Why Failure Is A Comma, Not a Full-Stop

The possibility of failure must never faze you. The sun will rise in the morning whether your idea pans out or not. What I do have a problem with is putting a time limit on going out on your own. It’s a journey, not an ‘outing’. You can’t make a deal with yourself or your family by saying, ‘I am going to try this out for two years and see.’ That mindset is a complete recipe for failure.

Nor does age have much bearing on the success or failure of most entrepreneurial endeavours. People often ask me, ‘What’s the right age to begin thinking about entrepreneurship?’ My initial response is, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t thinking about building something of value. Don’t worry about age so long as you go into any endeavour with your eyes open, a reasonable plan, your bullshit detector fine-tuned and your work ethic operating at peak capacity.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the older you get, the lower your ability to take risks and, in many cases, the more adamantly your family, spouse or kids will question your career choices. Logically, this might make sense. You’ve got more fixed overheads. You’re likely looking after more people than when you were single. But that’s not a big deal, because those negatives are offset by the life experience you’ve picked up along the way and the shortened learning curve for someone who knows a lot more about how the world works.

Bottom line: The right familial situation or age to jump is when you feel confident, driven and ready to jump. Most impediments to entrepreneurship are put in place by people who don’t have the imagination to dream. Go into every fight certain you’re going to win. As General George Patton once said, ‘No dumb bastard won a war by dying for his country. He won by making the other dumb bastard die for his.’

The fact is, after a relatively brief period, you’ll know whether or not you’re cut out to be an entrepreneur. If you’re chugging like a freight train in a positive direction, no one will tell you to stop because your family doesn’t approve or you’ve aged out of the market. You’ll have no choice but to keep working to reach your goals.

When learning to swim at the Cricket Club of India (CCI) pool at the age of eight, I struggled to learn from the coach. One day, out of the blue, my dad picked me up and heaved me into the deep end. No floats, nothing. I went down and came up…down and up, again. Beat the water. And after a few seconds that felt like forever, I managed to surface and stay there, much to my father’s delight.

Problem solved. From then on, I swam.

Three days of pussyfooting around the pool, when all it took was half-a-minute of intense concentration and maybe a little fear, followed by the realization that nothing bad was going to happen! In retrospect, I remember two things about that day: (1) if you’re half smart, you’ll figure out how to survive; (2) far from being mean or neglectful, my dad, who was fully clothed when he grabbed me and dunked me, exhibited the greatest confidence in my ability. He somehow knew that, while I might swallow some water and sputter, in the end I would be fine.

I recall a similar incident with my own daughter, Trishya, many years later. Two-and-a-half at the time, she walked straight into the pool on her own with no idea that something bad might happen. She disappeared into the water just as I put down the book I was reading on a deck chair. Panicking, I jumped in fully clothed, grabbed Trishya and gently placed her, petrified and shaking, at the edge of the pool.

An hour later, I took her back to the pool to underplay her bad experience. My concern, of course, was that she would fear water for the rest of her life. Instead, she became an ace swimmer, top of her class and school, a certified scuba diver and more comfortable in water than anyone I’ve ever seen.

Because of her young age, I don’t think Trishya completely remembers the trauma. But a lifelong fear of the water—or a powerful fear of anything, like failure—can change your attitude towards a lot of life’s experiences.

Trishya and I laugh about the incident now. She thinks I overreacted. I tell her that’s what parents do. I’m not quite sure if I meant the saving, the overreacting, or both.

[In Dream with your Eyes Open (the upcoming story of my entrepreneurial journey), I've written a lot about failure - my own setbacks and failures, the fact that so many have such a deep sense fear of failure and that most do not really open up and talk about it. Sharing one such [yet-unpublished] extract among many...
To pre-order your copy, head to https://www.dreamwithyoureyesopen.org/buy-book/]