Demonetisation being the buzzword of the season so I thought I’d apply it to entrepreneurship. Sounds like an oxymoron? In a capitalistic realm where entrepreneurship thrives on the profit motive, how can you remove money out of the equation? You can. Well, not entirely. But there are a number of tangible aspects of running your own business that are far removed from blindly chasing financial goals. Entrepreneurship helps bring quite a few aspects of personal enrichment into focus that, to repeat an oft-quoted cliché, “money cannot buy”. Let me take a few examples from my own experience and elaborate.

An internal map for directions

No venture is successful without having a vision or a dream. A vision is only realised however when one puts down the dream into actionable steps into a business plan: when you start answering the how of what and who by when with clarity. A similar effort perhaps involves set-ting personal goals for one’s own life: in many ways the two overlap and help define one’s life purpose and meaning. It’s not coincidental that most people turn entrepreneurs at the stage of life where the so-called mid-life crisis strikes.

Toasting to family and health

We have grown up hearing too many stories of great leaders who sacrificed everything- precious family time and their own health- to achieve greatness. This sounds so counter-intuitive. Having a great family life needs to be as much celebrated if not more. Outsourcing the kids’ upbringing to schoolteachers and nannies and relegating family time to one year-end vacation does not a healthy work-life balance make. Like one of the cliched ads that said - ‘In order to arrive, one has to leave first’, nothing helps more than to defocus, detach and refresh.

Killing the demons inside your head

The battle may be fraught with challenges but quite often it is the loss of hope and cutting short of efforts that causes failure and not so much the unavailability of resources, lack of knowledge or skill. Winning is as much about challenging one’s own limits first than it is about proving it right to the world.

In the same breath, it is also about not being too rigid or in too much love with your own idea. The whole point is to be flexible and savvy enough to see when the time has come to move on from something that’s holding you down and clearly not finding enough traction.

In the end, it is the profit motive that is required for building a viable business that generates money to pay for employees, investors and other stakeholders. But the journey becomes all the more enriching when you add a whole new dimension to it: one of living a fulfilling life, helping solve real-world problems that plague humanity or even simply just making people’s lives better marginally. All this may sound too utopian but every great journey starts with a dream and a first step, so why not dream big while you are at it! Oftentimes once a destination is reached, it is the journey that will probably be more cherished. So do stop and smell the roses on the way.

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