6 Years at Jigyasa the School!
Linkedin reminded me this morning that I have completed 6 years at Jigyasa.
SIX years. Wow! As a 21 year old, I never imagined I would spend that long at one job. Nor did I consider the world of education as a potential avenue on the opportunity spectrum as far as career was concerned.
John Lennon would have said life was what was happening to me while I was busy making other plans…
Starting a school was definitely not part of my plan!
This seems like a good time to sit down and reflect on the learning and growth that has occurred in the last 2200 days or so. Here are the changes that I have experienced in myself over the years:
- Change in time preference — Before starting Jigyasa, I had an obvious preference for evaluating life in terms of weeks and months. Rarely was anything thought out from the perpsective of a 5 year plan, or even a decade down the road. Now, as a result of having experienced how difficult and gruelling it can be to get your own venture off the ground, I naturally tend to think in terms of a year or two down the line, at a minimum. Depending on the goal, some times it is a 5 year plan. This has actually brought a certain degree of confidence to everything I do. The education system taught me to achieve x, y and z by a certain time / age. I now realise none of that holds good for me, so I give myself time.
A wise person once said — people overestimate what they can do in one year, and underestimate what they can do in ten.
2. My map of the world is often (mostly) inaccurate — The essence of most spiritual teachings is simple — see the world for what it is, be constant as the swirl of life sweeps up a storm around you. Acceptance comes after you are able to see past the veil of experiences and emotions that have helped get you to where you are. The last six years have taught me that the same applies to starting out on your own. (I have decided I dislike the term entrepreneurship — it aggrandizes an activity that is often brutal and harmful to physical and mental health!). To become good at starting, running and scaling a business, you need to see the world for what it is without letting your beliefs, experiences and values temper your view. In order to be successful, I am going to have to recalibrate my map very often. This is often humbling, even painful at times. But failing to do so will only prolong the time taken to reach my idea of success.
3. Minimalism is key — Each one of us has an idea of how we want to live. With the path I am on, I have realised that living a minimal life is the only way to unshackle myself from the demands of what other people consider normal or even ideal. I don’t believe that I need to have my own house. Renting ensures that I can live where I want, for as long as it suits me, without having the demands of a mortgage making me as illiquid as Bangalore’s lakes. That’s just one example. Minimalism applies to things, as it does to relationships and routines. Stay minimal, stay nimble. That’s my motto, financially speaking and otherwise.
4. Momentum is difficult to generate, and even harder to predict — The absolute hardest thing for me has been generating momentum for Jigyasa. By momentum I mean increasing the number of students and generating growth. A lack of momentum can kill a business, and also hamper motivation. In the early years, it was genuinely demotivating to hear great feedback from parents but still see that your monthly revenues are half your costs. Trust me, going through 2 years of negative income teaches you a lot. Life has a way of pummelling wisdom into you, even if you don’t think you need it!
5. ‘Sticktoitiveness’ is a learned skill — One of my gripes with the education system is that you get given a problem, which has a definitive answer, and you are told you are smart / good / intelligent if you find that answer within a certain timescale. But life is not like that. With many things in life, even if you are able to define the scale and parameters of the problem, you don’t know if there is a definitive answer. Nor do you know how long it will take to find an answer. Which is where sticktoitiveness comes in. You think you know what you should be doing, but you have to continue doing it despite having relatively little knowledge about whether you will actually find an answer. I only learned this after starting Jigyasa, and will continue to develop this skill for the rest of my life.
6. Don’t market to everyone, market to your tribe — When we started the school, we knew what kind of an education we wanted to impart to children. But we didn’t know the sort of people who would want such an education for their child. On one hand, the thinking was that everyone needs an education, and so every person who can afford our fees is a prospect. We were very, very wrong. Over time, and from looking at our parent body now, one can see that Jigyasa is for the kind of parent who is comfortable with experimenting. While there are many ways to disect a group of people, the one quality that a large chunk of the Jigyasa parent body has is that they realize the importance of a hands on education and that they experiment a lot with their own lives. So once you have that pinned down, it is easy to market to those most likely to become your customers!
7. Risk & reward are not the only way to evaluate business potential — Having been a student of finance for nearly a decade, I was taught to evaluate all business and investment decisions on the basis of risk and reward. All other aspects relating to human emotions were not given any thought. In this day and age, I wish business schools focused more on the softer reasons for starting and running a business (especially a self funded business) — being able to spend time the way you want to, having time to explore other areas of interest, having more control over the direction of your life, doing things that don’t scale at all but make you feel very good etc. To a lot of people my age and of a similar bent of mind, there are a range of non-financial factors which must be met for a business to be sustainable.
8. In education, small is ideal — In bangalore at least, Jigyasa has to compete with huge schools which have 100x the amount of money we have. Our only competitive edge is in our teachers, our methodology and the intellectual capital we put into the process. But the more I think about it, I see a dichotomy in terms of making education a sustainable enterprise. With the cost of real estate a high as it is, the only way a school can sustain itself is by having many hundreds or thousands of children. However, the bigger a school grows, the pace at which quality deteriorates is startling. This is a trend that is easy to spot and one that many parents complain about. So personally, I would love to find that ‘sweet spot’ — grow Jigyasa to a level where it more than justifies the exorbitant cost of real estate but still is small enough to deliver an education that is personal, impactful and relevant.
9. Empowering explanatory style determines your mindset— How you explain a set of events to yourself determines whether you will weather personal crises, pick yourself up after defeats, and keep pushing towards your goals despite all evidence to suggest that you won’t achieve them. It also determines whether you will be more prone to depressive thoughts in the long run, and consequently explanatory style has an impact on your general level of happiness. I wish someone had taught me this skill when I was younger. Because it is very much a skill that can be learned and practised. Picture this — you study hard for a test and still get ‘only’ a B. How do you explain this event to yourself? If your tendency is to say things like ‘Oh, I am not as intelligent as the others’, then you are more likely to form that negative belief about yourself. Whereas you could just as easily have said ‘I did study hard, but it just wasn’t to be this time.’ Teaching this to children is something that can radically alter their view of the world and of themselves.
I could keep going. These realizations have risen to the surface of my thinking over the years since starting Jigyasa. This wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of all that I have learned and all the mistakes made, but it more or less captures the big themes that are occupying my mind at this point.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed reading this article, I would really appreciate it if you gave it some claps. Better still, please do share it with people you know!
