You are well settled in your career and in your forties. For years, you have nurtured a quiet dream of building something of your own. The reasons may vary from person to person, but the urge is the same: one day, you want to start your own venture, even if you are not at the top of your finances.
One day, you finally decide and hang up your corporate boots. You are confident in your capabilities and the idea is ready. Your conviction and the desire to start your venture are so strong that you risk everything you have and then some. By the way, you have already taken the biggest risk of your life by saying goodbye to a secure and established corporate career.
Nevertheless, you start working at a feverish pace, putting in 18 hours every day and investing all that you have because the dream is so compelling. The efforts start paying off and the venture kicks off and moves along a steady growth path. Customers start coming in and so does the revenue. Month after month you are making progress that emboldens you to invest more, even if it means taking loans.
Life looks like a dream come true. Your decades-long desire is getting fulfilled and you are enjoying every moment of it. Your status in the society is rising, not only because you are making good money, but also because people around you are impressed with your risk taking ability and the subsequent success. You are popular, not just popular, but admired.
All this is intoxicating and months or years pass and all seems to be going well till one day suddenly…
A product malfunction, a jealous competitor or an environmental shift (read Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal or Environmental) strike a fatal blow to your business. You are concerned, shaken, and trapped but not broken. You double down and put in more work, enhance your skills and try to figure out what went wrong. Very quickly, your business performance nosedives and the revenue starts to dry up.
You have loans to repay, a family to support and a face to maintain in the society. You work harder than ever. Longer hours. New experiments. Endless searches for solutions. Every day becomes a desperate attempt to breathe life back into the business. In fact, you try so hard that your health starts to take a toll and your logic goes for a toss. You search online for remedies, work alone and try new things. Now you are putting even more hours, trying to breathe life back into your business. You work so hard that even the keys of your laptop start to wear off and the characters printed on them start to fade. You are behaving like a maniac.
You are now more reserved and withdrawn from the society. You try everything and anything that has the remotest possibility of reviving your business, but in vain.
More months pass and the people around you move on, no longer impressed by your creativity and success. You want to cry on the shoulders of your closest friends but they too are wary of listening to your sob stories again and again and start avoiding you. Anyone who is still around, advises you to give up and move on.
However, your heart refuses to give up. Sometimes the mind takes over and convinces you to not waste any more time and move on, but the heart is stuck. You cry alone in the nights, the thought of suicide crosses your mind repeatedly, not because you cannot face the world again but because you don’t want to live with the shattered dream. You are devastated! You are forced to live on because you don’t want to betray your family, the only support system that is still standing strong behind you.
And you know what makes it even worse? The fact that you don’t even know what went wrong or who did this to you and why? If you had answers to these questions, you could go back and correct your mistakes but in the absence of answers, you become even more miserable.
You watch competitors flourish with models similar to yours. Their businesses grow while yours collapsed. The most painful part is not just the loss, but the absence of answers. You don’t know what went wrong, who triggered it, or whether you could have prevented it.
And that leaves you with one haunting question:
What do you do now?
Vineet Gupta is the Founder and Managing Editor of MBA Study Point. He is an alumnus of the University of Wales, UK, where he completed his MBA. Along with his work across hospitality, finance, media, and academia, he has spent more than 14 years teaching MBA students at reputed institutions across India. His wide professional exposure and time spent observing people, workplaces, and cultures have shaped his interest in mindful living, leadership, and personal development. Through MBA Study Point, he brings together these experiences to help readers find clarity, balance, and practical wisdom for both career and life.
