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𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝘀 -𝟳 The single most important quality you need to have and cultivate further is to get up and walk every time you fall down. I am writing this the day after I turned down an equity investor from whom we have been seeking funding for the last several months, due to irreconcilable differences on terms. But while that deal broke off at 10 pm on Monday night and on Tuesday morning I was at a breakfast meeting with another prospective investor. Likewise, one has to persist in terms of operational difficulties. Our expansion in Jharkhand state has seen many ups and downs due to the poor law and order situation there. In November, one of our field staff was shot dead by robbers. What did we do we did not pull out. The day after the cremation, a hundred BASIX field staff, led by all of us in the senior team, went out doing our regular work-originating loans, collecting repayments, providing technical and marketing assistance to customers, etc. But the second and equally important ability one needs to cultivate is the ability to learn from experience, from critics, from competitors, from failures, from summer trainees, from mothers-in-law and from regulators! Expert knowledge is useful, but increasingly has shorter and shorter shelf life. So what is permanent is the ability to understand a new situation and respond appropriately, using both learning from the past but also a fresh appreciation of the situation. Some of this comes from the self and some from others. This brings me to the third point. Entrepreneurship is widely misunderstood to be a personal trait. It is so, to some extent. But entrepreneurship is a social construction - it is a phenomenon where certain behaviours get expressed in certain individuals, due to the support of their "eco-system" - colleagues, family members, investors, regulators, competitors and customers. All of these interactions, cooked in the skull of the entrepreneur, make for the heady mix that all of you are after. So nurturing this eco-system and interacting with it are extremely important. 𝘽𝙮 𝙑𝙞𝙟𝙖𝙮 𝙈𝙖𝙝𝙖𝙟𝙖𝙣 / 𝘽𝙖𝙨𝙞𝙭 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙖