What 2020 taught this 23-year-old entrepreneur

2020 is coming to an end. It has been one heck of a year. Which dumped away all my travel plans, my business strategies and market understandings. But in return got to work on a complete end to end product, ship quickly and learn new product building skills.

One thing which has remained constant throughout is the eagerness to learn, eagerness to seek answers for silly, stupid questions (why do I hate the taste of boiled water?), eagerness to impact lives by building things. And these philosophies of my life didn’t change even during a pandemic!

There is a lot of things I have grown immune to over the years. Below are some of my learnings from my experiences.

Quit Instagram

I stopped building this fake celebrity status in my mind. Social media makes you believe you’re the hero and the Preacher. But in reality, you’re just another entertainer on this big massive platform wasting away your time. As soon as I realised this, I flipped the switch and got off Instagram and Facebook for good.

Hustling is not sustainable.

If you’re planning to build a community, company, team, family, relationship. It has to be as easy as any daily activity. Hustling takes away a lot of energy in just one direction and ignoring the rest. This is great for the growth phase, but not once you reach where you wanted to. You will eventually burn yourself out.

Getting better as an individual

Life becomes easier when you’re competing with yourself and not someone else. I have barely won any competition or ranked no. 1 in the classes. Wasn’t that topper kid. Felt lost seeing all the competitiveness around me and wondered why is everyone in the pursuit of being that “No. 1", what happens to the remaining 99? Later on, I learnt there were just a handful of places where mediocrity was not appreciated. And all those No. 1s aspired to be in that handful of places. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in that place and I couldn’t come to an acceptance to it. I knew I deserved better. That’s all it to took for me to get better at whatever I liked so that people couldn’t ignore me.

Your network impacts your growth.

You’re a sum average of 5 people you hang out with. Didn’t really know the true meaning of this until recently, where I felt choked at a stage failing to grow. I had the bandwidth to go an extra 10 miles, but my network didn’t, so I had to slow down to evaluate how I got myself into this situation and what should I do to change this.

Learning on the internet

There is just immense knowledge out on the internet. The only thing people lack is the aptitude to learn. Till date, many skills I own I have got paid to learn them. I took the risk of getting paid for it because I have grown to accept I can learn new things on the go and people on the internet are generous enough to help you out if you’re stuck. There is no better feeling than this. (I am constantly blown away with the amount of quality information and conversations on platforms like Twitter and Reddit.)

Money is a pathway to freedom and not a source of happiness.

As cliche as it sounds, have experienced this first hand. You don’t want money to be a bottleneck to an experience. I remember as a kid, my mom and I used to go to the mall outside my school with 1.5k (INR) to buy a t-shirt and jeans for my birthday. And that used to be literally the only new dress I had to go out for the whole year. 2 years back, I took my mom for shopping with a plan of buying 2 dress material for her suit (salwar) but she liked 3 of them and 1 saree. We billed all 4 and that happiness on her face and that experience of seeing her so happy and telling whomever she met that her son bought this for her was completely worth it.
On the contrary, I stress-ate my favourite dish Biryani for one whole month just because I had the freedom and ability to buy. By the end of the month, It felt like I was eating away my money than my favourite dish. It had lost its taste.

Finding the right market value of a product and your skillset is very important.

Like it or not, India is the land of cheap labour. And if you’re in that category with no real skill to capitalise on. It’s time you spend next year learning that. If you are already a person with skill, please don’t settle for less. I know it’s easier said than done, I know the anxiety and restlessness one goes through to jump onto any opportunity that pays enough for you to pay the bills. You gotta wait and trust yourself. I chose to remain unemployed (not make positive-sum money) burning away my hard-earned savings, just to not settle for less. And trust me, it pays off. You need to find the community where they are paying well for the skills you have and try breaking into it. For me, it has been the Indian start-up community on Twitter.

You are really very lucky if…

I want to wrap it up by this one last point. You’re really very lucky if you have supportive family and friends around you. Who really wants you to be happy doing whatever you like and they have got your back when you fail. I truly understood this in 2020. I have failed more than succeeded, in all honesty, I really don’t know what success feels like. Because if present Sourav could go back in time and tell I would be so and so and would be doing so and so 5 years from now. I would have called it a success. But today while typing this it doesn’t feel like one. I still feel there is a lot I can do, learn and contribute to society than I have. And trust me, it’s your support system which gives you the freedom of thought that you can dream big and achieve it. A lot of them aren’t that lucky.
(Just a small story, I had planned an event in 2019 which failed miserably and I was in debt of close 1-1.5L (INR) which I needed to pay off in next 30–45 days. My mom was willing to give her gold jewellery to take a gold loan from the bank to clear the debt because she believed I could pay that off. And till date, she or anyone from my family hasn’t stopped me from venturing into such ideas. Luckily, I got a well paid consulting gig to pay off that debt.)

All in all, these are some of my learnings and introspections from last 2 years. It’s fairly autobiographical in natural because I don’t know how to write or make up fictional situations.

And for 2021, I can’t wait to be proven wrong, pushed out of my comfort zone, learn new things, travel, build better relations and product which impact lives.

I hope you have a wonderful 2021, and make up for all the loses of 2020 and much more.

Feel free to connect on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sourav_bz