How surrounding myself with like-minded Entrepreneurs helped me evolve

To be honest, being an Entrepreneur is kind of weird

It’s a lonely path. You give up a lot of your “personal” life to pursue something that you truly believe in.

But these lonely times can sometimes turn out to be pretty depressing. We all know this journey has it own share of ups and downs. And in those ‘downs’, people around you is what you need. Yes, there are friends. But over the course of my short entrepreneurial journey I have realised that while friends try to be your moral support, they don’t really understand what I am going through.

In November 2015, I quit my job to pursue my so called ‘dream’. While the initial days were almost like vacation, it got really annoying after a point. At my previous workplace, I was surrounded by a lot of people. And working from home was almost as dreadful as any thing could be. With hardly any agenda for the day, I would spend most of my time whiling away and by the end of the day I’d feed sad having not accomplished anything significant.

The I started working from Starbucks. The environment is great and so is the music (not a big fan of their coffee!). Still, something wasn’t right about the place. I just couldn’t point my finger at it!

I then spoke to a batchmate of mine who took the path of entrepreneurship right after college. Thankfully, he was able to tell me what exactly was going wrong. It was the people, people around me. And they were not right, at least for what I was trying to do.

He then suggested me to enrol myself in a co-working space where entrepreneurs, freelancers and creative artists would come every day and work. Everyday you’d meet someone new, interact with them and have something precious to take away. Some of it might directly influence the business I am trying to build, most of it might actually not. But that’s not the point. My thought process would evolve everyday and I was growing 10x faster than when I was working from my house. That’s the power of surrounding yourself with the right people, like-minded people.

It’s been a year now since I took this decision. I have moved between 3 co-working spaces and it has been amazing till now. I have met over 200 like-minded individuals who’ve had something new to offer. I hold a new perspective about most of the things I care about and I am hoping it’s only going to get better from here.