Do constraints imply super performance or excellence?

I am lucky. Chances are high that you are lucky as well. Well, in what sense you might ask? Well, in every sense.

I presume good family, decent childhood, good schools, parents who provided well for you, middle to middle-upper class background is what normal working executives and entrepreneurs come from most of the time; partially correct.

Constraints is a negative word which can bring about the desire, grit and over performance that ordinary people only wish that they can achieve. Constraint is something that spurs innovation. In India we have a ‘Jugaad’ innovation for a lot of things like getting water out of wells, plugging the fields, charging the mobiles, scaring locusts etc.

I want to talk about a few super entrepreneurs and really loveable people who I felt were on a completely different plane or planet. I have this friend who I have known for 4-5 years, introduced by a close personal friend. He is a very sweet, humble, generous and deeply religious human being. In addition, he runs a company that is probably valued at over $200mn. And I firmly believe that what keeps him going and makes him strive to do things and push harder because he came from nothing, almost poverty. He had to start helping out by earning a living as a young boy to supplement his father’s income. He has seen immense hunger; suffering and pain which makes him never want to go back. This also makes him to pull people below him up and improve their circumstances. People like him are genuine and hard to come by and people like him will change my country.

“Can you be my CEO and partner?” This is what I thought I heard this older gentleman tell me. I said “sumimasen, mo ichido onegaisamu.” So I asked him to repeat himself. This 62 year old Japanese entrepreneur wanted me to become his partner and set up a company in Singapore. And he had just met me once before in his life. I knew he was quite successful and had in-fact built a $100Mn business over 36 months. I realised later that he had put together a core set of great people and some of them worked under him in a top electronics brand in Japan. He left that company. (It was the only company he had ever worked at) because he was not selected as the Chairman of the board and CEO. So his natural choice was to leave and set up his own business. I thought of Colonel Sanders and KFC, when I first heard this story :) But was not all that rosy. He was a little boy in the aftermath of the war where Japan was at the receiving end. There was nothing, he told me. His entire family went hungry for days. He went scourging for food. That hunger that started 45 years back, took him to almost the very top of a globally respected Japanese consumer electronics brand. And then, onto his own company.

I have a friend from school. He was and is very tough. I haven’t met him in a long, long time but once upon a time, we were very close. I always think back to the times when he was lost in thoughts and sometimes very switched off. He often would get serious in a lot of friendly banter and other context during school or in the play yard. I never realised the fights he was fighting on the inside till much later. I never empathised and couldn’t relate to the trauma he had gone through as a child. It made him want to aspire for more, work extremely hard, ever since leaving school. I don’t think he had too much of a life apart from work and limited interaction with family and some smattering of friends. He is a partner in a larger firm today. I think he deserves it and more.

We all live with or are born with constraints. I was recently reading a few articles about my classmate and friend Laura’s book called Edge. She is a top professor at Harvard Business School and has done quite a lot of research on adversity and how people deal with adversity. There is an edge, not a chip on their shoulders. These extraordinary people define it as an unfaltering quest to accomplish and strive in order to achieve excellence in whatever field they chose.

My advice to VC’s, Investors, Founders and the ilk - If you find people like who I have detailed above, don’t let them go.