I read this statement by Rahul Dravid in an article and loved it. It’s similar to this post I wrote a while earlier.

“When I’m requested to speak to youngsters I like talking about this phase of my life and liken it to fascinating plant: The Chinese Bamboo. You can take a Chinese bamboo seed and plant it in the ground, water and nurture the seed for an entire year & not even see a single sprout. Infact, you’ll not see a sprout for 5 years. But suddenly, a tiny shoot will spring from the ground. And over the next 6 weeks, the plant can grow as tall as 90 feet. It can grow as fast as 39 inches every 24 hours. You can literally watch the plant grow.

What was the plant doing during these 5 years, seemingly dormant period, it was growing its roots. For 5 full years it was preparing itself for rapid, full growth. Without this root structure, the plant simply couldn’t support itself for its future growth. Some would say the plant grew 90 feet in 6 weeks, I would say it grew 90 feet in 5 years & 6 weeks”

After I quit my job in 2011 (March), I had little idea about what to do next. I thought I will experiment a bit and see whats in store for me.

I knew I was done with working for someone and wanted to see if I had any capability in building a business – any business, size or industry didn’t matter much.

Things were hazy. I had several half-baked ideas. Tapprs is one that worked out okay.

Tapprs:

Tapprs was never really my primary idea – since it is capital intensive, I kept resisting it. But all my other ideas failed to gain traction and I kept getting deeper into Tapprs and it started doing significant revenues. Natural course took over, esp after some inspiration by Lensrentals.com CEO Roger Cicala.

At Tapprs, things weren’t based on rocket-science. We simply paid attention to:

1. taking care of customer well
2. being fair and honest with employees and other stake holders
3. putting business interests ahead of personal interest
4. not taking short-cuts
5. being fanatic about processes, systems, inventory & money management

That shows on the dashboard below, at least a bit.

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I was reviewing the articles from last 3 years of my blog – those focused on entrepreneurship.

Here’s a quick summary.

Note: If you’re new here, I quit from my job after 8 years in the IT industry on Mar 11, 2011. After wandering a bit, I started Tapprs ventures India private limited – a profitable small company now based in Bangalore.

Quitting from job

This is what I wrote when I put my papers on Jan 4, 2011. In it, I talk about:

• the need to give a shot at my own venture
• how I was clueless about what idea to pursue, what to do, etc
• why I still wanted to do it

Also, I spoke about 2 things I wanted to avoid:

1. capital intensive ideas
2. long gestation period ideas

Interestingly, I ended up doing a capital intensive idea (Tapprs). My strong aversion towards loss and risk might have contributed to my thinking of wanting to avoid long gestation ideas.

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“You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”
― Warren Buffett

I’ve been thinking a bit of late.

There are times when I could have done a much better job of something. I had the ideas, I had the skills. Yet, I didn’t.

I sometimes do things that are pretty mediocre – that is one big reason what pulls my results down, I think.

I wondered why.

One answer is – our brain is automatically incentivised to choose the ‘easy’ and ‘now’.

We could do something in 2 hours or we could do a quickie fix in 10 minutes. Many a time, we just settle for the latter – and justify it with umpteen reasons – no time, will do a revision soon, whatever.

And many a time, we are too ‘impatient’ to wait for things to be rolled out – we are too focused on the ‘now’. Could we afford to wait for a day or two and do a better job? We could – but we go ahead and do a quickie fix in 20 minutes because it is ‘now’.

The program you wrote has a bug and you need to fix it – how do you do it? You patch it up instead of taking the longer route of ensuring the code is clean, well thought out and reusable. Of course, you fixed it – for now. Easy.

But in the long term, that is what puts you along with those 6.99 billion mediocre people out there.

Want to be better than just mediocre?

Get rid of the easy and now.

I want to – hopefully wil get there one day!

I grew up in Ooty on a tiny farm.

My dad wasn’t a full time farmer (he was a teacher), but we did have a farm running all the while. It was too small to make us any money, yet my father enjoyed working on it.

One of the things I learned from the farm was this. First you prepare, then you sow and only then shall you reap.

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