Category: entrepreneurial

At our recent town hall, I shared a mantra with the team for the year ahead: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

This phrase, I first encountered years ago, came to me while I was thinking about last year’s challenges, and how to avoid them in future.

Often, in our rush to deliver quickly, we equate speed with haste. We skip steps and prioritise urgency over precision, which creates preventable errors, rework, miscommunication, and late-night work.

“Slow is smooth” basically means being intentional and systematic in our approach. It’s the careful planning, clear communication, and focused attention to detail.

It’s doing the thing right the first time.

When our processes are smooth, when they flow without confusion or correction, then we unlock speed. Momentum builds. Quality increases. Trust grows. This is how “smooth becomes fast.”

It’s my guiding principle this year. It is about building a culture of intentional, flawless execution.

This year, at WPoets, we’re not chasing speed. We’re chasing smoothness. The speed will follow

Incremental mindset means taking an idea and improving it in small iterative steps.  Great things are build by people who keep their focus on an idea for a longer period of time then an average person, and kept improving it. It’s a believe that says, I may not know everything right now, but I will learn it along the way. To start building things and keep improving them till they become perfect.

You can read article in Stanford magazine or the Mindset book by Carol Dweck around Growth Mindset, to understand the research around incremental mindset and how to develop it, within yourself.

When you are running a startup, this believe in yourself, that you will figure things out along the way, will keep you from giving up when things become tough and everything is going against you. I have now faced such situations twice at AmiWorks, first in 2011, and then again in 2014. I continued simply because I believe in identifying and correcting mistakes and moving forward.

For me, the best examples of growth mindset comes from the life stories of Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison, they kept experimenting on their ideas till they found a way to make them reality.

picture credit : by Standford Magazine

I have no idea how and why, but every time I feel low, one of these two pieces of poetry will automatically fill my mind and keep playing in loop till my spirits are back to normal and I am ready to take on the challenges presented to me.

First one is

करत करत अभ्यास के जड़मति होत सुजान।
रसरी आवत जात ते सिल पर परत निसान॥

I had read this for the first time in 5th class Hindi text book, and every-time I think that I don’t have sufficient skills to do something, this couplet plays in my mind till I go ahead and do it.

These two simple lines forms the basis of my ‘I will figure it out‘ attitude as I go ahead and do new things.

Second,

वीर तुम बढ़े चलो
धीर तुम बढ़े चलो

सामने पहाड़ हो
सिंह की दहाड़ हो
तुम निडर,हटो नहीं
तुम निडर,डटो वहीं

वीर तुम बढ़े चलो
धीर तुम बढ़े चलो

Whenever I have felt like giving up, these eight lines takes over in loop and does not let me give up on my goals. I don’t even remember when I had first read it.

In last 6 years of my entrepreneurial journey,  their has been multiple times when I thought about giving it up, and I had to do things that I was initially ill suited to do, but I kept on going.

These two simple things are secret of my self motivation, what’s yours?

After over 10 years of being an entrepreneur and seeing highs and lows of being on my own, I have seen certain shortcoming that I had to overcome within myself. While speaking to Amit recently, It occurred to me that a LOT of entrepreneurs I have met have repeated the same words that I am writing below, but in different ways.

Here is my attempt to highlight some common issues I see with newbie entrepreneurs (I am not saying young purposefully because it isn’t anything to do with age). Hope these thoughts would help you as an entrepreneur:

a) Hiring Okayish People Because They Want To Work With You

Every entrepreneur who has a little less muscle power (financial mostly) and is a little low on confidence than usual (which is at times because of background) faces this issue. We hire people because they are willing to work with us. You sure need people who will work for you and stick with you, but that doesn’t mean that you should hire people just for that reason. If you admit, there is a slight hesitation & fear in rejecting candidates or looking a bit further before zeroing in on someone. That’s because we feel that this is the best we can get and we can’t afford / retain / deserve someone better at this stage.

I would challenge newbie entrepreneurs to be a little more rigorous in hiring people and don’t be so scared. If you hire out of desperation, you will build poor accountability within the team and you would stress out because you are putting up with poor performance.

 b) Not Valuing Your Health & Well Being

 Can’t stress enough that THIS IS A GAME. You win & you lose. Both would happen. There is so much silent pain in struggling with your business, to learn what you don’t know and re-do everything every few months. We often lose friends, stop valuing time with family and stop caring for our health and wellbeing. My request would be to stop and think what is important for you? Yes indeed it would take a lot of hard work and some sacrifices for you to make it big. But that need not be at the cost of everything you have. Make hard rules. Give dedicated time to that friend who won’t talk business to you, see what you family expects from you and do the right thing.

And of course, organise everything. Use a calendar, To-Do app, reminders and anything else that helps you keep all the chaotic thoughts and work in order. That would help you not carry your work in your head all the time. At Price Baba whenever a new comer joins, we train her / him using pre-created modules for using calendars, give them a structured and documented demo of our values & culture and even how to write effective emails. Training your team to play by the rules is as necessary is following it yourself.

c) Working With Friends & Family

 It is very hard to work with friends and family. As a team when they are working with you and even when you are doing a business dealing with them. Because you like them, they like you and you trust them, it is easy to get started with friend and family. If at all you do so, please see it as a professional relation and treat it that way. This requires a great deal of maturity on both sides and often doesn’t work. So beware.

Driver is usually the person with the agenda who keeps team together, focused on the task at hand and making sure team is going in the direction he wants.

If you want something done by your team then you need to be the driver.

In a team settings, we all know the importance being a leader, but unless leader is also the driver he will be ineffective. Just like when you plan a outing with your team and you decide to go somewhere, you will take your seat in the vehicle and wait for the driver to take you to the destination. From this point onwards the driver is in power to decide everything about the trip, till we reach the destination.

An effective leader is one who is also the driver of the team, or else have a drive dedicated to his’s vision, otherwise we will have an rubber stamp leadership in team. If driver is missing altogether from the team then it will not move in any direction and it will fail, just like the  above outing if no one is going to drive the vehicle.

Every time we speak, we’re telling stories about our lives.

These stories almost always fall into one of the following types:

1. I could not do X because of these Y problems, or
2. I did something despite these Y problems coming my way.

The first casts you as the victim of your story; the second lets you emerge as the hero.

I choose to listen to and tell the hero’s story. Which one will you choose?