I thought I’ll share about my journey from the past 6 months. This is as transparent as it gets.

I left Netflix fully burnt out, fatigued, and sick — from everything except work. There was a lot I didn’t know at the time, but there was one thing I knew for sure — I could not go back to a regular corporate job. I was, for all intents and purposes, done. With the labels, the titles, the system, the salaries even. I felt I had seen everything there was to see (and more), and I’d be a fool to want to continue to invest my life and career into the muck that large-scale corporates often are. It did not align with my ambitions, but most of all with the kind of person I am.

I went back to the drawing board (quite literally — the first purchase I made was a whiteboard and some markers) and started listing out all the problems that I felt were complex enough for my liking. My husband joined me in this “ideation phase”, and together we dreamed up everything from rural tourism to cultural gifting to zero-gravity D2C footwear to eldercare solutions to physical toys to a media format to make kids read via video.

That last one caught our fancy for quite a while, and we went into “validation phase”, talking to many kind parents who volunteered to speak with me about how they felt about their kids’ reading and media habits today. 20+ such interviews later, we reached an unexpected conclusion — this was a great business opportunity, but not fulfilling enough for us. You see, parents are inherently fuelled by the desire to give their kids more and better, which can easily be translated into spend, but what creates a conflict is the child’s developmental interests and the parent’s own opinion of how they should be parented. To get into the middle of that as a media property with commercial interests felt… bizarre.

We then went back to a place we keep going back to — somewhere in Himachal — and spent quite a bit of time with people we love — Himachalis. Co-incidentally, this was also when we were trying to understand the stereotypical “Bharat” audience. A particular local kid took great interest in us, and we started spending quite a bit of time with him. I showed him games I liked to see what did or did not interest him, I saw him consume the media he was consuming every single day on his mother’s mobile phone (utterly sad what is being made in the name of “building for Bharat”), we took him on walks and found that despite being a local he had explored the place less than the average tourist (mainly because his parents were, as most rural people are, incredibly busy with chores), and mostly, we fielded many curious questions from him. The most pertinent one was, “Are you both speaking in English so I won’t understand” (in pahadi Hindi, of course). He said that, not just once, with a look of innocent embarrassment each time, defying his usual confident and happy self. It was a brutal awakening for us. He was a bright student (as confirmed by his mother) and went to a good private school, but English? Well, India remains divided on language. Geographically, culturally, economically.

I started thinking of how media could intersect with language-learning. Of course, having spent an insane amount of time arguing about content, multilingual audiences, languages, text assets, translations, visual assets, creative intent etc. in my previous life came in handy, and while I could see something that would work well today, I eventually grew disinterested (once again) in the problem from a future technology standpoint. Video as a format started to feel too passive. Language-learning as a problem felt more academic than regular media could handle. Most of all, the cultural, geographical, economic complexities of what constitutes a person’s (such as the Himachali kid in question) current language-proficiency, made me think that the amount of personalisation that is needed to address this problem would be best achieved with 1:1 learning, if one wants to genuinely teach language vs just hit dopamines and serotonins. It didn’t help that getting to know this kid and his life at a deeply personal and emotional level made it difficult for us to see him as an “audience” or “segment”. The “Bharat” we read about in investor theses is not the real “Bharat”, as we came to learn.

By December, also tired from multiple personal commitments and medical procedures, I started to wonder if entrepreneurship is not for me. I felt I had exhausted the possibilities of ideas and if nothing had managed to stay (or make me stay on it) for longer than a couple months, then maybe there wasn’t a problem out there that I was ready to dedicate my life to. My husband and I parted ways (as business partners — hey!). He went back to working in Sports and Social Development while I begrudgingly started considering employment again, or worse, content creation as a career. I had been doing some consulting work on the side which kept the money coming but honestly? I hated it. I learned that I hate giving business advice. I don’t trust anyone to execute on my advice the way I think it needs to be executed, and I get tired of trying to be precise with my words only to realise that many people do not need nor value nuance the way I do. It may be vanity, but if there’s a whole lot of “I” and “me” in there, I am probably not cut out to be a consultant, I concluded. As for content creation, I have managed to keep my internet writing authentic and enjoyable because it never needed to pay my bills, to change that felt like a travesty. All content creation starts with satisfying the creative itch, but ends in the making of an influencer. I never wanted to be one. As much as I enjoy being online, I dreaded the idea of making that my whole identity.

Identity. That’s the other dilemma I grappled with — when did work become my identity? I mean, sure, I did grow up with intense pressure to score, win, and achieve (not claiming that I always did, but I did generally well). I did deeply internalise that the society rewarded me multifariously and abundantly every time I showed up with the conventional idea of an “achievement”. I did make pre-career choices that favoured prospects over passion. I did spend an abnormal amount of time from the most youthful decade of my adult life obsessing over work, performance, validation, promotions, raises, recognition etc. instead of living my 20s like a 20-something should. But when did work become my identity? Pfft, what a mystery.

As much as I questioned it, as much as I knew that ideally no one should think that work has to be their only identity, I realised that I had no way out now. Work, for me, was in fact my main identity. Not the job, the title, the salary, the promotions, the work. The thing(s) you actually do when you say you are working. Attending meetings, writing documents, preparing presentations, handling stakeholders, upward management etc. are work, yes, but is that most of the work I should be doing when I know how much of my identity centres around the work I do? That’s when it hit me — I needed to design my dream job. My dream work.

That was the genesis of what I call “my primary motivation as an entrepreneur”.

You see, they tell you all sorts of things about who is the ideal entrepreneur, why you should or should not be an entrepreneur, what are the good and bad reasons to be an entrepreneur, how it is the best time to be an entrepreneur, all that. But none of it matters unless you have a deeply personal reason to be an entrepreneur. That reason could be money, it could be fame, it could be anything else, but it has to be a reason so essential to your entire being that it keeps you obsessed with the work. When the work succeeds, it keeps you obsessed with creating the next set of work. When the work fails, it keeps you obsessed with making the work work. All for that one reason. Your reason. Whatever it may be.

Right at the onset of the new year, when I thought I had failed to find my reason and my identity, I was struck by an idea, a problem, a space. One day passed, two days passed, weeks, and now a month later, there is remarkable progress. All the advice they give to entrepreneurs is starting to look right and it is starting to look wrong. I am excited, not in a child-like way, but in a serious and sincere, “I have to build this”, way. And building, we are. Most importantly, it’s all making sense. Not just the past few months, but the past several years are making sense.

Thus, here I am, treading on the path many before me have treaded and few have succeeded on. It’s not an unconventional path, not anymore. But it sure is an uncertain one.

What am I building? Where am I? How am I doing it? I’ll share more in time (and I make no promises, it may very well be underwhelming). All I can tell you is this — I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I have to design my dream job, my dream work. That means the things I do on a daily basis (the actual things of doing, not the things around and about the things). That means the people I see and talk to everyday. That means the thinking and talking I do with those people. That means everything I consume and feed myself in the interest of said work. I want to curate all of that into a job that would energise me even when it fatigues me. Entrepreneurship is that job, for me.

We all have to work, right? Because who are we without that which we do? Because where else are we to pour ourselves and all that we know and all that we are? Because where else do you find purposeful connection outside of love and family? Because where else are we to make things with people who also want to make similar things? Isn’t that what work ultimate is? And doesn’t that consume most of our waking hours? Then why do work that kills you?

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