Fear(lessness)of failure

We only hear the fairy tale endings of a story. No one talks about the nuances of how decisions are made, failures in the path, mindsets at play, questions asked, answers given and at-last how things really went by. Here is a journal of building Xperian from my lens as i build it ! There will be moments to cherish, moment of facepalm, moments of prioritisation and even moments of despair. The good, the bad and the ugly matters in building something precious. Here you go with one such piece !

The only thing we have to fear is the fear itself - Franklin Roosvelt

One of the biggest fears is the fear of failure. How about the other way around ?

Gotta pay bills

From a personal finance perspective it surely is a big win when you get past the tough “got to pay bills” frame. I can say that with a little more confidence as I have tasted the freedom for quite sometime now. A decade may be !

An equivalent frame from entrepreneurship perspective is “we need to stay afloat”. This time it is not just you and your family. It is a bunch of committed people, their families, their hopes, their desires and their life context. A little harder than the first one for sure.

A familiar road

The easy route to stay afloat when you have the needed skills is consulting and services. That is what we did at Oghma. For 7 long years. Very successfully actually. 

Provide skills and time in exchange for some currency. A cozy place to be for sure. However the impact is relatively little as it is proportional to the number of projects you take up in a year. Some gets launched, some gets buried, some gets dragged for years and some gets dropped on the way though you are promptly paid for it.

For a design quality stickler like me, it is one project at a time so that focus is maintained and the best can be given to the project. So this means even lesser impact because the projects get cherry picked .

Success breeds complacency too

My biggest default issue was, I did not know how to degrade the design based on the billing rate. So we had to stick to only clients who understand what it means to work with good design and not compare rates with upwork and ask for a lipstick on a piglet :)

The focus was getting sharper day by day. Our clients loved us, our work ethic, our commitment and above all our love for design. They were absolutely smart to understand that it is a steal to get an entire design team at a relatively affordable rate with no retention expenses, attrition issues and CTC changes :)

Clients who got the big picture right, had long contracts with us. Our contracts started at a minimum 2 years and ran up to 5 years. In a row we were booked. I survived a premium design agency in the streets of Madhapur against the IDEOs and Frogs of the world without a website for 5 years. Can you beat that ? Yup. May be that is what good work and work ethic does. All this was going great.

Getting past the comfort zone

But somewhere we need to drop the fear of “we need to stay afloat”. Get past that mark and do something more awesome to the design and designer world. Every designer’s dream is larger impact. More customer smiles. Pride is also a big part. Let us face it honestly.

Gearing up all the guts one fine evening we decided to go all the way in an ecosystem model. Not even a product model. I don’t want to fool myself saying by making one tool, all the tears of the design community is wiped off. If the focus is short lived yes, a tool will do. But what if you say this is what I will do till grave ? Then there is enough time and there is no hurry. The sickness of busyness and no time for anything sucks.

A rational choice of problem area

Let us anchor on the truth and start from here and now. There is capability and there is opportunity. Well not much resources are there right now but I am confident it will happen over a period of time. If not we will apply the best design brains and make it happen.

Here is a simple framework I use to determine what problems are worth solving

At the most what will happen, I will fail in this effort of Xperian. So what ?

I can always go back to consulting or services or corporate and continue with the love for design. My team would have gained more capability than any of their peers in the industry by building an organisation first hand. I am sure they will be in highest demand in the market. What am i so worried about ? They are ready to throw themselves in, i am ready to plunge in, the community of designers need this love, what are we waiting for ?

Investments, travel, networking, time, energy, family, bills to pay (if not for me, for everyone in the team), sacrifices (yup, that vacation to Europe) etc. There are 1000 reasons to say no but there is just one reason to say yes. DESIGN.

Can we make this life worth it ? Can we design our "grave" experience and work backwards ? Is two meals a day so hard ? Can my bills take away the love ? Is that so tough ? Should we worry so much about being afloat ? May be I will drown by being afloat by not addressing the longing to express the love ? I guess it is better to die, go to ashes and be a Phoenix bird than never taking a flight.

If this existence can hold all these life forms, can it not hold me ? A small piece of life in this large existence trying to express love for design. Doesn't sound so bad isn't it ? This zoom out helps me everyday to be grounded. Right after the anchor i zoom back in and get things cracking. I am not saying it is easy. All i am saying is it is possible to go past the bills and being afloat.

What are you holding back and letting time pass ?