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Entrepreneurship has to be a love affair || Session at IIM-Ahmedabad (2020)
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5 years ago
Entrepreneurship
Love Affair
Inner Growth
Ambition
Profit
Value Creation
Quality of Life
Competition
Description

Acharya Prashant explains that there are two kinds of entrepreneurship. The first is merely an extension of what one has been all their life. He notes that most people in the audience have been competitive their whole lives, chasing numbers like percentages, CGPA, percentiles, and CTC. This kind of entrepreneurship is a continuation of that, where one starts a company in a hot sector, seeks funding, and then sells it off to add more zeros to their personal bank balance. He describes this as a run-of-the-mill approach that brings no real change to who you are, calling it just another song sung in one's own primitive way, with nothing fresh or melodious about it. The second kind of entrepreneurship is an expression of the best within you, a seeking and longing for the best. This is not an act of ambition but rather a love affair. With this approach, you will not quit if the venture fails to turn a profit quickly, nor will you be eager to leverage equity for rapid growth. The cause is so worthwhile that you want to live with it and will not want to sell it off. The growth of such a venture will mirror your inner growth. This is the profit beyond profits. Ultimately, we are living beings, and it is the quality of life that matters, which is the reason for all our endeavors, including being at a prestigious institution. The choice between these two paths is yours. The second kind of entrepreneurship may not yield as much material or financial benefit, but it serves a higher purpose. For him, the choice is obvious. His work is something that needed to be done, and he had no choice in the matter. When you see something as compelling and urgent as the current state of the world, and you see the beauty in ridding yourself and others of self-imposed bondages, the compulsion and the beauty combine to make you choiceless. He concludes that there was no way he would not have done what he has done, and that to each his own.