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What are you scared of? 

Ghosts?

Heights?

Water?

Your boss?

Your spouse?

Failing?

Being lonely?

Being in a crowd? 

How about decisions? Do decisions scare you? 

It’s ironic that we all ask for more responsibility. But rarely feel comfortable with the responsibility that comes with taking decisions. 

Eliminating the fear around taking decisions is the best gift you can give yourself. 

And you do that by taking ownership of the outcome of the decision. It’s success or failure. 

The thing you should be most scared of are people who sit on their decisions. 

And that could be you

Inadequate: lacking the quality or quantity required; insufficient for a purpose.

Incapable: unable to do or achieve (something). 

Incapable is the output. The what. 

Inadequate is the reason. The why. 

All of us are guilty of stopping at the what, whenever we fail. 

I am incapable  

I can’t do it 

I don’t have what it takes 

Only a few of us penetrate the why

Why am I incapable 

Why can’t I don’t it 

Why don’t I have have what it takes 

In my experience, surrounding yourself with circumstances and people that make you feel inadequate, will magically ensure that you don’t remain incapable over a prolonged period of time. 

But we rarely do 

Again, ask why! 

We stay in an apartment complex comprising 400 odd families 

And there is a 100sqft store that caters to our daily needs. Kapoor stores

Below the 100sqft display is storage, possibly 3-4X bigger. So it’s not that he doesn’t have merchandise. 

2 weeks back, a 1500sqft store opened. 

GM Mart

Stacked display

Air conditioned 

Scanner checkout counters 

The mega retail format in our world 

Kapoor stores was fucked. 

Or so we thought! 

And am sure Kapoor did too

Here is what he did

He realized that most parents drop their kids at the bus stop, between 6-7am. So we opened the store at 6am now 

GM Mart had operating hours – starting 8am 

Kapoor began to extend credit. Starting with fort nightly and going up to a month, based on retention and amount. 

GM Mart was not designed to give credit 

Kapoor began promoting his home delivery ferociously. Promising 15 min delivery. 

GM Mart was proud of its self help format. 

Kapoor started to give free eggs or bread on purchase of 500

GM Mart didn’t see why they should 

Place yourself in the shoes of Kapoor. And ask yourself – what would you have done? 

I love Kapoor stores. It had a choice to crib. To give up. To settle. 

And it didn’t. 

There is a little bit of Kapoor stores in all of us. 

And a lot of GM Marts around. 

Neither is destined to win. It’s a choice we make. 

A belief we hold within 

I have been in the Internet some for 8 years now. By virtue of that I have accumulated a lot of tacit knowledge. If rumors were to be believed there is even a name for this now. Experience! 

It’s an immensely gratifying experience when I can add value through my experience. When I am able to move things forward, because of a larger repository of situations behind me. 

What isn’t a bit gratifying is when I am forced to add value through my discipline and rigor. If I move things forward because I have the discipline and rigor of thinking through things – that’s not because I have more experience. That’s simply because I care. And someone else doesn’t, as much. 

Discipline and rigor aren’t an outcome of experience. 

They are a choice 

Right after a heavy dinner, the worst question to be asked is “what will you have for breakfast” 

You feel shitty right now. Why did I eat so much. You don’t want to have anything for breakfast. 

Come breakfast, you are hungry. And you gorge again. Perhaps feeling shitty again. You completely forgot how you were feeling last night. 

Humans suck at remembering the extent of their emotions they felt in the past. 

Whether happiness or pain

As a founder, the variance of emotions that hit you everyday is massive. Virtually impossible to remember all of them, let alone explain them. 

I have gained a lot by recording these emotions. Everyday, I speak to myself. A voice memo. Answering 2 questions 

What was the overwhelming emotion I felt yesterday?

Why did I feel that emotion?

And every now and then i go back to that day, just as one would to a diary. With the hope that I can still rationalize why I felt the way I did. Possibly learning how to be consistent with my emotions. 

Turning emotions into a habit is hard. 

Which is why it’s worth attempting to do it. 

Am reading a book on the science of happiness. 

It describes an academic experiment where a 4 year old is sitting in a room with 2 adults. 

One of the adult moves out of the room. The other adult places a jar of cookies, which until now was on the table, in one of the shelves. And calls back the first adult. 

An overwhelming majority of kids said that the first adult knows where the jar of cookies has been placed. 

The 4-yr old brain has still not figured that what they see is not always what the world sees. Just because they know doesn’t mean the world knows. 

Isn’t is amazing how as we grow older and apparently wiser, our brains start going back to when we were 4? 

The goal is not to make the world see what you see. And treat it for real. 

The goal is to seek the truth. Doesn’t matter who saw it. 

Yourstory covered the journey from Groupon to nearbuy. 

It chronicles our journey in the past 9 months, from

• 12 cities to 33 cities
• 3 categories to 18 categories
• 100% groupon tech to 100% nearbuy tech
• a zero member tech team to a 75 member tech team
• selling a voucher every 27 seconds to selling it every 9 seconds now
  
• multiple disconnected offices to a collaborative progressive space

The lesser emotion of Pride

For what we have built, for what we have collectively achieved, for the fact that someone independently acknowledges the same

Its a pat on the back for the intense work that has been put in

And we all should pause for a moment and feel awesome at how far we have come

The more important emotion of realism

Only we know what we have been through these last 9 months 

The long days and nights

The question of “are we moving fast enough”

The realization that we moved too fast too soon

The cash conservation steps we took

The moments of doubt, insecurity

All these are not visible in the coverage. 

They are NEVER visible in ANY coverage

Always remember the blood and sweat that has gone into “overnight” success. And never lose sight of where we have come from. Never forget your roots. 

The world will treat you as a success, only when you have questioned yourself every single day on whether you have what it takes to win

Was at the gorgeous Mohali campus this weekend. I love it there. On some levels better than Hyderabad. More so because I see a sense of belonging and ownership within the batch. Hyderabad, always my first love, acts transactional at times. And I am unable to relate to that from 10 years back. 

Startups are like that. People from 5 years back have seen a different side of nearbuy   They have been part of the grind. The recent ones feel that the organization owes them. A lot. When it never did. Never to even the ones that first joined. It just created a world where everyone knew everyone and everyone worked for a common cause. 

Startups will eventually not remain startups. The question is – what do they become? And why? 

I left the batch with 2 important messages. And a student (thanks Gaurav Gupta) was kind enough to transform the into a meme

Ruchi asked me last night – “what was the highlight of the day”. 

It got me thinking. For far longer than I expected. I finally gave her an answer. 

But the answer wasn’t the answer I wanted to give. 

Of course there was a highlight of the day. All days would have one. But was it the highlight I wanted? 

For a long time, we have been asking the wrong questions it seems 

What’s the best thing you have done

What’s the thing you are proudest of 

What’s your most cherished moment 

Which achievement did you have work the hardest for 

All these questions are trying to find what I call “local maxima”. 

It’s a statistical term – and simply put it means picking a small range in a graph and finding the highest point in the curve.

All these questions will of course have an answer. Even the most depressed guy on earth will have a “happiest” moment. The one who thinks he has few achievements will have one that he is proud of. There will be one moment in everyone’s life they will cherish. 

We are trying to find the highs in the range of their own lives. 

There is another concept in statistics

Global maxima

If you look at the curve in its entirety, what’s the highest point. 

Which moment, if created, would you love to have as your most cherished 

Which achievement, if accomplished, would you be proudest of 

What would you love to be remembered as

What would you want your highest point in life to be 

The best thing in your life so far should not be the best thing in your life ever.