One of my businesses was doing well. For the first time, I believed I had understood how business worked. I had a partner to invest and we were aiming to scale high.
I was confident.
I was growing.
I was certain.
Then came our first cashflow crunch. Two months into it and my partner took one step back. A family to take care of and he being the sole earning member, his first responsibility was towards his family.
I was not prepared for a lonely battle. I never knew how to handle something I had not planned for. I was certain that we would be able to go over a few troughs in life. I was certain the business was doing well and would fulfill our dreams. But I never knew our dreams never alligned and even though I was ready to struggle my partner could not.
One of the hardest discoveries I made during that phase was that my greatest obstacle was not ignorance. It was certainty. I was always certain about people. I was certain about future. I was certain about the present reality.
Whenever I believed I had made it, feedback stopped and I lost awareness of reality.
Looking back, I can see that I kept protecting my identity & my ideas. Being wrong felt uncomfortable because I had connected my knowledge with my self-worth.
Reality had no interest in protecting my identity. It simply revealed what was true. That is why feedback often hurts.
Ego does not resist knowledge. It resists correction.
My certainty limited my response to those circumstances. I failed because certainty had made me rigid. I could no longer respond quickly to changing circumstances.
There were businesses that emerged as winners even in those tough times. Most of them remained humble to accept uncertainty and change course.
I realised that humility was not thinking less of myself. It was accepting that reality was under no obligation to agree with me.
I became more interested in understanding than in being right.
I stopped being an entrepreneur only to be known as that. I became an observer wanting to know more and understand more.
Only later did I understand a verse from the Bhagavad Gita that I had read before but never truly understood.
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥
Karmanyevadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana,
Ma Karmaphalaheturbhurma Te Sangostvakarmani
“You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the results of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”
My duty was not to chase success. My duty was to understand reality, act, receive feedback, refine my understanding, and act again. I had to keep doing this without asking if success had been achieved.
I had not merely failed. I had discovered a better direction for my next action.
I had understood, that one of the most important ingredients of learning was failure. Failure was the test result that I could use to get better at understanding.
I stopped seeing myself only as the doer of action. I became an observer of my own actions.
Learning started accelerating and asking questions became easier.
Feedback became easier. Failure became easier.
Reality had not changed. Only my relationship with it had.
Perhaps ego is not the opposite of knowledge.
Perhaps it is the opposite of inquiry.
- Kartikeya
Inquiry in Silence. Yoga in Practice
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