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‘Just the way your first kiss is important and you keep going back to it time and again, even when you become this bald and beer-bellied “businessman” who can now only fantasize about washboard abs, your first step to becoming an entrepreneur is celebration-worthy.’

As a driven teenager many years ago, I used to have a poster that showed this cute four-year-old girl trying to tie her shoe-laces, succeeding in it, and breaking into the most jubilant smile. The copy read: celebrate the small victories in life. I may not have understood the full import of this statement then, but when I see entrepreneurs so caught up in the rigor of building their businesses that they have forgotten to celebrate the baby steps they have taken to build them, I realize this simple statement is actually a telling one.

You should always celebrate the first steps you took towards becoming an entrepreneur. What was it? Was it hitting on this shark of an idea in the college canteen over cups of coffee that you couldn’t afford?

Was it writing the business plan for a business plan competition in which you participated for a lark? Or was it being dragged to a session on entrepreneurship where the passionate teacher exhorted to all present: Kill the placement officer!!

And since then, all those momentous occasions which gave you that adrenalin rush which no job can ever do?

Why aren’t you celebrating them? I’m sure you air-thumped when they happened. But why don’t you keep going back to them for sustenance? They are your little oases, when those niggling worms of self-doubt and low esteem crawl all over your being.

A young mentee of mine put it very succinctly. He said, “When it’s the end of the month and I don’t have a rupee in the bank and I have to pay salary to 10 people by tomorrow, and I’m saying to myself: ‘what were you thinking when you decided to become an entrepreneur, you addle-pated fool,’ that’s when I think of the day we got our first customer, how we pooled money that day after signing the deal to buy one Dominoes pizza and how we ate it like it was our last meal.

I still remember the taste of capsicum and olives and jalapeno. Every time I’m down, I go back to that day and I still ‘feel’ that taste on my tongue, and then I know everything is going to be alright!”

You know what? We humans may be the ‘crown of creation’ in evolutionary terms but greed does us in. Our labrador Mocha has taught us this. She loves boiled egg for breakfast. She loves chicken, too, which she gets only as a special treat once a month. Give her both in two separate bowls and she first gobbles her egg, burps and then she attacks the bowl of chicken.

If only she could speak, I’m sure she’d say “Duh! Egg is what I enjoy everyday, so first egg, then chicken!”

What do you think we humans would have done? You bet we would have discarded the egg in a jiffy saying this is every day staple, so chicken, here we come! And give us more!

Why this parable in the context of the entrepreneur? Because entrepreneurs too abandon their milestones, hanker for new ones, without stopping to savor the ones they have achieved.

I read an interesting story about a woman who grew the most amazing daffodils in all shades over five acres of a mountain slope. She lived amidst this riot of color in a dilapidated house and outside her house was a poster that read:

Answers to the questions I know you will be asking!
1. 50,000 bulbs.
2. One at a time, by one woman, two hands, two feet, one brain.
3. Began in 1958.

My dear entrepreneurs, this woman had only five acres; the world is your mountain. But like this woman, you too have two hands, two feet, one brain—use them to grow your daffodils. And this woman remembered every single milestone; that she started in 1958, that she planted 50,000 bulbs so far to create that thing of beauty.

Nothing stops you from remembering every single milestone, savoring and celebrating it, revisiting it so that you leave behind not just the daffodils but the story of how you celebrated the victory of the milestones.

NANDINI VAIDYANATHAN teaches entrepreneurship in business schools around the world and has co-founded two companies, Startups  (forstartups.blogspot.com) and CARMa (www.carmagroup.in), both of which mentor entrepreneurs.

Tags:
CARMa, Nandini Vaidyanathan, startups