The thud of falling food awoke the beggar kid. He thought the policeman had come but was surprised to see food lying in front of him. He hadn’t eaten for 2 days. He went for it like an animal.

Walking away was a young school kid. He was not happy with what his mother had packed.

He froze as the slap hit him. Mummy was shouting but he couldn’t hear a word. The tears in his eyes blurred her angry face. He didn’t know what he did wrong.
But he knows he will never be seen with a dying animal injured in an accident. Or a person. Never again.

What is this? Why is this post so short? To know the answers click here

Recently I was introduced to a new category of writing by one of my colleagues called 55 Fiction. Complete detail about the concept can be found here but in one line it means to come up with a fiction story in less than 55 words. As I mentioned in my last post that one of the reasons I write is to make myself a better story-teller and be able to communicate my thoughts in the best possible way. I think 55 Fiction could be a very effective tool in helping me achieve those goals. The need to convey the full story contained by the word limit would actually push my thinking limits beyond the threshold to come up with new ways to convey my message. To be able to convey the complete message in fewer words is an extremely impressive and powerful trait that is exhibited by leaders of the world and I think it would be a great exercise to try and see how well I do.

They say “Speech is Silver, Silence is gold”. I would like to add brevity is platinum.

I like to write. I like writing so much that I do not let any chance go. I write here on my blog, I write on my company blog as well as on blogs of our product sites. Many people will tell you many different reasons why you should blog and how it will help you in your life goals but I think it is much more than that. Writing provides me with so many avenues of improvement in my personal life that slowly it has turned into a necessity for me. Like always I have tried, using points, to summarize how writing helps me and can help you too. At this point let me make it clear this is not a “benefits of writing post” because the benefits of writing are too many to be listed in one post. This is a post where I share how writing helps me specifically and if you can relate to me, how it can help you too.

1. Channel to let out emotions – I am not a very expressive person by nature and I do not like to share my feeling with anyone. Writing provides me with a great channel which I can use to let out those emotions and reset my mind. It is very important for an entrepreneur like me to have a fresh start every day and pent-up emotions can be a major roadblock in doing that. This works for me and helps me take any kind of load off my chest.
2. This is the closest I get to feel like an artist – I greatly admire all kinds of artists. The ability to channel any kind of emotion or life experiences into inspiration and then turning it into a piece of art simple fills me with awe. Whenever I write something I feel the accomplishment of creating something out of nothing but an idea. It is a wonderful feeling and gives me a lot of positive reinforcement. It would have been awesome if I could be Chopin or Poe but I am content with the fact that I can and get to write.
3. Makes me a better story-teller – I never publish the first draft of a post. As a practice I (try to) make sure that I always go back and read what I have just written and try to find areas that need to be changed. Keeping the typos and grammatical errors apart many times there is a need to change a word or a sentence because I feel that it is either not sending the message in the right way or I can come up with a better way. This activity helps me a lot in my everyday life. I find it important to be as engaging in real life as I try to be in my writing. If a message has to be conveyed, I would want to convey it in the best possible way and this habit of constant correction helps me in this.
4. I get to share my experience – I am the kind of person who is more than happy to learn from the mistakes made by other people. I really appreciate it when someone shares their experience with me which can help me in my future endeavors. I know no two problems of two people are the same but there are similarities and it would be a good thing to be prepared or at least be aware of the problem in hand. Life teaches you something every day and if you think the lesson that you learnt today could be helpful to someone, please share. That’s what I do.
5. Stimulates my brain – I love my job. I love to be in a startup and I love every second of it. That being said, there are times when I wish to switch that of my brain and do something else. Not because I want a break but because I do not want my brain to follow the same train of thoughts. Writing provides me with an avenue to refresh my mind. Whatever time I spend in writing, at that time I am thinking about many things different from what I have to work on every day. It helps to write about various themes and topics as it makes you think in different ways each time.
6. I get to interact with others – Writing, just like any other form of communication, invokes interaction from the readers. And this interaction is very different from the kind of interaction you would get if you communicated the same message by any other medium, say verbally. I consider the feedback that I get for my writing to be extremely valuable and I try to learn from it as much as possible. At times I do get trolled or face extreme criticism as well, but one needs to know how to deal with that as well.
   Apart from these 6 reasons there are many more benefits of writing like improved communication skills, marketing benefits and personal branding but these 6 are the key reasons to why I love writing and why I will continue to do so. I know I not a great writer but one thing I know for sure is that I am getting there one post at a time. You should start writing too if you already don’t. Its awesome!

It is in the primal human nature to develop attachments. We get attached with people we live with and with things that we own. The closer the relationship is, the stronger is the attachment.  But the things we are most strongly attached to are the ones that we create. Parents are most attached to their children, artists are strongly attached to their creations and coders are attached with their code. But sometimes we are so overly attached that it starts doing us harm. We close our eyes towards the negatives in our creations and blindly defend them no matter what the truth is. We are not open to criticism and that could be dangerous. Although this is true for almost all aspects of life since “Entrepreneur” is the language that I speak best so I will take its example only.

An idea is born in your mind. You play around with it for some time in your mind and things start making sense to you. You get in the flow of things and this idea starts to seem like a good idea. By this point you have started falling in love with your idea. You are confident that it would work (sell) and anyone who says otherwise is a naysayer. This is where things could start to take the negative turn. You become so attached with your idea that you are not willing to take any kind of criticism. Positive or Negative. You forget that it is important to validate your idea before going any further.  An idea which has not been validated is like a ticking time bomb with no display. It can blow up in your face while you were hoping that it would never go off.

Hi Akhil,
I hope know you are doing awesome. You must be happily married with the love of your life and maybe have a kid or two. Work must be good too. Being an entrepreneur suits you after all!! Now enough with niceties and let me come straight to the point. The reason I am writing this letter to you is to make sure that you have acquired / retained some good qualities that I wish to have when I turn 35. If everything went well then I am sure I you will have a positive answer to all the points. But if not, I am sure you must have your reasons. Still it’s never too late to realize and work for your goals.

• Keep Learning – I evaluate the success / worth of a day based on the sole factor – Did I learn anything new today? Or to rephrase it – Have I added any value to myself by doing whatever I did to spend the day. If the answer is yes, I feel worthy of a good nights sleep otherwise not. I have been doing it for quite some time and am pretty happy with this idea. I just want you to have retained this habit. It does not have to be ground breaking or cutting edge, just make sure every day you acquire some new knowledge.
• *Try to find stability *– I am sure you are doing well financially as well as with your family. What I am talking about is my habit of constantly running after new things. This might be stemming from the point mentioned above. I like to learn anything new that is available and the moment something new comes up that becomes the center of my attraction. I am sure that you have let this fickleness of your mind go and have learned to train your head to not be distracted by new shiny things until you have mastered whatever is in your hand.
• Don’t let success get to your head - I love what I do and take a lot of pride in doing that. Unless something extremely bad happens I will be successful in my endeavors. I just don’t want this success to get to my head. I want to stay the polite and friendly person I am. So if you have become successful and that success has changed you please try to get back to being the good person that you were 9 years ago. If you are not successful yet, just hang on. It will come to you.
• Wear a suit, don’t be one – I am working really hard to get to a position where I get to wear a suit to work every day. I would assume that has happened with you and you have a great collection of suits. Just don’t be a suit. Remember how you reached there, your humble beginning and stay down to earth.
• Keep enjoying smaller things in life – This is absolutely important for me. I love the small things in life. I love driving miles to eat a specific dish. I like to get tea at a roadside tea stall and have late night chats with friends and family. These are the things that bring happiness in my otherwise hectic life. Never let them go.
• Give back to the world – The world does not become a better place until you give back to it. And by that I don’t mean a donation to some random charity about which you know nothing just for the heck of doing it. As of date I have adopted and am responsible for the education of two underprivileged kids. I am sure you can afford to do the same for 20. Still even if you are doing it for only 5, I will be happy as long as it is done properly.
• Keep Writing – I love to write. It makes me happy to pen down my experiences even if I don’t share it with many people. I am sure you have experienced a lot of things in the past 9 years and the people around you could greatly benefit from your experience. I know you must be busy but still try to find some time to write, if you already aren’t.
  These are more or less the ideas/aims I wanted to share with you. I will try to make sure that I stay on the correct path and achieve/retain all the qualities I just mentioned. In case I miss one or two, I trust you that you will start working towards acquiring them as well
  Best of luck
• 26 yrs old Akhil*

The first few days of a startup are really testing. You have just launched your startup and are eagerly waiting for the first few clients and are willing to bend over backwards to acquire and service them. It is especially common in the service industry for young startups to either yield to excessive bargaining or underquote their price extremely low just to acquire the client. It is understandable too as you are desperate to make a mark and you don’t want to let any chance go. So you quote the price you think the client will pay and not the actual cost. Well, DON’T. It is a big mistake for young startups and here is why

• *Diminishes your value/the value of your service *- if you finally close a deal at 50% the cost that you had initially quoted, you/your service lose value in the eyes of the client. No client would simply assume that you are working on zero margins or doing this just to get the budget. But they will be happy to assume that you had over quoted by a margin of 100%, were trying to rip them off and that they were able to get an awesome discount. This would mean that you would never be able to work with this client at the right price ever again.
• You lose money/confidence - trust me on this that an undervalued project is always going to be a loss making one for you. The moment you realize that your project is not going to yield anything your motivation to give your 100% will go. Simply saying, we are driven by incentives, take away the incentive and with it goes the motivation. Being confident about ourself is the biggest asset of us entrepreneurs and of we lose that we put a lot at stake.
• Any reference/repeat business would come at undervalued price - any increase in subsequent costing would be perceived as markup and no client would be happy to oblige.
• Adds more steps to getting profitable - once you have delivered a project at a low cost than it actually incurred you would take some time to slowly increase your billing to the right price and then only you can go any further. This is the time where you lose profit. Lost time, lost money.
• Support will drain you - support is proportional to the size of the project and not the cost. And you will have to provide support if you don’t want to lose face in the industry. When a client asks for support whose project was already loss making for you, you will have to do it even if you don’t want to. Maybe in the beginning you will oblige but remember with time you are going to get busier and the work of your paying clients will suffer because you are providing support to a loss making project. In this point I am simply assuming that you have also under quoted for support or worse providing support without support contract. Trust me, startups do that.
  I am the co-founder of a services firm and trust me all of these lessons come from experience. An undervalued project always ends in relationships ending with a sour note. I know we get desperate and just want to grab whatever we get. But let’s try to stay confident about ourselves and our abilities and make sure that we always get the right value of our efforts.

[caption id=”attachment_367” align=”alignleft” width=”300”] Google Search Akhil Gupta[/caption]

I am sure all of us have at one point or the other googled ourselves. Most of them are just curious as to see what they will find. I for one do it very frequently. And no i am not in love with myself. Well I am but that is not the point. The whole reason of doing this is do a reality check of where I stand in this world. Some might call it unfortunate but there are some very successful “Akhil Gupta”s in this world. Real life leader of men. Whenever I do a check it makes me realize that there is a long way to go before I make a mark on this world. Let me just point out a few Akhil Guptas that have really made their name and I consider my real competition

We all have a struggle inside us. One mans struggle varies from that of the other man but that struggle is there. Most of us consider this to be bad. That struggling is not good. Undesirable. But it is not that ways. This struggle is what takes us forward. Beyond hardships it teaches us to appreciate good times. It is the driving force being what we do, Why we do and how we do anything. Without struggling with the books no student reaches distinction. The struggle of working in a start-up is what hones an entrepreneur into a leader. Struggle is good. But the right struggle. To reach happiness find your struggle.

Keep struggling with the wrong things and you will be stuck with them forever. Learn to identify your struggle, find it, eliminate it and then find a new struggle. Or else don’t make any goals at all.

The section leading to this part has been intentionally left blank as I do not want refuse to write about the Delhi rape. A lot has been written by almost everyone. Bloggers wrote heartfelt posts about it and others filled the social media networks with their views. Some blamed the system, while others blamed the police. Many shed lights on the gaping holes in the law. A lot has been written really. Everyone has someone to blame and they write to transfer this blame. They write “it’s the society’s fault”. Some call the society orthodox while others call it insensitive. What noone writes is “we are the society”. We are the ones to be blamed. Police can not prevent rapes. Laws cannot prevent crimes. All police can do is catch the criminals and laws can get them prosecuted. It is not the governments failure. It is ours. We let such incidents happen. It is our fault that we only wait for such events to wake up. We light out candles and hold our signs and then we go back to sleep. Waiting for the next rape, the next terror attack, the next blast.
I don’t have a solution. I wish I had. I too am angry and sad. More angry than sad. I just know one thing that something needs to be done. And I will have to do it. At my level. We all will have to change ourselves, individually for a change to come. We need to stop looking up to authorities for things we can do. As a man I pledge that I will never let myself be a participant in violence towards women. Not the perpetrator not a witness. I need to make sure that even the smallest of incidents are reported and dealt with. I will never pass by a woman being harassed. I will no longer take “this is our personal issue” as an answer. I need to stop letting “police harassment” as a deterrent. I need to stop this from happening again.
We need to stop writing about it bring a change in our lives. Only we, not the police, not the govt, not the law can prevent such incidents from happening. A lot has been written really. A lot needs to be done.