BookMarks #115: Dream with Your Eyes Open

Title: Dream with Your Eyes Open: An Entrepreneurial Journey

Author: Ronnie Screwvala

Genre: Non-fiction, Memoirs, Entrepreneurship

Published: 2016

BookMarks

“Dream with Your Eyes Open” is not exactly an autobiography but more of a collection of lessons learnt in what goes in making a successful entrepreneur. The book narrates the author’s learnings from his various ventures starting from his childhood, like selling balcony seats at his family home to get a glimpse of the stars at a premiere, starting a theatre group, a toothbrush production company and multiple ventures into the media space! And all along he passes on the learnings he has acquired from his experiences from the struggles, the success and most importantly the failures.

Here are a few nuggets taken from the book about entrepreneurship

• Entrepreneurship is a journey, not an outing.
• Entrepreneurship is about living life on your own terms.
• Dream huge and dream with your eyes open
• Risk means pushing the envelope when others want to take the safe route, and caring more about potential rewards than possible losses.
• As long as you have the hunger to succeed, innate confidence in yourself and in your abilities, the guts and conviction to take sensible risks and a can-do attitude, you will prevail.
• Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone.
• Entrepreneurship in a nutshell: action and reaction; understanding, confronting and transcending fear; working, disrupting and succeeding; trying and failing. And then laughing about it all later, while absorbing lasting life lessons.
• When you start from scratch, you’ve got nothing to lose.
• Deep knowledge comes from doing.
• Authenticity is at the heart of effective communication.
• The importance of acquiring domain knowledge—or at least the ability to ask the right questions if you want to succeed in a new initiative at scale.
• Failure is inevitable. One of the hardest and most enduring lessons everyone in business learns is that not all great ideas succeed. Plan for failure. Embrace failure. But understand that failure is a comma, not a full stop.
• Failure can be a stronger motivator than success.
• Failure is more interesting and instructive than success.
• You’re not answerable to anyone but yourself.
• Level your gaze beyond the horizon. Life is too short to allow others to make you feel inadequate.
• Do what needs doing. Figure out what went wrong and fix it.
• Plan for success and insist on survival. To survive is to give yourself a fighting chance to succeed.
• Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
• Exits are about creating value and letting go when the need and opportunity arise.
• Focus occurs in the present.
• Most success springs from feeling joyous and confident, believing one can accomplish almost anything—and sporting victories contribute to such euphoria. The day India wins big at the Olympics and becomes a global player in sports, we will already have become an economic superpower.
• It's all possible.

Overall and engaging read. It also helps that the Ronnie Screwvala’s journey has already been in the public eye. So getting to know the background of these ventures makes it more interesting. 

Previously on BookMarks: Endgame