Gauravonomics Diary

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I have a tendency to try to do ten things at the same time, when most others would only attempt three. This means I fail as often as I succeed.

While it may seem from my bio that I have never really failed, the reality is that I have failed far too many times to remember.

The first two decades of my life were littered with failures so serious that my father told me that he was scared that he’ll have to provide for me for life and my girlfriend asked me how I’ll provide for her if we were married (another girlfriend asked me the same question less than two years back).

At my IIM Bangalore interview, I forgot where I was and talked for a full five minutes about why IIM Kolkata was the perfect business school to study marketing.

At Tata Motors, I think my boss was the only person who really liked me. Everyone else only tolerated me because I put in long hours, negotiated ruthlessly, and got things done.

Some of the cool digital marketing initiatives I led at Tata Motors on Indica V2 Xeta and Indica Vista (also see) almost didn’t happen, at least on the first attempt.

The first startup I attempted — a city-centric citizen journalism community called DesiBlogging (imagined as a hybrid of MetroBlogging and Instablogs) — existed for three months and had exactly three users.

The first time I decided to put in my papers and become an entrepreneur, my business plan for an Indian social media agency — Buzznomics — fell apart at the last moment because the rest of the team backed out.

Before I left Mumbai, I made plans to collaborate with two friends on their two different (super-cool) startups as part of my research but realized that I couldn’t find a large enough overlap between my research and their startups.

Many times, I have started podcasts, vidcasts and blog series and left them midway because the rest of my life caught up with me.

I have 280 starred unanswered e-mails in my mailbox, I haven’t really written anything for ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’ in the last three months, I haven’t yet put together the reading material for the course I am teaching in two months, I don’t yet have a team or a line of code for MobiChange, and I haven’t ticked off a single item from my 30 by 30 list.

The list of my failures is long and I am too self-conscious to talk about some of my most shameful personal and professional failures.

The interesting thing is that, after each failure, I have smiled at the mirror privately or laughed at myself publicly, admitted that I failed and moved on to new iterations, or to new projects. The interesting thing is that something good has come out of each of these failures.

IIMB not only accepted me but also put me in the list of top twenty entrants. DesiBlogging inspired my chapter in the first Age of Conversation book. Buzznomics inspired my chapter in the second Age of Conversation book. All my failed collaborations resulted in references for the Yahoo! Fellowship. Tata Motors not only gave me five big roles in five years but also a year-long sabbatical for my fellowship.

Going by this track record, I’m hopeful that all the projects I’m working on at present will also turn out fine, even if they fail.

So, even when I didn’t really know it, my two mantras have always been “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” and “Fail Early, Fail Often”.

Here’s a video of Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address where he quoted the farewell message in the last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog and asks the students to “stay hungry, stay foolish” —

Also see Rashmi Bansal’s new book Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish that tells the “inspiring stories of 25 IIM Ahmedabad graduates who chose to tread a path of their own making”.

Finally, do check out Ashish Sinha’s post on TriedPool (as against DeadPool) and attend Kiruba Shanker’s FailCamp unconference “where people get-together to share and learn from failures”.