(Wrote this on 09th Feb 2020)
I quit my job exactly a year back today. It’s been quite a journey.
I’m not a successful entrepreneur, I’m not a failed one, I’m a learning one.
The past year has given me an opportunity to learn and execute skills that I’ve learned in the past 10 years, and the learnings have been immense. Thought I’d share
1. Entrepreneurship: There are no good or bad ideas. Only experiments. And experiments take time and money. And the amount of time, money and pain it can take to create something new can be indefinite. Learn to be patient.
2. Marketing: People don’t come on the Internet to buy products. People come on the Internet to consume stories. People who become the most successful marketers tell stories that talk of untold pains of the customer and unexpected gains.
3. Sales: The human brain, in most cases is triggered by greed or fear when it makes a purchase.
4. Product Management: Never pick tasks, features in your product. Pick problems, blocks, metrics to solve.
5. Writing: It takes perseverance, a lot of bad articles to arrive at a good one. The key to becoming a great writer, or to becoming anything great in life isn’t just intensity, but consistency.
6. Acting: Act not to act, but to react to what your co-actor has to say. The greatest minds listen, consume in huge volumes before they build something new of their own.
7. Nutrition: Almost everything being served to you in a packet has rubbish. Please start reading the nutrition facts.
8. Programming: Magicians exist, they write code and change the world at scale. You don’t see them speaking to you a lot because they have their earphones on, and are too engrossed in the problem they’re solving.
9. Humour: Nobody gives a fuck about your problems. Start laughing at them, and you’ll suddenly a lot of people would want to hear about you.
A good sense of humour is a skill with one of the highest recall values, beyond most of the skills that you have. You’re not born with a good sense of humour, it’s a skill that can be learned. Acquire it.
10. Handling relatives: People closest to you don’t want you to try something new, not because they don’t want you to succeed, but because they don’t want you to fail.