#52booksin2018: Reading amidst failures, survival and hope

I've been running a campaign with #52BooksInAYear and 2018 was its third edition. The idea was simple:

1. To try to read a book every week. Hence, 52 books
2. When you're done, click a picture of it with a note on what it meant to you
3. Upload the note with the hashtag (because social media is cool)

What's been particularly beautiful about this campaign is that it's brought a lot of people together. Many followers have showered me with appreciation and some of them have even started with their own campaigns, which is beautiful. I got inspired to do this because of Bill Gates and for quite some time, I read, albeit privately. But then I thought why not turn it into a campaign? Glad to have learnt that from Thinking Fast and Slow! (I proudly make such premium book references now).

Before coming to books, I'd share what a year 2018 has been for me and The Testament. It began with a very hopeful launch of our third product called Cread (which apparently, only my cofounder and I could pronounce correctly). We had invested a sizable chunk of our profits (over 25 Lakhs) in two products before this and they had failed. The situation was tense and team's morale was very, very low. This was our shot! I was trying to plough our core business' earnings into it, just as I had done for our last two moon-shots. The only difference was that the stakes were way too high. Even though our strategy seemed solid and initial results were great, who could control time? The Testament - our baby which grew from zero to multi crore revenues right out of college - was struggling, and it was not clear till when our cash cow could support the Moon-shot. Cread really needed to pick up. It was basically life and death.

Unfortunately, Cread didn't pick up. I failed to raise money from investors and our core business simply couldn't afford it anymore. 40 lakhs of our hard earned profits were smoke and so were all the ambitions that come with them. All of a sudden, my co-founder and I were seeing ourselves giving farewell parties to our team members every week, and the cakes didn't taste good anymore. Things were terrible and we were almost dead by September. From a hot company by young entrepreneurs, we were an army of wounded soldiers who had lost three critical battles and a lot of men. Also, none of us looked like John Travolta. Who'd marry us? We were devastated and had no clue of what tomorrow has in store. Depression was killing me everyday.

Avneesh: This isn't good, bhai. Any gyaan from all the books you read?

Me: Jiski hoti nahi hai kabhi haar, vo hai pyaar.

Thankfully, our sense of humour was still alive.

While all this was going on, one of the ideas that had us excited on the sideways won some seed fund from the government. Also, our core business got a massive project from an oil major which could keep us afloat. This wasn't Snapdeal level comeback, but could we complain? Probably not. The truth is nobody wants to go through such an excruciating phase, but it's important to appreciate that coming out alive isn't a bad outcome. In fact, failures make the story interesting, right? They do. That's what we told ourselves.

I obviously couldn't read 52 books in 2018 while all this was going on, only 32. Was honestly tempted to reach the target with 20 comics, but what the hell! Here are the top three which really helped me sail through the magma which was 2018:

• Principles

In this book, Ray Dalio (founder of the most successful Hedge Fund of all time) shares his 'Principled' way of thinking. Principles is divided into three sections - his life story (my favourite), Life Principles and Work Principles. And all of them prove one thing - Learning machines are winning machines. Normally, every book can be crystallised in a line or two, so people can decide if it's worth going for or not. This one is hard to pin down like that. I'll say it's an instruction manual written by a person who proves that sustained success isn't a coincidence, and it's not that simple. After reading this, I can imagine (to some extent), how leaders of that level function, and why I'm not there yet. There's so much to learn!

• Art of thinking clearly

I read Deepinder Goyal's blog where he outlined his journey till reaching $80 Million in revenues this year. In the article, he also mentioned a few books which I found very interesting. He called this one "the sum of all psychology books". I took the recommendation and am glad to have followed through! Though it could be better referred to as "the juice of a lot of psychology books", the point is that it's a terrific piece explaining the practical implications of difficult books like Thinking Fast and Slow, Strangers to Ourselves, Fooled by Randomness, etc. The beauty is its simplicity. Concepts read like Grandmother's tales and really sink in. It's a real nugget of wisdom, for sure.

• Go Kiss the World

I think Subroto Bagchi is amongst the finest writers in this space. He really knows how to inspire without being preachy, and share wisdom without being cocky. His writing is great, stories beautiful and lessons very, very heart-warming. Despite having read two books from him, I didn't find this one repetitive or stretched. It was fresh, powerful, educative and emotional; just like High Performance Entrepreneur and Elephant Catchers. They say everyone and anyone is gifted with one great story to write as a book; to be able to write more, you need to be a writer. Mr. Bagchi surely is. Though his journey of starting as a government clerk to building a Billion Dollar company is filled with great anecdotes, I especially loved "Maybe it's time to stop being the sapling who chooses to fight the rock."

Special mentions to Platform Revolution, Venture Deals, The AirBnB Story, Skin in the Game, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, No Shortcuts and Blitzscaling. They were all great books!

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Wish you a happy 2019. :)