While running 21D, what till date is your greatest personal failure and your biggest learning from it?

We, Anuradha Ghosh and I, started 21D Solutions about one and a half years ago. Our shared interest in creating something new and useful and our penchant towards entrepreneurship, held us together. In this duration of more than 18 months, we tried myriad of things – from offering training expertise to social media content to overall digital marketing solutions, everything and anything that we were sure we would be great at doing. Everyday our conversations would evolve, sometimes even dissolve with so many ideas floating together.

So, failure and learning come as a part and parcel of this expedition.

Failure

My biggest personal failure that I am still struggling with, is my inability to say an outright ‘No’ to things I am not comfortable with. It’s not to say that I do not embrace vulnerability. I appreciate every aspect of being afraid of doing new things and still taking them on. That’s courage and that’s amazing.

But this is different. For example, if I know that it’s impossible to complete a certain task, ensuring standards and compliance, I should be able to communicate the same, but that’s specifically where I fail miserably.

My incapacity to say ‘No’ at the right moments have, at times, prolonged the duration of an unhealthy relationship with people and work.

That, I think, is my biggest failure.

But again, failures are only successes in the making. I have come to realise that any pain or suffering or struggle that is taken towards something that you don’t appreciate or love, is not worth going through. Not at all.

Learning

My biggest learning, till date, is that –

‘Consistency is far more important than perfection.’

Even if you break one stone a day, you will be able to break 30 in a month, 365 in a year, so on and so forth. But, if you break stones as per your convenience, you will never be sure of how many you will be able to break in the future, you will end up procrastinating and finally quitting.

There are so many ideas that we lose in the planning phase, in the pursuit of perfection. That time lost is our opportunity cost.

Don’t let your ideas or your work or your life compensate for your need for excellence. They deserve to be brought to light, to life.

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