The light bulb above your head is glowing so bright that it’s threatening to blind everyone around you. But what should you do with your great invention ideas? Before you start blabbing about your invention to the wrong person or run to the first company that offers to buy it, you need to do one thing: Protect it and work on it.
I started my entrepreneurship journey in the second year of my engineering. Everything looks good when you are setting the system but once you step into ground level work then it’s a nightmare.
But I never back down.
Here are some problems which I firmly withstood during my journey with Mecura India which back my claim.
Competing against yourself
It’s all about practice and getting your body and mind ready for the big run. When I started working on my venture, Mecura India six months back, I can still remember the day when I gasped and stopped after working day and night. When you begin your journey, it’s getting yourself ready to compete against yourself.
Every minute you need to improve and that needs lot of self discipline and dedicated time to plan and execute to perfection. Competing against yourself brings out the best in you. It helps you to know your weakness and work on them constantly to see results.
As an entrepreneur, you compete against time and yourself while building an awesome product/service/team. I’ve seen quite a few positive transformations in bringing the best in myself – be it convincing my co-founder to join me on my vision or giving a better spiel to recruit freshers from college to join Mecura India or convincing my first paid client to sign up or bringing in the first investor/advisor on board.
Getting prepared for the long haul
You must believe in your idea and stand with it firmly. The success lies in constantly listening to your body and mind while keeping tab on things around you – the weather, watering stations, pacers, and cheering crowd. You pull back or take an extra break based on what happens on the day of the run. Likewise in any startup you get ready for that long run and commitment.
Working against time, resources and getting ready for the long haul is painful. Painful as it may seem, but you sign up for the journey in which you begin to initially get used to pain, then enjoy and relish the experience, the passion that drives you day in day out.
Learning as you start to crawl, walk and run
When I started Mecura India, I still remember I could barely sleep for the first few months. Panicked, I consulted experts or friends – each one came up with something that seemed to have worked for them. But what I soon realized was in entrepreneurship – every individual and startup is very unique.
You need to try out things that best fit you, your team, your product and your strengths – what works for others may not work for you. What finally made me cross the finish line was the learning I had in the journey when I began to read, do small experiments and finally getting to see what is really working for me. So the key is to figure out from your learning a strategy that is going to work for YOU and YOUR startup.
Learning to recover fast
It is quite natural that you may face failure. During the initial ramp-up days of a startup it is common to run into roadblocks, issues and things that just don’t take off. The key is in recovering from these setbacks, refresh your mind with the learning and apply them while moving forward with your startup journey. You need to think on the feet taking real time feedback on things that are not working. Ultimately your goal is to finish the race.
Preparing for that big day!
Be it product launch or be it that IPO, all the work, training, preparation is going on for that big run. Likewise in being an entrepreneur, all the hard work and sacrifice is for that big day when your product is to be launched, hitting milestone – be it raising your first seed round or series A or an IPO. So it is important to enjoy the journey as it unwinds, have the passion for making your way and work on it as if it is your last lifeline.
This is a guest post by Akbar Khan who is the Founder and CEO of Mecura India. He is also a prominent speaker and an innovator in Electronic Medical Records for children in schools.
——————————————————————————————————————————————Disclaimer: The views, opinions and positions expressed within this guest post are those of the author alone and do not represent those of Third Party Formations Limited T/A The Hacker Street Media. The copyright of this content belongs to the author and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with them.——————————————————————————————————————————————
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