Imagine a world where Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t thought of Facebook; or a world where the genius of Google was still unknown; how would you book those minutes tickets if it wasn’t for MakeMyTrip or Yatra? Can you survive a hot summer evening without a refreshing beverage and a book you got from Flipkart? Don’t we all love the quirky trinkets we see at Happily Unmarried or Chumbak? What would our lives be without innovation, invention, creativity and technology? What we do if it wasn’t for courageous young people who decided to take a leap of faith, start their own new age businesses or service companies and turned them into success stories.
It’s not easy to move beyond a culture where having a ‘real job’ is possibly the most important dream parents hold for their children. It’s not easy to move out of conventional, comfortable professions and tell people you bake cakes for a living, or run an adventure company, make documentary films, work at a delivery service or web portal. It’s even tougher to make this decision and stand by it – from running an online fashion label or being a stylist to running a digital solutions firm, from running an NGO and leading a social movement to designing cars and sometimes doing things so offbeat that you don’t understand them yourself – entrepreneurship requires more than just starting capital. It requires courage, vision, self esteem and a whole lot more. More than anything else, it requires a firm belief in yourself and what you do – only then can you change the rules; only then can you change the world.
Speak to any person involved in a startup, and they’ll tell you that things do fall apart, and you will make mistakes, but you can’t be great unless you’re brave enough to make these mistakes – and learn from them. It also requires some amount of support, but you’ve got to understand that there will be times when it will all be on your shoulders.
It’s astonishing how this generation is unafraid to take the road less traveled – with all its rocky bits and thorns – and make it work. Despite being termed materialistic, selfish and unhappy, the young today are consciously developing this need for change – they’re not afraid to walk on fire, they’re not afraid to do to materializing their ideas from a rented garage, they’re not afraid to make that firm call to say no to an easy and comfortable 9 to 5.
And it is this fearlessness which will one day change the world. Every startup is based on insane courage and passion, and as a generation, we should be incredibly proud of this endearing quality. We’re learning from every wrong step we take, we’re falling and rising, we’re giving our hopes and aspirations a chance, we’re doing our part in building a society where people are accepted for who they are, and can do whatever they like for a living– and we have every right to be proud of it.
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