Dear Student, If You’ve Got an Idea, then Just Do It!

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at an event where the objective was to spread awareness about Entrepreneurship among students. First of all, kudos to IIT Kharagpur students for starting an event with such an objective. All I can say is that I wish there were such events when I was in college 🙂

After I shared my journey, during the Q&A round I found a pattern of questions. Honestly speaking, I could not relate to the problem initially, but when students kept asking the same thing in one manner or the other, I realized it’s got to do with a basic human problem, Fear.

Students in 2nd, 3rd year of engineering wondering whether they should build their idea/product or not? My feeling was, why not? What’s there to lose? I just couldn’t get it! You’re not leaving a high paying job, you don’t have family responsibilities, you don’t have to quit college to start something, then why are you not doing it? All you might lose is a little bit of sleep and maybe some pocket money.

  1. One group said, “parents are not allowing it”,
  2. Another said, “they were not sure whether they will get funding”,
  3. A third said, “they were not sure if their idea will work”

And some other similar excuses is what I heard. Yes, I call them excuses because those are not real reasons which can stop you from doing anything.

To those questions, my questions were:

  1. Why do you need to tell your parents right now?
  2. If you’re building something only to get funded, then probably you shouldn’t be doing it at all!
  3. Unless you try it out, how will you know whether your idea will work?

Probably, there’s just one answer to all of them, just work on your idea and build something, and (in simple code):

if it works, then {

  1. your parents will be happy to know about it
  2. investors will trace you down and fund you
  3. you will know that it can work!
    }

If it doesn’t {

  1. you don’t need to tell anything to your parents
  2. anyways you don’t need funding
  3. either you will know that it won’t work or you will find out more ways to make it work
    }

Bottom line is what Nike says, Just Do It!

Remember, you’ve got nothing to lose!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *