Polarizing facts you wish you’d known earlier!

Ever heard quotes or advice like “In business, there are no friends” or “you cannot share your ideas to people!” before?

I bet you were!

me, trying so hard to look casual when teaching

Lemme open this things first.

Here I am, in my mid 20s, running Binar Academy with my awesome business partners and superstar team. Sounds cool, right?

Let me be honest with you:

I often feel inferior and anxious, just because sometimes I feel like I’m too young for this

As a millennials myself, I often ask for guidance and learned from others’ experience as well.

But…

I often get polarizing advice. And right now, I wanted to share to you all some of it and what are my learnings from those advices.

Working hard and its impact

When I was 19–20 years old, I often criticized by my family and colleagues, they told me to work hard if you wanna be a successful person.

Getting older a bit, on my 22–23 years old, I learned that working hard doesn’t necessarily leads you into success, either. It’s not enough

I once work at 2am in the morning to recruit freelance massage therapist to join GO-JEK as a GO-MASSAGE therapists in Soekarno-Hatta airport

It’s not about how hard you work, it doesn’t matter at all. It’s all about how do you LOVE things that you do.. how sincere you are working things that you are doing.

You can work up late and contribute nothing, but you can also work 1–2 hours but make an impactful changes!

Mixing up business with friendship

Some people might have bad experience on building their business, thus, they told me this.

You cannot or should not make business with your friends!

But… my experience told me the other way around.

We built Binar Academy based on shared vision, to give a better social impact through education.

Faces behind Binar Academy

True, they are not my friends, but turns out they become more than just a friends! They are my family now.

It’s not about friends or not, it’s all about your beliefs and visions. If all of you are aiming the same goal with the same vision, scrap the status, even maybe you can start to make a business with your own spouse.

The risk of sharing the ideas

I often get some kind of question from people about Nadiem Makarim, Founder of GO-JEK when I’m working there. They ask some questions like:

• How can he become so creative on building the business model?
• Isn’t he afraid that his idea will be stolen?

And such.

Even when we are sharing the business model of Binar Academy to people, they asked me why did I tell them everything?

Our business model, where we re-invest our profit to provide a full scholarship tech academy

Once, Alamanda Shantika told me:

“The reason why I told people about our business model, is so people can replicate it! The more Binar Academy in this world, the better this world will be!”

And to me, it’s very mind-blowing! How can we, as an entrepreneur, encourage people to become our competitor?!

Turns out, that’s the reason. We are not building Binar Academy to feed our greed, instead, we are building it to make a better Indonesia, even, world.

By the way, idea is just an idea, it worth nothing without execution.

You think you have a good idea? Make it happen!

That’s the learning I am sharing this time, next time, I’ll share another. I hope my learning can be useful for you guys as well.

Gilang Gibranthama is a co-founder of Binar Academy and passionate about knowledge sharing

Care to know about Binar Academy further?

Want to have a free consultation about your career path and life purpose?

Need to discuss about your business strategy?

Reach me out at ggibranthama@binar.co.id and I’d be more than happy to help!