Illogical decisions were the best decisions of my life

Thursday April 14, 2016 , 5 min Read

I am a logical thinker and all my life I took rational decisions. Whenever I needed to spend little money, I did a lot of research. Even when I went for vegetable shopping, I asked the cost of vegetables from all the vendors, and then bought from the one who was selling at the cheapest price. I negotiated further to bring down the price. I feel like a smartest person in whole sabji-mandi.

Two years back I took an illogical decision of leaving a well-paying job when there was a responsibility of feeding a four-month-old baby. Even my wife was not employed at that time. It sounds like a totally stupid decision to leave the job when promotion was due in a couple of months. How can any logical minded person leave the job before buying his own house and save enough for retirement?

The reason I left my job was my startup. I was trying to run a business without any prior business experience.

My startup had lot of weak points. None of the co-founders were from education industry when we were trying to sell to schools, we had no ninja developer from IIT, no growth hacker with proven record, no sales person, no venture funding, not even a single influencer contact in education industry. But we’re still building a product for schools.

Also read: 7 tough problems of a first-time entrepreneur

Sometimes I wonder if I should have waited for some more time before leaving my job, or if I should have saved some more money, bought a home, asked my wife to start working before starting my venture, or if I should have waited for few paid customers and VC funding before taking risk of becoming jobless. That would have been awesome. Don’t you think that is the ideal time to leave the job and get full time into starting up? That sounds like the safest road of the startup journey.

But I took the illogical decision and quit my job. I even put half of my savings into my startup.

I left my job when our product was under development and we had zero revenue. The only logical fix was keeping aside money for 12–18 months of household expenses. Everyone in my friends and family raised their eyebrows on my decision but my wife supported me (that’s what I needed at that time).

But life proved us wrong. It was not easy to run a startup with too many weak points. Honestly, I was not aware of those weak points at that time. I can see those things now after having two years of intense experience in startups.

Long story short, we failed at our startup and lost 15 lakh within a year. Absolutely zero returns over investment. All our family members and relatives gave us lessons that we should have listened to them.

We listened but again did not follow their advice. There was some inner voice that was saying to move forward in the direction of startups. I don’t know how to explain that voice.

The logical step at that time was to go back to a job and start earning more than before to cover up the losses. I still had money to survive for eight to 10 months. I thought of giving one more chance to my startup journey.

I was not gambling. The decision was not driven by any greed, but it was driven by hope. A hope of getting better tomorrow in terms of life experience.

Tremendous opportunities opened up for me after I took the decision to remain in startups. I got connected with most respected startup mentorship network – The Morpheus. I joined another startup as a co-founder, but that too could not take off. But the residual of failures were priceless.

With two failed startups,

I got rid of my well-paying but boring job.
Learned how to survive without regular salary.
Met with awesome entrepreneurs.
Got initiated into digital marketing (and I love it).
Discovered a writer inside me.
Got introduced with integral education.
Found a connection between business and spirituality.
Got out of money race and rat race of coming first.

I started working on content marketing with startups on freelance basis. I was able to earn sufficient money to take care of my monthly expenses, and found sufficient time to improve my skills. It is a sense of completeness. I am so grateful to the universe that gave me wisdom to take tough decisions.

Now when I look back, I can clearly see that my biggest illogical decision was the best decision of my life.

It was not the first time that I took such a stupid decision. During our campus interview season, I skipped 15 companies that I did not want to join. My fellow students were skeptic, either I lost my mind or hiding a secret job offer. Later I got job from the company where I wanted to work (dream company at that time).

Similarly, I took some illogical decisions in school and college – like opting Math and Science in English language when I was a weak in English. I dropped one year before graduation in hope of getting into best engineering college, when I was just an average student with a small chance of getting into premier institution.

The one common thing that I see in this thread is – thinking beyond my capabilities and trusting my gut feeling.

It is called intuition. Most of the times you want to take a decision but your logical mind comes up with data to reject it. Your mind says it an illogical decision, but somehow you know it is the right decision.

How many times you took an illogical decision based on your intuition? Let me know if that proved to be right or wrong.