Entrepreneurship & value creation are two things that help you live your life to the fullest. It is nothing but pure magic. If you deliver value and if some people are willing to pay for it, your happiness knows no bounds. Not because you are making money. But because it is being valued.
Wealth creation comes later. It is value creation that takes precedence.
During my engineering college days, I was not staying in the hostel.
Instead, I stayed in a mansion that rented rooms for monthly rent on a double occupancy basis.
That gave me an opportunity to network with some senior friends.
There was a Mechanical Engineer who worked with the transport corporation. I studied Mech. He took me to his depot & workshop and I learned quite a bit about automobiles in general [& buses in particular].
I fell in love with automobiles so much that in my final year I took “Automobile Engineering” as one of my electives.
I miss those days. Those days are not going to come back.
There was another Mechanical Engineer in the mansion. He was an entrepreneur who had a factory that processed old leather and made new leather. Isn’t that value creation? At the core, all entrepreneurship experiments start with value creation. I am sure you would agree.
My friend had the land & the idea for the leather processing. And he took TIIC [Tamilnadu Industrial Investment Corporation] loan for the building & machinery.
Then there was a Sidha Doctor, a Psychologist, and a Deputy Superintendent of Police in the mansion where I stayed.
They were all my best friends. My roommate was working in the Railway Mail Service [RMS] by night and during the day, he was a stockbroker. He was a gem.
Of all this, the one thing that got stuck with me was entrepreneurship.
Years rolled by. I was in my final year. I had to take up a Project or internship or something like that. The idea was to build something that’s a proof of concept of our study.
We even had an Engineering Economics paper. More on that later, in another post.
Coming back to my final year project, the entrepreneur friend suggested that I take up Sick units for a study and suggest ways to revive them as part of my final year project. I did. Then, I interviewed several entrepreneurs including one who was running a textile mill & had shut it down.
We scheduled a time to visit the textile mill. As if I was a management consultant, I had a questionnaire and collected a lot of data.
I did this project for almost 6 months before giving up.
My friends & I then took up another project titled “design & fabrication of a blow molding machine” and completed it successfully.
Learnings:
- Entrepreneurship is not all that rosy as it seems.
- If you are passionate & ready, the teachers will come to you.
- Anything can go wrong. But they can be fixed as well.
- Live to your heart’s content. And savour those moments.
- Happiness comes from the thought that you can solve any problem.
Happy Learning!
Happy Selling!
#b2bsales #engineering #collegedays #kkrocks #entrepreneurship #problemsolving
