A year ago when I’d penned down my first edit note for The Indian Trumpet I’d said that even if someone had told me that the journey towards launching this e-magazine for Indian expats would be tough and exhausting (also, exciting & fascinating) I would have still done exactly the same thing and with the same enthusiasm.
And as we celebrate our first birthday, I seem to be having a déjà vu moment. Yes, on July 1, 2014 we celebrated a milestone & a beginning, and writing a piece on ‘Three things I would have done differently in the years gone by’ for Life Beyond Number comes as a perfect opportunity to stop for a bit and ask myself a simple question: Is it time to look back at how far we’ve come or a time to look ahead & see how far we’d go from here? Or perhaps it is time for both.
Yes, it is time to feel grateful for both the collapses and cheers, to pat our backs and learn from mistakes, to strive harder and dream bigger & to gather love and spread smiles across the latitudes and longitudes. Now in a journey so exciting, tiresome, rewarding & challenging it is tough to single out the three things that I would have done differently simply because I wonder if I’d not fallen then I would have never known that I had the courage in me to pick myself up. So, I’d rather say that here are the three things that not just helped me grow but also taught me that growing up would be incomplete without a few bruises.
1. Share The Load
At a certain point in any entrepreneurial journey one should begin to delegate work, and looking back I feel that had I done so I would have slept better & more. I took it upon myself to answer all 1,000 mails that landed in my inbox, to edit each piece to perfection, to design every pixel of the website, to make sale & marketing pitches & more.
As a result, while I pushed myself harder I found it difficult to forgive myself if I failed to deliver & accomplish what I’d set for. I played the founder-editor-designer-writer-peon-coffee boy-advertising rep… for The Indian Trumpet, which was pretty exhausting.
My learning: Share thy load & hire smart.
2. Bring The Money
I don’t have a business background but I have a strong background in the field of journalism, and while over the years I have evolved from a journalist to an editor to a manager I feel I am still better with fonts & colours than numbers & percentages. While in a year, The Indian Trumpet made one & all fall in love with the colour, culture & chaos of India, it did have a tough time walking on the financial ground.
My learning: Put equal energies towards keeping the passion alive & bringing in the money.
3. Spread The Noise
Never shy away from talking about what you are doing & how far you have come. We gave it a miss for a long time & once we did we were flooded with letters from fellow editors of magazines of international repute, picked up by a researcher in London School of Journalism to be studied as a part of the course on online journalism, approached to share our articles with another magazine for Indian expats, and even by a publisher who wanted to buy us out!
My learning: Invest time & money in spreading the word about what you do & how well you are doing it.
Parting Advice
Before, I sign out here is to every budding Entrepreneur out there:
Don’t be afraid to make a start, and a slow one at that. For, there is something about slow starts. The magic, the frustration, the anxiety, the imperfections, the discouragements, the temptation to give in….
But the best thing about slow starts is the fact that you made a start! A beginning towards a dream, a change… It’s not about who wins the race, the tortoise or the rabbit! If we had a chance we would all make a brisk march to our goals but our race is different from his/hers/yours/theirs. Yet, don’t be afraid to give up because the one who tried is the one who can give up! Find your track and start walking, strolling, hopping, skipping…there is nothing better than standing on the start line!
To read the other awesome stories in our special anniversary series “Looking Back”, click here.
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