THE PASSION PROJECT : PART IV | Salil Rana
As far as I can retreat to retrieve into depths of my mature mind, there has always been this one obsessive idea that has propelled me through my professional life – “Why work doesn’t feel like work for some people?”. Some people seem to breeze through the weekdays, hardly waiting for the weekend to come and when it does, they simply carry on working, oblivious of the calendar constraints. Monday morning blues is not a relevant thing for them. They get up every day rejuvenated with a sense of excitement for the day ahead and what they are about to achieve. These are of course people who have found their passion in life that is now leading them purposefully in whatever they do. And yet, as we have these real-life examples strutting around, it seems like an almost-alien concept that doing something you love, professionally, is even a remote possibility. It’s just a myth they say, something out of a fantasy film they feel. “Nobody is that happy with their job”. But that is exactly the point. For these people, what the do isn’t a mere job, it is the joy of their existence. I have stumbled through life, trying to find that joy for myself. And while I still may be an amateur, I thought to seek out the experts who may help shed some light to find what we all are looking for. This series encapsulates those people who have not only found their passion but are living it. And I hope their stories will inspire you to live your purpose too.
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“I never lose. I either win or I learn.”
– Nelson Mandela
“Those 54 Hours. It all started from there. I was participating in the Startup Weekend by Google for Entrepreneurs and it was as though we had been transported into a parallel universe. It was like being in the eye of the storm with just you, your comrades and your capability anchoring you to the ground, saving you from getting sucked into the chaos. My teammates were not my mates in the literal sense. Well, not just yet. You see, I had been asked by my friends to join in with them, but I knew that if I didn’t stop being dependent on their light to blossom, I might never learn to weather the winds in their absence. It was time to break away to try to see if I had got what it takes to take on the likes of them.”
I was talking to Salil Rana, the now Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Living Things – a company putting efforts in making things alive, trying to give the machines in our daily lives thought and intelligence – and the then young protégé at VNIT, Nagpur. The conversation was of a competition that he was partaking in a few years back and one that was about to change his life. “So, you won?”, I asked breathlessly, after listening to his brief entrepreneurial escapades. “Oh no no! We came in third and my brilliant best friends came in first”, he chuckled as he remembered. “But that taught me something. It taught me to bet on myself.”
And that was the beginning of a journey that has led Salil to where he is now. It might have been a couple of luminous last two years, but the origins of his story started quite shaky as he tells me. “I ended up in an engineering college like most lost souls of our generation. It was more of a way to manage the expectations of everyone around me than any real love for the sciences, you know. But through all those years, I was constantly restless, as if I were trying to walk a barricaded path set by someone else and completely out of my control. I really wanted to be free, to experience everything, to try new things. So I joined the entrepreneurial club at my undergraduate college.” Turns out, Salil had a real knack for it and he ended up selling the highest number of t-shirts ever for one of the events of the club. “From there on, it was all about how else can I push my boundaries, pick up things out of my comfort zone and that’s how I ended up being in that competition. Even though we didn’t win, I knew immediately that this was something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. This was it. This was my calling and I had to go”, I heard his determined voice perk up over the phone. Building things from scratch was something Salil fell in love with, but he had an appetite something else too – to break the status quo.
Somewhere around the third year of his college tenure, Salil understood that he was not cut out to be a classroom context. “For me, the steady stupor of lessons was not cutting it. I knew there was something more that I could do, something beyond that was waiting to challenge me to my real potential. And when I actually failed in one of the subjects that I could have easily passed, that was the final straw. It was suddenly clear to me that my grades were not going to define me for the rest of my life. It was what I wanted to do, what I chose to do. So, I made a decision to startup in college. I already had an idea that I wanted to bring to life, the one that we worked on at the Startup Weekend. I moved out of my college dorm room to the real life.”
That was the initiation of the ignition that fueled his dreams and passion from then on. It was the point when Salil said he knew he was finally in control of what he was doing, what he had actually wanted to do all along. But reality checks are often a way for life to throw us curveballs and although Salil was prepared for it, it still didn’t soften the blow. “Those first few years were hard. I seemed to be the only one who believed in what I was doing. Everyone else just thought I was just acting on some whim. My parents were not happy, my friends were concerned, my bank balance was questioning me. I knew it would take some hard work, but I had to be ready for the strong will too. Because everything that could go wrong, did!”, he reminisced ruefully. The startup idea fizzled out pretty soon after he came out of the college, he had a few other ideas that he wanted to try but he just didn’t get the right chance to bring them to fruition, he had to do freelance work just to keep up with the costs and he had to still keep pushing. He even went back to a corporate job in between for a brief while but immediately understood that, again, this was not he was supposed to do and came back to his entrepreneurial roots. Listening to him, I realized that when choosing to do what we love, yes it takes courage to take the next step, but it takes even more strength to keep going with the step after that and the step after that.
“It was tough, but it was my process. It was a conscious process. It was where I think I both found and built my passion. I cut out the options which were not working for me even if it meant that I had no safety net. It helped me drill down and focus more to make the things that I chose work. Maybe I always had a flair for connecting with people and being a risk-taker, but 80% of the skill set that I have formed now came from the circumstances. It’s because I chose to react that way to the situations. I chose to be with people who could make me better in those situations.” Salil went from there to another revelation that helped him understand a bit more what he exactly loved to do. During his journey, he found a few professional partners-in-crime and together they started ‘Our First Million’ – a YouTube channel focusing on your friendly-neighborhood millionaires who may never find their way into a Forbes list but had plenty to share from their own life experiences. They captured stories of grit and greatness that came in capsules, stories that were still relevant to someone who was looking to make that first start. Within eight months, the channel had picked up pace and achieved more than 1.5 Lac views, just through genuine, organic engagement. “It was like being introduced to someone you already knew but had forgotten, like the writing on the wall that had always been there but been a blur had become clear. I really loved content creation!”, he chimed.
From there it was a hop, skip and a jump to what brought me to him. Salil might have had to start right from scratch, but slowly and steadily, he is making his way to the top. Currently his capabilities are being used to implement critical marketing projects that will help get his company into the next stage of growth. Under his and his team’s leadership, Living Things is now a part of India’s leading tech Incubator, SINE IIT Bombay. It has been recognized by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India. When the pandemic hit, instead of looking to pad they profit margins, they recalibrated their focus to manage the situation, lend a helping hand wherever they could. He says that he has grown throughout his journey and now understands the importance of taking 100% accountability of what he does. “I was always blaming others when things went south in my life before, without getting a perspective of where they are coming from. But this journey of finding my passion has changed that in me. The biggest obstacle that was keeping me from doing what I loved was I, me, and myself. And that will stay with me forever. Because tomorrow I might wake up and want to pursue something different, but I will still be centered around that core philosophy. There is no ultimate destination that I see myself aiming for because in my mind, that doesn’t exist – for me at least. We are all a complex mixture of things and we are constantly evolving. But whether you are ready to take accountability of that is what makes you, you.” This whole justification of your actions is important for him because that is the big ‘Why’ behind everything to do. It is that conviction that is constantly driving him, fueled by his why, his sense of purpose.
It’s nine in the night now. There was an eerie silence on his end of the line as people had already shut their laptops for the day and were getting ready to shut themselves down too, but he was still going at it – partly for the work and partly for the obligation of this conversation. I could hear his voice over the phone with as much sincerity and spark as one might be after a cup of coffee on a brisk Monday morning and wondered where he got that persistence from. “Well, things are always going to be a rollercoaster you know. You will always have ups and downs. But I never beat myself up. I have always believed in my capacity to learn. I have faith that even if things go wrong, I can somehow still learn what I need to fix them. But I ensure that I stick to that positivity. So, if needed, I will shoot the messenger”, he calmly stated. I recoiled on the other end of the receiver. “Excuse me?”, I double checked, not knowing if I had heard it right or it was just plain wrong. “Shoot the messenger, you know”, he reiterated, “shoot the messenger bringing negativity into your life. Just immediately cut off people who are there to do nothing but add to your burdens. Who are just there to tell you, in comprehensive bullet points, everything that will go wrong. You cannot build anything with that kind of negativity. People will always question you but it’s plain and simple – start where you are, use what you have and do what you can. So. if someone says why would you even do that, you start with why not. ”
This is first in the series of The Passion Project. To know more about the author and the origination of this series, read here.
