Want to follow your dreams? Be prepared to fail and recalibrate multiple times!

Hello everyone. I am back after a short time travel of my entrepreneurial journey. It was a journey of following a dream, living it, seeing it collapse and bouncing back to normal.

Unlike Sir Martin Luther King Jr, I had a small dream. I did not want to change the world. All I wanted was to inspire people to become better in one single moment, here and now. I wanted to be a motivational speaker and do this with music.

With a vague dream as this, I started following and building my vision of becoming a musical motivational speaker in India. In Feb 2015, I did my first musical motivational talk at Alliance Francaise Auditorium in Delhi and the response that I got was good enough to make me believe that yes this is where my heart and soul belong.

However, life is not like a Netflix movie or series that will conclude in a few hours or a few episodes. The ups and downs are far too many. I kept doing musical motivational gigs – some paid, some referral based and most of them unpaid. In 2019 I took the courage to bid adieu to my professional work life and started chasing my dream of becoming a motivational speaker. After all, you cannot build a fulltime enterprise working only on weekends!

I started off well and in 8 months of my entrepreneurial stint did close to 50+ events. I did marketing, sales, pre-sales, creating my own scripts, practicing, rehersals, creating YouTube Videos and everything I could have done like a typical start up. The fact that we were doing things right was validated by continuous flow of enquiries and during this time i was also invited to deliver my biggest talk at Talkatora Stadium in Delhi with over 3000 people.

By Feb 2020, I had made three year plans and revenue projections and was all set to take off. That’s when the all the plans were greeted by unexpected alien called Corona Virus. COVID-19 hit the world and as global markets tanked, so was my entrepreneurial run. Forget revenue, the motivational gigs disappeared faster than stories disappear on Instagram.

Realizing how bad the situation for live events could be, I had to shelve my plans and ambition and get back to work (since that seemed most logical and I am thankful to god that my previous organization and leaders were kind enough to have me on board again!). Did I quit too soon (You know everyone who made it big demonstrated perseverance)? May be, may not be? Was it the best decision? Who knows? Did I ran out of cash-flow?

Today, as I complete six years of my dream run of being a musical motivational, I want to share a perspective on why all the good advice on the internet may not be best suited for you. Here are the reasons:

1)     Unique V/s Adaptation: Lot many of us may be following a dream or journey no one else has pursued. If that’s the case then existing benchmarks are hard to come by. Even if you are creating something that’s an adaptation, your context and journey is truly yours.

2)     Courage & Passion: People say it’s important to have courage and passion. Trust me, both are important, yet none is mandatory. Passion will trigger you in the direction of your dream, while courage will help you stay the course. However, in exceptional periods like last year, both can be recalibrated.

3)     Staying Put V/s Letting Go: While you may have burned the bridges to start your entrepreneurial journey and never wanted to hang-up - however, there is always a right time to stay invested and exit. The call again is yours and there are no right and wrong answers. When you let go, you are not a quitter; just like when you persist, you are not a success.

4)     Plans V/s Outcomes: Roadmaps, strategies and everything that you anticipated will work may not work at all. Plans V/s Outcomes rarely follow the same timeline or journey you have envisaged. What matters is your ability to bounce back, align, re-align and recalibrate every time.

This beautiful bandish (originally sung by Pandit Jasraj Ji in Raag Bhairav), Mero Allah Meherbaan – Koi Bigaad Sakat Nahi Tero, man leejo thaan – rightly summarize the spirit of my own journey….Have a dream, follow it up, take plunge, get initial success, fail massively, try again, recalibrate, try again, fail again, exit if needed or stay the course and bounce back to emerge stronger. 

Watch this short video: Mero Allah Meherbaan - An Inspirational Journey of Following Your Dreams