2024 is coming to an end and it is time to reflect on the year, professionally and personally. These are 9 lessons for a business owner from 2024. Looking back to even 2023, I find them to be applicable as is. This, therefore, is not a one-off personal reflection but an attempt to carve out Rules for Business, that any entrepreneur can take cognizance of.

With that said, let’s get started.

1. Master Recruiting
   As an entrepreneur, you start believing you have the power to change something. Maybe you are a little mature and understand that you need a team to build something significant. You assemble a team and you get complacent. Why you ask? Entrepreneurs/Business owners as much as they love doing things independently and showing their prowess in their respective fields, they dread recruiting. So once a team is assembled, we are taken hostage by the thought of losing people and having to recruit again, the so-called dreadful task. However, unless the team is of A-players, it cannot be an A-Team and therefore cannot be any worthy Company. A tremendous amount of research has been done on the topic of getting the right people in the right seat for your business. I’d recommend reading books by Dr. Jim Collins, a Professor at Stanford Entrepreneurship. Suggest reading Beyond Entrepreneurship by Dr. Jim Collins. Long story short, recruiting is the most powerful tool in an entrepreneur’s arsenal. Don’t dread it, capitalize on it!
2. Multi-tasking is a myth
   This might rub-off the wrong way to a lot of people and rightfully so. Since, we hear so much about productivity and how some so-called “influencers” use very minute productively. And I get the allure, you are sitting there with multiple different machines on your desk, multiple screens, and you think you need them to get things done at the same time. Unfortunately, nothing is done efficiently and/or effectively. More often you’ll find yourself burdening yourself with the easy tasks because you can multi-task them. But they are also very low priority tasks and just because you can finish multiple of them simultaneously, don’t think you are being productive. Its a delusion. The big, hairy tasks that would require absolute tasks keep getting pushed to the end of the day. By that time, you neither have the energy or the desire to take them on. The goal is to get things done to accomplish something meaningful, not getting things done to look productive. In the long run, the big, hairy tasks will bite you beyond recovery. Suggest reading about Eisenhower Matrix to understand more!
3. Leading a team/business starts with leading the day with excitement
   Imagine a regular day as an entrepreneur. You wake up early for a morning team call. You meet the team and for the first minute or so everyone is exchanging greetings and asking the most useless question in terms of the response expected — how are you? And you respond to it by “Hangin in there” or “Not bad. Today will be interesting”. With the response, you also release a sigh. As a leader what do you expect is happening to each person in your team who hears such a response from you? Are they energetic? Are they excited for the meeting/work? I can guarantee no. The question how are you? is not to serve the purpose to get a response but more importantly how you say it. Imagine answering the same question with a positive response like “It’s great! So looking forward to what we have coming next” with a smile that is bubbling with excitment, not too much just bubbling. The team will start expecting good things for themselves with that kind of response. In fact even if you say something like “Not bad at all! Today’s meeting will be interesting” with the same bubbling excitment and the team will receive that energy. Okay, enough said! The problem is keeping the excitment all the time. I think one has to learn to become professional in regulating mood. One of the suggestions I’ve observed to work is waking up at the same time everyday to sustain a routine and regulate hormones. Suggest reading 12 Rules for Life by Dr. Jordan Peterson.
4. Entrepreneurship is not a grind
   Imagine yourself, a person with a 9–5 job. You quit your job to follow your ideas and the trendy word “passion”. You thought you’d enjoy it every single day. You are mature and you know that it will not be all-roses and there will be many downfalls and low times. You still are excited about it and you want to puruse entrepreneurship. You embark on your journey and suddenly everywhere on the internet you hear from the so-called influencers talking about how building a business is a grind, painful, and a sacrifice, delayed gratification, how you should be working while others are partying, etc. Here’s the thing. No one knows the future, how long you’ll live, so why go through all of that. And honestly, the answer is not something deep and philosophical. I don’t have such answers. The answer is simple, the only reason to do it is because entrepeneurship (not any particular business venture) is that one thing you enjoy more than anything else and you want to reap the supposed outcome you envision. It is not painful, not a sacrifice, not a grind, not delaying things you enjoy. No! Its simply what you enjoy most. Suggest reading Great by Choice by Dr. Jim Collins.
5. Arrogance for execution not for knowledge
   Here’s an observation about startups/businesses. Founders talk about their businsesses and ideas at its only them who thought of a thing like that. In most cases, that’s not the case. Yet somehow we all fall prey to such a thought and develop arrogance that we’ve the most knowledge about the subject, that we’re the first ones to think of it. Here’s the problem. We are blinded by the ideas we have but don’t have the guts or willpower, or the faintest interest to compete for the execution. To give you an example, and might be controversial, but every once in a while you’ll find someone mention that gravity wasn’t discovered by Newton and it was someone else in Middle-East, or China, or India. We remember Newton for gravity however. Now I’m not arguing about who gave the idea first, but it was moulded into a law and a mathematical formula by Newton, the most important aspect of anything — its application. Arrogance not for the knowledge but for the execution. Suggest reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
6. Play to your strengths, minimize the weaknesses
   We all have a natural affinity toward different things. Some are good with math, some good with design, some good with oration, some introvert, some extrovert. These are some things that pretty much go into describing our personality, strengths and weaknesses. So far so good. In the internet age, we get bombarded with content that show how people with certain talents are celebrated. So what do we do? We try to emulate those qualities in ourselves. The problem is for the most part it will feel inauthentic and exhaustive. Play to your strengths and stick to refining them to be the best. I’m an introvert and if I try to be an extrovert, I can’t keep up with it for more than a couple of weeks. Like I can’t be Andrew Tate — it’s just too much talking. By the end of it, I’m more demotivated than ever before. At the same time, it is important to minimize the weaknesses. Being an introvert is not a crown to wear. You live in a society and you need to get things done for which you need people. So go out and work on it to minimize it. I spoke to 10 strangers a day for 30 days to get used to small-talk and making sure where it matters I speak. Mind you, if you are thinking I was ever shy, no I was not. I was just not motivated to speak without cause. An introvert loses energy with public interaction, while an extrovert gains energy. Minimize the energy loss with practice. Do not focus on turning weaknesses to strengths. Play to your strengths. Suggest following content by Simon Sinek on the topic.
7. Commit to the vision, not the method
   I don’t know how many times I’ve had to do it so far. And I still continue to do so. You are an entrepreneur, you start with an idea and a business strategy. Let me make a small correction, you are a real entrepreneur and so quitting is not in your dictionary. When that’s the case, no matter which business strategy you come up with, no matter what ideas you have, no matter what products you think are useful, you’ll come to realize that it won’t work. What do you do then when you can’t quit? You pivot. The goal is build a great Company not just one product. Too many people commit their existence as an entrepreneur to one single product, but when “Mama don’t sing”, they pack their bags and go home. Fake entrepreneurs are weeded out. Remember some plans are to be measured in decades not months/years. The best of the best companies that have really stood the test of time have been companies that have existed in the 3rd or 4th generation of the Founders of the companies. Examples being Walmart, Amway, Tata, Reliance, Birla. Imagine if the freedom fighters of a country decided that after independence the country is not working like they wanted to so they should surrended back the country, it’d be a disaster. When countries don’t surrender after failures, why should an entrepreneur think they should pack up after failures. Suggest reading Built to Last by Dr. Jim Collins.
8. A successful day is when what’s necessary was done
   Bob Dylan said something to the effect of “A successful day is waking up in the morning and getting to bed at night and in between getting done whatever needs to be done”. When we have big dreams/visions, we also tend to get hasty. Sometimes the hastiness is good, sometimes its a disaster. Thinking of the big vision, one gets overwhelmed and instead of accomplishing the day gets paralyzed with the fear of all the challenges, even the ones that have not come up yet. The key it to bit one chunk at a time, and biting it hard. For most people and me, the case has always been that our complex brains process 90% noise and only 10% of actual signal during the day. The result is lower efficiency, effectiveness, and mediocre accomplishments. So how do you go about increasing the singals you process and reducing noise. Its simple, biting one chunk at a time. Nothing more is needed. Bad things will happen no matter what. Seize the day. Suggest reading The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.
9. Personal time away is important
   If you are anything like me, you feel if you are not working you are not being productive. You feel guilty for not working. Problem — no real relationships outside of work, no personal interests, no life beyond labor. We’ve somehow been rotten to the core by the so-called “influencers” that grinding all your life is the way to make life matter. My eyes opened when I saw an Indian multi-millionaire mentioned how he became rich was sleeping 8–10 hours/day, and just working on building something useful for people (he was into technology), no insane grinding and spending time working. Living life, maximum signal, minimum noise.

So there you go! A comprehensive look into business lessons for life. I’m always learning so it’s only going to add more lessons to the list. Stay tuned!