How Loss Can Drive an Individual To Entrepreneurship

Tuesday August 07, 2012 , 3 min Read

When you ask Sunitha about her first investment in her business, she would say without thinking “Loads of loss, physical and emotional”. When her husband passed away 4 years ago, she inherited long term debts and short term bills in the form of family responsibility, home loan and school fees. And of course, she had her own un-employability. All she could ever do was cook and that’s about herself. In the three years that followed, all she did was cook, pack and dispatch lunches for employees across the street. The aroma of the lunches spread to more streets. And today she has a fleet of people, who deliver lunches across her city.

The fear of being deprived of your needs can make the laziest one run. When one is deprived, you can either take it constructively or otherwise. It’s like hitting the rock bottom and the only way out is the way up. Sunitha says un-employability is not the absence of opportunity but the presence of fear and low confidence.

Loss can drive an individual to take the first step, perhaps unknown to him/her, towards an entrepreneurial journey. The aspiration to be at a place, which takes away from current state, drives a lot of successful entrepreneurs on a daily basis. The challenges can be mental, physical or financial among others but what keeps you going everyday will be where you aspire to be.

Some of the things that I personally learnt from the case above is that Sunitha had a strong desire to overcome the loss. She knew the task was massive and it demanded enormous effort from her. Every time she hit a roadblock, she reminded herself of her current state and that made her find ways to go around her problem.

Being an entrepreneur can be very demanding not only on you but your family too. You will probably not realize it, but they too are sacrificing their time with you and all the good things that they could have done with you. So, the thought and the realization of it can act as big push for many of us.

My take from this has been that for an entrepreneur among other things, the thing to do on a daily basis is to keep reminding himself of his current state. To me it works as a great motivator. I have a small card in my wallet which reminds me of this. Before every important meeting, or when things don’t go my way, I read it. I call it my personal happiness statement. And whenever I read it, no matter what the situation is, it gives me that extra special boost to the task on hand. It’s when you take personal responsibility for the state that you are in is when you will start working harder and with even more zeal to achieve your business goals. Taking personal responsibility means accepting the fact that if you fail it is because of you and not because of others. And when you truly understand and start living this philosophy, you will always see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Finally, one should remember that success is never full, no matter how many years of entrepreneurial toil. For if you have perceived that you have enough of success, then you did not succeed in the first place. Accept your fears and transform them into fuels for your own personal entrepreneurial journey.

[To discuss such issues and more, do join for the Fail Summit on September 29th]

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