What's the hardest thing to do in life?

Moving on, that’s the hardest thing to do in life. And no ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t just have to do with moving on with from your exes. There’s much more.

Back in college, I was very passionate about theaters. Post college hours, I would invest all my time and energy in building that character that I had to play on stage, in getting that line, that emotion right. So much so that the character would become a part of me, and that would reflect on stage too. But once I was done performing the play and had received my share of appreciation/criticism, the hardest thing for me was to move on to the next play, the next character I had to portray on stage. The hardest thing for me was to kill that part of me that I’d worked on, built over weeks, months and move on to the next one.

And gradually over time, I realized that this was something that each one of us felt was terribly hard for each one of us to do. Moving on from the school/college friends who gave us the best time of our lives to our workplaces, moving on from the jobs that you worked so hard to get into because you don’t like it anymore, moving on from being complacent about that successful venture you built, that song you wrote, that act you did that everyone is talking about to the next one, from that failure has bogged you down and broken you into pieces to the next face of your life and of course, moving on from your exes. You know the last one pretty well, I’m sure.

And I use this lesson that I’d learnt from my experience in theaters, that like every good or bad act comes to an end, every high or low in life does too. And no matter how much our heart wants to stay with the part of us that we are presently, it is important for us to move on.

That one common thing between almost all great companies

Funny how about 5 years back in school, I would press the '7' button on my keypad four times to reach the letter 's' in my phone, and how life has changed now. Amazing how I'm not a stranger now in a stranger city through Google maps, how I book a cab, recharge my phone, buy my grocery and what not by a click of a button through technology.

But there's one thing that I've observed about all successful companies around me - time, they help you buy time. In countries outside India, where people work on hourly wages, people know how expensive their time is and hence know what the worth of their time is. And people in India are slowly beginning to realise this too; and that's what the investors flooding their money on startups are waiting for, for us to realise how expensive our time is.

Two learnings -

1. Understand/Realise that your time is expensive. Work, invest in, taught to, laugh with people who are worth your time.

2. If you're a company, or a startup building a product, ask yourself if your product/company is helping your users buy their time. If the answer is yes or so you believe, you're heading the right path.