THE BOON AND NECESSITY OF ENTREPRENEURIAL FAILURE – RAJESH NAIR – Director, Ernst & Young LLP

Perhaps one should look at entrepreneurship as necessary to character building and business maturity. It is also important to emotional maturity, and your decision making capability. These are some of the reasons, which I have seen from my experience of interacting with entrepreneurs for over two decades now …

Need to think deep: – We live in a world of distractions. Whether it is the zillion breaks in a normal day with social media, tweets, messages.We are driven to take a ‘shallow’ approach in many important decisions in our life. Building a venture, builds focus, encourages us to think 24/7 and follow a dream that we created. Often, the difference between an expert and a dilettante reflects a life time of intense deep work to develop competency in specific areas.

Need to build passion:– Passion is like oxygen. It can breathe more than life into our ordinary rigmarole and transform the monotony of daily life. It builds purpose, helps you look beyond the obvious trivialities of a routine, and makes work and life align to a ‘calling’! It is also very personal in the sense because you can only kindle passion within yourself. But passion is also seen as infectious. We love to see and follow with the ‘fire in the belly’, who have the gumption to stay the course.

Need to look at failures as experience – This concept has been a singular thread in accounts and stories of many a successful entrepreneur. Failures are not really setbacks, it is a result of an experiment that did not give you the necessary results. It just clarifies on what to change and modify in your next try! Building this attitude is paramount to making sense of what you are doing and gather impetus and move forward, come what may! This is also not an easy task. It will seem that at times that our will power is a finite source and we have just depleted it. But picking yourself up and moving on and, more importantly, having learnt something needs an open attitude towards the problem. We can’t stop blaming the external forces – remember, often, the best response is within your reach.

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