Time and again we have listened to several entrepreneurs tell us that social entrepreneurship is a journey; not a destination. You start with an idea, one that according to you will make a significant social impact, and then you start building a business model around this idea to make it sustainable, and generate at least a basic revenue stream. Nothing big, just enough to get you by.
Slowly you realize that your initial idea was not as impactful as you thought it would be. Either that, or you realized that people would not be willing to pay any money for it. So, you revise it and start the iterative process: will this be sustainable, will it target the market I am aiming for, will people be willing to buy my product, will I be able to generate a cash flow .... you add and you subtract, you bend forwards and backwards, you spend sleepless nights writing feasibility pitches and chalking out business plans, you practice your pitches - 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes and 5. Soon you have become a tiny part of the world of social entrepreneurs - all wanting to change the world in a small but significant way.
As I write this last blog before the end of semester, I realize how fortunate I have been, and maybe fortune had nothing to do with it, maybe it was persistence. If you keep doing new things everyday, you have less time to focus on things that did not work out, and instead you are always looking forward to the next thing that might actually work. As I started the year, I interviewed with the best consulting company - which did not work out at all as I had expected. I simultaneously received the confirmation that our team made it past the first round to go to Boston, but I was I so upset about the consulting company that I did not celebrate that success. Soon school started and I kept applying for one competition after another, one scholarship after another, knowing that SOMETHING would give. The Hult competition was such a farfetched victory that I never really gave it second thought until we won the regional finals in Boston.
Then came the Dell Social Innovation Challenge, and I was a little more upset about not getting into the semi-finals than I expected. By that time, however, I had started a process of getting over things that did not succeed much easily than ever before. Be really upset, mope around a little, and then move on. I think the biggest thing I have learned in this journey, other than the technical aspects of how to survive in the world of social entrepreneurs, is the skill to keep at it. Pick yourself up, and start again, and again ... until something just works right and your life changes forever. It will happen, and in some cases, if you put your soul into your work, it will happen sooner than you think. But don't give up. We all have some amazing ideas, and have gained a slew of skills to make the ideas work. All it needs now is our commitment. That, and the ability to fix our processes when things go wrong, instead of lamenting about our failures! I would like to end with another favorite quote:
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”
-Henry David Thoreau
No comments:
Post a Comment