Being an avid traveler the one thing that has been imprinted in hard rock in my mind is the fact that the world is an extremely diverse planet. With its deserts, plains, mountains, seas, oceans, rivers, canyons and lakes, it not only offers us a wide variety of resources but has also taught us to make the most of them.
Our early ancestors had this drive in them to find alternate solutions to any problem that they were faced with. Honing a scientific temperament, they observed, experimented, applied and learned to find a perfect solution to their problem.
For instance, when faced with the problem of finding materials to write on, different communities used different materials depending on what was available. While those in India used palm leaves or the birch bark, the Egyptians used a more available papyrus to create ‘paper’. Others also used hides and leather to write down their many thoughts and preserve them for future generations which otherwise might have been lost.
Therefore, what they practiced in the past was the concept of innovation and the constant effort to hone one’s problem-solving skills. Today, I see the same skills being passed down in the present generation, especially in the ones who have been sent to fend for themselves in the ever-increasing ‘student accommodations’ or ‘hostels’.
Forced to live out of a limited weekly allowance and scarce resources, ‘boarders’ come up with innovative ways to get their work done. This brings to mind one time that my friend had narrated to me the various uses of a clothes iron to a student in ‘boarding’. From being a bed warmer, clothes drier to a portable frying pan, an iron apparently has multiple uses that I as a layman could probably never have fathomed.
His hilarious escapades in boarding still bring to mind a movie I had watched where three Indian ‘engineering’ students had ‘saved the day’ by creating an inverter from car batteries and a suction machine using a vacuum cleaner and pressure gauge! Such is the power of human creativity to make the most of the resources at hand.
What I learned from this was that every solution has a problem, one needs to just focus on it and find the alternates without giving up on it.
This is what I have applied throughout my life as an entrepreneur. On the path to success, one will definitely come across a number of hurdles. There are two things one can do:
- Blame it on the availability of resources and give up on the same
- Find an alternate solution focusing on the resources at hand
The choice is yours. So gear up and make the right choice! After all, every problem always has a solution.
Cloverbites By Rupesh Sanghavi 
Leave a Reply