Escaping the corporate world and becoming an entrepreneur is certainly an attractive proposition for anyone who relishes the idea of being their own boss, but before taking this plunge, it's important to acknowledge just how hard it can be to launch a successful startup.
Running your own business today is so difficult, in fact, that some have compared it to managing one of the top firms on Wall Street.
"I tell anyone who asks that being an entrepreneur is tougher than running Merrill Lynch," Sallie Krawcheck, owner of professional women's network Ellevate, wrote in a recent article posted on LinkedIn.
Krawcheck would know. In addition to having held the title of CEO of Sanford Bernstein and Smith Barney, she also ran Merrill Lynch Wealth Management for more than two years.
The first practical advice she gives to anyone even considering pursuing a career as an entrepreneur is to take a long, hard look at your finances to see whether you can afford to invest heavily in your business while earning little or no income.
"As the founder of a start-up, it’s not about how much cash you can make, but how little you can make and for how long. Firstly, that cash can help the business to be successful; and, secondly, if you are going to be successful, the value of that dollar working in the start-up is worth massively more than in your bank account. So before you make the switch, do the math and shore up the bank account."
Another consideration Krawcheck highlights involves doing some introspective research. Before jumping headfirst into entrepreneurship, she writes, it's important to question your true motivations for doing so. Is it your passion for creating something out of nothing that's driving you, or the "idealized portrait" of life as an entrepreneur?
Even if you are financially prepared to start your company, and you feel you're doing it for all the right reasons, it's safe to assume that, to some degree, you will fail. The silver lining, according to Krawcheck, is that all entrepreneurs fail at one point or another.
"It's just a matter of what you fail at and how quickly you recover," she writes. "And you will be rejected; it's just a matter of getting past the rejections."
“Naalai namathe,” she had said when arrested in 1996, ‘Tomorrow is ours.’ This time, she had no words of solace for her followers
J Jayalalithaa with MG Ramachandran in a film (Photo: KAPOOR BALDEV/SYGMA/CORBIS)
When the crisp verdict was pronounced on 27 September before a select few in a special court in Bangalore, it came as a thunderbolt that numbed her senses. It was a return of the fear of the wages of sin that had haunted her for nearly two decades, the fear that she had managed to dodge for 18 years playing hide-and-seek in the labyrinths of the Indian legal system. She now stood convicted, sentenced to four years and fined Rs 100 crore. Four of her associates— devotees who dragged her to the abyss—stood convicted too, though with lower fines. It was a moment of irony in a political life fraught with jealousy, humiliation, malice and cruelty that she had fought alone with courage and determination. It was a moment that shattered the image of her invincibility. Amma, the redeemer. Amma, the universal. Amma, the one who looks at you with a benevolent smile, like a goddess, at every street corner of Tamil Nadu. Now she is damned.
The conviction of J Jayalalithaa, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu until the verdict forced her resignation and barred her from contesting elections for the next 10 years, is a dramatic twist in her colourful life, and it comes at a time when she had emerged as the most powerful leader in south India.
For a woman with the baggage of being a former film star, single and a Brahmin, to gain acceptance in the theatre of Dravidian politics was surely tough. What makes Jayalalithaa such a fascinating figure is the fact that she relentlessly challenged the male-dominated politics of Tamil Nadu that had tried to block her at every step of her journey. Remarkably, she rose to the top of the AIADMK, a party that was rudderless after the death of its founder MG Ramachandran. He was looked upon by his followers as a demigod, and it would not have been easy to step into his shoes, but she did, fighting single-handedly against the machinations of her enemies within and without the party. More recently, when the rival DMK—which was wracked by a power struggle between party patriarch M Karunanidhi’s sons—was routed in the 2011 Assembly polls, she dared to go for the moon, aiming to win enough parliamentary seats to have a say at the Centre, even claim Prime Ministership if possible.
Her life, she once said, was an ‘open book’, but she remains unapproachable. An enigma. Her fits of rage, tantrums and arrogance are legendary. So are the stories of a troubled childhood, her brilliant school record in Chennai’s Church Park Convent, her love of books, her erudition and impeccable English, her intelligence, her relationship with MG Ramachandran, her sense of loss after his death, and her relationship with her aide, Sasikala.
It is her hatred of Karunanidhi, however, that colours her political reactions. The past shapes her present. Her loneliness, her anger, the battering of court cases against her, with her wealth frozen, properties sealed and jewels seized and taken into legal custody—she was imprisoned for 28 days earlier— have all contributed to her formidable personality.
The villain of the drama has always been Karunanidhi. Her waking hours are consumed by devising plans to undo him and his progeny. Her sleeping hours are tormented by the recurring dream of a horror three decades ago. She can’t forget the humiliation that she experienced as a young entrant to the state’s Legislative Assembly at the hands of her political enemies. That day, enraged and humiliated, Jayalalithaa left, swearing like the infuriated Panchali that she would never step foot inside the House “until conditions are created under which a woman may attend the Assembly safely”. Jayalalithaa became a symbol of Draupadi. Karunanidhi did not realise that symbols could prove politically disastrous.
Jayalalithaa’s previous stints in power taught her that impulsive acts of anger and vengeance would only harm her. She learnt to wear masks. As a former actor, this came easily to her. It is amazing how she strengthened her grip over the party in spite of its humiliating defeat in 1996 and again in 2006. She returned with a stunning majority in 2001 and again in 2011. In her third term as Chief Minister, she appeared to have consolidated and understood the art of wielding power.
In her first term from 1991 to 1996, corruption had been the main political issue; in her second term from 2001 to 2006, she baffled observers with her autocratic measures, which went unquestioned except by the media, with which her relations had anyway soured. Her whims assumed stunning proportions. One of her first moves after assuming power was to arrest the 79-year-old Karunanidhi in the middle of the night, an act that shocked the nation. She made a suo moto statement in the Assembly ruling out any discussion of the proposed demolition of the nearly-100-year-old Queen Mary’s College building to be replaced by a new secretariat. She had an ordinance issued against ‘forced conversion’. She banned animal sacrifice. The MDMK leader Vaiko, who was an ally of the ruling BJP, was arrested under POTA for speaking in favour of the LTTE, a banned outfit, and put behind bars. Both those laws have since been repealed and the anti-LTTE tag now lies buried.
She has been ruthless and unforgiving in other ways too. Over the past two years, she removed 17 cabinet ministers. She brooks no opposition and her word on any subject is law. She is her own master. Her own advisor. She has survived three years without any major scandal or corruption case. She has proven a shrewd populist as well. The man in the street gets all that he needs in the name of Amma’s welfare schemes. If there is any discontent, it is offset by her largesse—20 kg of rice free for each below-poverty-line family, mixie-grinders and fans, never mind if there is no power, and bicycles for school kids. There are Amma canteens that sell idlis at one rupee apiece and curd rice at Rs 3 a plate. She knows the Tamil psyche, the belief in that old adage: ‘Be grateful as long as you live to the person who fed you.’ And in Tamil Nadu, it has been Amma, the universal mother.
In an extraordinary life, she has had many defining moments, but perhaps the most politically significant was her massive victory in the 2011 elections, proving all poll predictions wrong. It was a victory that relieved her of the burden of her fear of the future, of the need to challenge the might of Karunanidhi. Her entire second term had been consumed by the politics of vendetta. Now there was no need. The DMK was already a finished story.
She has always managed to live in the present, preferring to cross every bridge as it comes, with no time to look back. It has been a life of turmoil. She once described it thus during an election campaign: “I stand before you, having come [to this point] swimming in the river of fire.” It was a journey that hardened the once innocent and lonely child. It turned her cynical and arrogant. Cynicism and arrogance became her masks. Every fall was a challenge, every victory intoxicating.
Ah, she had almost forgotten about the sword hanging above her head. Or perhaps she thought she would be forgiven her lapses because of her popularity among the Tamil masses and her political power. During her first tenure, her rule became a byword for corruption at all levels, and she was naïve enough to flaunt her wealth. It shocked the people of Tamil Nadu, and she was duly punished by her constituency, which handed her a crushing defeat. Though she was imprisoned by the Karunanidhi government, she was acquitted in almost all the cases filed against her. It won her sympathy. She hoped that she would be acquitted in the disproportionate wealth case as well. Her party men had thronged the streets outside the court in Bangalore, waiting to burst crackers to celebrate yet another victory.
When Amma emerged briefly to have a word with her trusted aide and now Chief Minister, O Panneerselvam, she showed little of the emotion that had appeared on her face in 1996 on the day she was taken to prison from her Poes Garden house. Then, she had looked at those who stood before her gates and said, “Naalai namathe!” ‘Tomorrow is ours.’ And her followers knew she would be back to lead them again. This time, Amma had no word of solace for them. “You cannot write her off,” many had said then, and some still say it, though far less convincingly.
Hers has been an extraordinary life. With her gone, Tamil Nadu politics will lose its colour and verve.
Forty-seven percent of the time, the average mind is wandering. It wanders about a third of the time while a person is reading, talking with other people, or taking care of children. It wanders 10 percent of the time, even, during sex. And that wandering, according to psychologist Matthew Killingsworth, is not good for well-being. A mind belongs in one place. During his training at Harvard, Killingsworth compiled those numbers and built a scientific case for every cliché about living in the moment. In a 2010 Science paper co-authored with psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, the two wrote that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."
For Killingsworth, happiness is in the content of moment-to-moment experiences. Nothing material is intrinsically valuable, except in whatever promise of happiness it carries. Satisfaction in owning a thing does not have to come during the moment it's acquired, of course. It can come as anticipation or nostalgic longing. Overall, though, the achievement of the human brain to contemplate events past and future at great, tedious length has, these psychologists believe, come at the expense of happiness. Minds tend to wander to dark, not whimsical, places. Unless that mind has something exciting to anticipate or sweet to remember.
Over the past decade, an abundance of psychology research has shown that experiences bring people more happiness than do possessions. The idea that experiential purchases are more satisfying than material purchases has long been the domain of Cornell psychology professor Thomas Gilovich. Since 2003, he has been trying to figure out exactly how and why experiential purchases are so much better than material purchases. In the journal Psychological Sciencelast month, Gilovich and Killingsworth, along with Cornell doctoral candidateAmit Kumar, expanded on the current understanding that spending money on experiences "provide[s] more enduring happiness." They looked specifically at anticipation as a driver of that happiness; whether the benefit of spending money on an experience accrues before the purchase has been made, in addition to after. And, yes, it does.
Essentially, when you can't live in a moment, they say, it's best to live in anticipation of an experience. Experiential purchases like trips, concerts, movies, et cetera, tend to trump material purchases because the utility of buying anything really starts accruing before you buy it.
Mean self-reported ratings (Kumar et al, Psychological Science/The Atlantic)
Waiting for an experience apparently elicits more happiness and excitement than waiting for a material good (and more "pleasantness" too—an eerie metric). By contrast, waiting for a possession is more likely fraught with impatience than anticipation."You can think about waiting for a delicious meal at a nice restaurant or looking forward to a vacation," Kumar told me, "and how different that feels from waiting for, say, your pre-ordered iPhone to arrive. Or when the two-day shipping on Amazon Prime doesn’t seem fast enough."
Gilovich's prior work has shown that experiences tend to make people happier because they are less likely to measure the value of their experiences by comparing them to those of others. For example, Gilbert and company note in their new paper, many people are unsure if they would rather have a high salary that is lower than that of their peers, or a lower salary that is higher than that of their peers. With an experiential good like vacation, that dilemma doesn't hold. Would you rather have two weeks of vacation when your peers only get one? Or four weeks when your peers get eight? People choose four weeks with little hesitation.
Experiential purchases are also more associated with identity, connection, and social behavior. Looking back on purchases made, experiences make people happier than do possessions. It's kind of counter to the logic that if you pay for an experience, like a vacation, it will be over and gone; but if you buy a tangible thing, a couch, at least you'll have it for a long time. Actually most of us have a pretty intense capacity for tolerance, or hedonic adaptation, where we stop appreciating things to which we're constantly exposed. iPhones, clothes, couches, et cetera, just become background. They deteriorate or become obsolete. It's the fleetingness of experiential purchases that endears us to them. Either they're not around long enough to become imperfect, or they are imperfect, but our memories and stories of them get sweet with time. Even a bad experience becomes a good story.
When it rains through a beach vacation, as Kumar put it, "People will say, well, you know, we stayed in and we played board games and it was a great family bonding experience or something." Even if it was negative in the moment, it becomes positive after the fact. That's a lot harder to do with material purchases because they're right there in front of you. "When my Macbook has the colorful pinwheel show up," he said, "I can't say, well, at least my computer is malfunctioning!"
"At least my computer and I get to spend more time together because it's working so slowly," I offered.
"Yes, exactly."
"Maybe we should destroy our material possessions at their peak, so they will live on in an idealized state in our memories?"
"I don't know if I'd go that far," he said. "The possibility of making material purchases more experiential is sort of interesting."
That means making purchasing an experience, which is terrible marketing-speak, but in practical terms might mean buying something on a special occasion or on vacation or while wearing a truly unique hat. Or tying that purchase to subsequent social interaction. Buy this and you can talk about buying it, and people will talk about you because you have it.
"Turns out people don't like hearing about other people's possessions very much," Kumar said, "but they do like hearing about that time you saw Vampire Weekend."
I can't imagine ever wanting to hear about someone seeing Vampire Weekend, but I get the point. Reasonable people are just more likely to talk about their experiential purchases than their material purchases. It's a nidus for social connection. ("What did you do this weekend?" "Well! I'm so glad you asked ... ")
The most interesting part of the new research, to Kumar, was the part that "implies that there might be notable real-world consequences to this study." It involved analysis of news stories about people waiting in long lines to make a consumer transaction. Those waiting for experiences were in better moods than those waiting for material goods. "You read these stories about people rioting, pepper-spraying, treating each other badly when they have to wait," he said. It turns out, those sorts of stories are much more likely to occur when people are waiting to acquire a possession than an experience. When people are waiting to get concert tickets or in line at a new food truck, their moods tend to be much more positive.
"There are actually instances of positivity when people are waiting for experiences," Kumar said, like talking to other people in the concert line about what songs Vampire Weekend might play. So there is opportunity to connect with other people. "We know that social interaction is one of the most important determinants of human happiness, so if people are talking with each other, being nice to one another in the line, it's going to be a lot more pleasant experience than if they're being mean to each other which is what's (more) likely to happen when people are waiting for material goods."
Research has also found that people tend to be more generous to others when they've just thought about an experiential purchase as opposed to a material purchase. They're also more likely to pursue social activities. So, buying those plane tickets is good for society. (Of course, maximal good to society and personal happiness comes from pursuing not happiness but meaning. All of this behavioral economics-happiness research probably assumes you've already given away 99 percent of your income to things bigger than yourself, and there's just a very modest amount left to maximally utilize.)
What is it about the nature of imagining experiential purchases that's different from thinking about future material purchases? The most interesting hypothesis is that you can imagine all sort of possibilities for what an experience is going to be. "That's what's fun," Kumar said. "It could turn out a whole host of ways." With a material possession, you kind of know what you're going to get. Instead of whetting your appetite by imagining various outcomes, Kumar put it, people sort of think, Just give it to me now.
It could turn out that to get the maximum utility out of an experiential purchase, it's really best to plan far in advance. Savoring future consumption for days, weeks, years only makes the experience more valuable. It definitely trumps impulse buying, where that anticipation is completely squandered. (Never impulse-buy anything ever.)
That sort of benefit would likely be a lot stronger in an optimistic person as opposed to a pessimistic person. Some people hate surprises. Some people don't anticipate experiences because they dwell on what could—no, will—go wrong. But we needn't dwell in their heads. Everyone can decide on the right mix of material and experiential consumption to maximize their well-being. The broader implications, according to Gilovich in a press statement, are that "well-being can be advanced by providing infrastructure that affords experiences, such as parks, trails, and beaches, as much as it does material consumption." Or at least the promise of that infrastructure, so we can all look forward to using it. And when our minds wander, that's where they'll go.
The festival season started with Navratri, followed by Dussehra. Few days later, there will be Diwali—one of the brightest festivals in India. Many legends are associated with this festival. It marks the victory of Rama over Ravana; and symbolically good over evil.
This festival of lights also gets people to spend crores of rupees on people they may see once a year, or on things that they don’t really need. It is also a period of irrationality. If one is looking for an example of behavioural economics, look no further than the ongoing festival season.
Diwali itself may be around four days long, but people’s irrationality starts at least a month before. The rituals of consumerism associated with Diwali and other festivals during the period influence us to do things that make no rational economic sense.
We buy more food than we can possibly consume. It’s not surprising to see many of us go berserk at grocery stores. We delight in showcasing our generosity by laying the table with various types of sweets, dry fruits and other food items to avoid feeling guilty about not doing enough for Diwali.
We consume more harmful food than usual, knowing fully well that they are a potential health hazard. And we justify the indulgence in the name of Diwali. We buy new clothes, jewellery and household items, even if we do not need them. The frequency of shopping increases, undeterred by the hardships associated with heavy traffic and crowd and long queues at shops. During this period, we throw all caution to the wind and forget about the environment, pollution and climate change. We become irresponsible and spend money on firecrackers, even as hungry eyes witness money being metaphorically burnt through a creative display of firecrackers. Where does our compassion go?
Closer home, we worry about the stigma of giving cash or gift vouchers instead of a gift, even though the voucher may be worth more. In this way, we help retailers extract disproportionate value, which should ideally go to the recipient. The wasteful tendencies extend even to investors, who flock to their brokers on the mahurat trading day and buy stocks even if they are expensive and do not merit investments. Thanks to mahurat trading, brokers happily earn even at the cost of making a wrong investment.
Businessmen worship their accounting books on particular days during the festival season. But they merely pander to custom, and have no firm resolve to follow ethical practices in day-to-day business dealings. In fact, the festival season is the perfect opportunity to give bribes in the form of expensive gifts and jewellery. The recipients, too, happily avoid feeling guilty about accepting such gifts, in the name of Diwali. Even the profession of begging becomes lucrative. Asking for alms in the name of Diwali, they rake in a greater collection as donors also become liberal. Setting the scene Marketing has a lot to do with how we behave during Diwali. Special Diwali deals create the anchoring and the scarcity effect.
Consumers, being in a festive mood, are more likely to make lax purchase decisions rather than calculated ones. Special advertisements like “gift your dad a TV” use the reciprocity bias to encourage buying in the hope of receiving. The popular carrot, “exchange old for new”, exploits the loss aversion bias, especially when buying expensive gifts. Social norms, too, play a huge role in the mad rush of spending—“everyone is doing it, so let’s follow the herd”. Envy and comparison also add fuel to the fire of irrational spending.
We are strongly influenced by how others act and the values and behaviour displayed by our peers. Surprisingly, no asset management company has launched a mutual fund scheme capitalizing on the irrationality of investors during the festival period. If such a scheme were to originate, I guess it would be called “Diwali consumer goods scheme”. And soon the market would be flooded with Diwali-themed schemes. But the great thing about the festival period is a tacit agreement across the country to make the season all about spending time with loved ones, exchanging gifts as a means to display our affection.
Rationality makes people boring. It wouldn’t do to have every person using their minds to take decisions. It is a welcome change to sometimes use the heart and not the mind, even if the resultant actions are not in our best financial interest. Who cares? We are human beings, and we possess a mind as well as a heart. I am going to be irrational, and I am going to enjoy it!
