad.

I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

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Under the clear skies

Posted on September 12, 2012 by V

I will let you in on an experience. Something not everyone knows. Something not everyone knows they can get.  An experience that will prove you that when you learn to lead a team under these situations, you can lead under any and I mean any situation without the slightest of apprehensions.

As a merchant marine, you learn to adapt, not to  panic and stare straight at trouble knowing fully well if thing go a little on the wrong side it could mean death to someone. But most importantly you learn to lead, yourself and others. Leading becomes second nature to you like breathing, voluntarily and involuntarily. Here’s a couple of scenarios where you know there is nothing to do but to stand up and take the lead. It’s either that or perish. Which one would you  rather choose?

Scenario 1:

You go to sleep at 2100 hrs. on a December evening in the middle of the stormy Atlantic. Five hours later, when it seems like a dream, you are thrown off your bed almost into the washroom of your cabin. The captain rings a blaring alarm and summons you on the deck where the wind blows at –13 Degree Celsius.

Why you ask? It’s simple.

There is a storm brewing and your vessel is heaving, almost nose diving some of the time into the frosty Atlantic. And when the 2 degree water gets thrown into the –13 degree wind blowing at a 100 Knots, you get a mountain of icicles landing straight on your deck. A lot of those and you destabilize your buoyancy. So you convince a team of 15 people with bags of salt who brace themselves against the –13 degree wind on the deck and ask them to look straight at the white mountain rushing at them.

When it does land on your deck, you throw the salt on it, make it melt and let it flow. When you can convince people to do that for you, what is it , if not leadership?

Scenario 2:

You are having a cup of tea inside your engine room. It’s 3’o Clock and you need a break right?

Guess again.

Your noses tinges at the smell of heavy oil and rush out to the engine platform to find  130 degree Celsius hot black oil sprouting like a whale from the High-pressure pipes, all over the E/R.

That’s when you look into the eyes of your crew and ask them to accompany you to help you head over to the emergency Shut Valve, fully aware of what burning hot oil will do to you or him, when it lands on you.

You lead by example. That’s what you do out there at sea. YOU LEAD.

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The basic premise for life

Posted on August 21, 2012 by V

Recently, I started a company in the renewable space called SolarTown and we recently won ( from among 450 other companies ) in this really awesome Pan-India Business competition called Conquest 2012.

Following that, much to my pleasant surprise, we started courting widespread investment attention from a score of firms placed all over India. In my discussions with them, one thing stood out. They liked the Vision and the Team  more than the current product of the company or the market, which by itself was quite huge.

So this led me to question of “Why?” Why are humans inclined to hear out the”why” rather than the “What” or the “How” ?

A vision for a company is something very similar to what high performing individuals call “purpose”. A man with a “purpose” is more inclined to withstand adversity than one without. A man who knows his “whys” all too well is like a well-lit road. He knows where he is, where he wants to go and most importantly , why he wants to go there. This is explained in excruciatingly delightful detail in Man’s Search for Meaning by Dr. Victor Frankl.

That purpose is what “vision” is to a company. Knowing that, no matter how great or built-to-last a company is , what you create will cease to exist probably within the next 1000 years, either through technological disruption or the plain vagaries of natural microeconomics of the market, why would you still go about doing what you want to do?

There is no 1-size-fits-all answer to this one. It’s a personal and sometimes deeply philosophical journey that each one has to take to reach the answer to that. But when you do come out of that philosophical tunnel at the other end with an answer, the world feels different. It’s like a veil has been removed and you know what matters and what doesn’t. What to focus on and what not to. It’s, to say the least, …….freeing.

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Good Business Ideas vs. Bad Business Ideas

Posted on August 12, 2012 by V

Let’s admit it. Everybody wants to be famous. But fame comes to a select few. Not you everyday Joe. So in the world of entrepreneurs, if you had to showcase a select few , then the media better need some good fodder to drive up its page rankings or views. So to drive up their page views, they go around choosing

a.the most photogenic entrepreneurs to grace their covers

b.the youngest entrepreneurs, because let’s face it – everybody is amazed by that 22 year old kid who built a billion dollar company when we were working our hinds off in some cubicle in a large firm filling out student loans.

c. the 0.001% of entrepreneurs who got a stroke of a sensational idea, the ultra-rare unique idea and decided to build on it.

 

But here is the kicker,” you don’t need that fame to be a successful entrepreneur”. For practical reasons it’s important to differentiate between good and bad ideas ( how else would you drive up magazine sales / page views), but for the most part, failures can be attributed more to the lack of audacity you approach your work with. Let me elaborate.

I recently had a friend of mine quit the Solar EPC venture he was working on citing the market wouldn’t grow for quite a few years. With all due respect to his reasons behind that decision, I am but forced to analyse his rationale.  Was he quitting because ‘the market wouldn’t take off’ or ‘because he didn’t have the patience to stick it out ‘ or maybe he figured that he would fit into a better industry than this one. That analysis is precisely what I am getting at.

To succeed in any endeavour, our idea does not need to be unique or new. That myth, propagated by media sensations,  has become the accepted dogma of entrepreneurship because the media only covers the miniscule percentage who made it overnight with a sensational idea. There’s no excitement in the story of the guy that built an empire by aggressively buying local delis, the guy who started a series of grocery stores ( the second one – started seven years after the first one!! )  and built a $200 Billion empire, the guy who started coffee shops all over the place, the guy who sold chicken in retail all over the country.  You don’t even need to innovate ( gasp! ) . Just find things that other people do, and do them too. But sticking it out with audacity, is the most difficult part.

So it’s up to us to decide what we really desire. Glamour or success. Most often than not, the former is just a by-product of the latter. Not the other way around.

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Low Bandwidth

Posted on July 30, 2012 by V

I guess sometime or the other , in life, you are going to have to come to terms with the fact that

You are not going to read all the books you want to.

You are not going to meet all the people you want to.

You are not going to buy all the things you would rather have.

You are not going to visit all the places you had like to see.

You are not going to indulge in all the activities you aspire to.

You are not going to get to try out all the careers you would like to.

But in spite of all these shortcomings, you can decide which of the chosen very few of the above categories would bring you optimum happiness when you face your own mortality, at the end of it all.

Like in all things, life is about optimising happiness, not perfecting it. Because there  is no such thing as ‘being perfectly happy’.

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Greatness is cumulative

Posted on May 16, 2012 by V

In Chennai, the Entrepreneurial eco-system is small. Certainly, it is smaller than the “Entrepreneurship in the air” attitude of Bangalore.

But every time I organise a StartUp Saturday (www.headstart.in) in Chennai, I come across numerous success stories against all odds and doe-eyed optimists presenting their StartUps to critical and prodding eyes. Each of those times, I organise an event, I am but astonished by this statement of Jim Collins, for its accuracy and the precision of its truth.

Sam Walton began with a single dime store in 1945 and did not open his second store for seven years. Seven years! Twenty-five years later, Wal-Mart had only 38 stores. Today, Wal-Mart has about 4,000 stores, building up to that number through a process that has been slow and steady. Albert Einstein once quipped that the greatest mathematical discovery of all time is compound interest. That is the Wal-Mart story. Walton began with $72,000 in annual revenue, grew it at 29% per year for three decades, and then accelerated from there. In recent years, the company has settled into 16% per year average growth — but off a much, much larger base. That kind of cumulative growth achieved over seven decades turns a $72,000 dime store into a $1 trillion corporation.

You achieve greatness, it turns out, in much the same way that you turn a giant, heavy flywheel: It takes a huge amount of effort to get the thing moving from one turn to two, from two to four, from four to eight. But if you keep pushing in a consistent direction, you’ll eventually hit a hundred, then a thousand, then a million RPMs. When you combine a consistent direction with substantial speed, you achieve something greater than either of those elements alone: momentum.

Greatness is cumulative indeed.

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To desire or to not to desire.

Posted on April 18, 2012 by V

DESIRE.

The very concept of desire and how it inspires great action has always fascinated me. The more I studied what leads men to put in herculean efforts, the more I came across two distinct school of thoughts regarding Desire and its implications.

Now, there is the Napoleon Hill style, who says that Desire is the starting point of all achievements. Then there is the Buddha style that says desire is the root of all evil.

On analysis, you will see that difference is not in the absolute concept of desire but rests, like always, in the perception of the concept called Desire and its implications.

I think both schools of thought point in the same direction that “what the mind can conceive, it can achieve”. But they simply persuade the reader (us) to conceive  different things.

So while Napoleon Hill /Robin Sharma/Tony Robbins and the like seem to understand that, they place great materialistic achievements on a pedestal and inspire the masses to work towards them and the other philosophical line of leaders seem to take an approach beyond that to inspire the masses that there is something to live for beyond just fast cars and big houses.

Is there? We will just have to live through life and see for ourselves, I guess.

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