I have fallen in love with the word “risk”.
For many people, this word carries a negative connotation. It signifies a sense of dread and apprehension. This is what we are taught from our childhood to avoid. In a regular middle-class family in India, this is one word that you learn to fear. Millions of talented young individuals take up steady, medium-paying, dreary jobs to avoid risk and have some stability in their lives. This stability becomes stagnation for those few individuals, like me, who strive to explore new horizons each day.
My life is littered with instances where I had to take terrible amounts of risk just because I have been confident with myself. Against all advices, all arguments and all warnings, I have usually chosen the past of highest resistance; the one that was least likely to succeed. These decisions, interestingly, have been the ones where I have been most successful.
The lesson I learnt from these endeavours is that you have to risk if you want to gain a healthy amount of return on your investment, and, as you keep on risking on each turn, you develop a certain appetite for risk.
Anything that has low risk appears dull. It seems to lack action and purpose.
All this sounds very energetic and positive till you realize that it is not just a blind foray into new territories. It involves careful analysis of the paths ahead of you and picking the one that you are sure to give you most returns. Your success in making such a decision depends largely on how good you have researched. The rest of it is pure logic. You need to apply the best of your reasoning skills to convince yourself why you should choose the path that you want to choose.
The result is interesting. The first person that you always sell an idea to is yourself. If you are able to convince yourself, logically and with actual data, that you believe you are going ahead on the right path, the rest of the process becomes a reiteration of whatever you have explained to yourself.
Now, these were the processes I went through to decide on investing big time in Applait. More of it is yet to come, but I love these phases of risking something regular and steady for crazy and roller-coaster like adventures.
This is just a toast to the exciting times ahead! A toast to the spirit of entrepreneurship!