Exactly Fifteen years ago a friend of mine and I got selected to take part in a neighborhood’s club car rally, for a 27 year old this was dream come true. I had just bought a new car from the success of my first business venture and wanted to flaunt it. A car rally was perfect, I started reading about racing, how to manage the clutch, cornering at fast speeds and watched hours of racing videos.
All excited we landed up early at the starting point. We were handed our instructions and to our amazement we were told that..it was not a speed rally. We were to follow the map, navigate to each check point and we cannot be early at any checkpoint else we would face penalty points !
Now our entire strategy was to change based on this new challenge. We threw our helmets in the back seat and out came the calculator & the navigation map.
Many times as Entrepreneurs, we make decisions based on our gut feelings..no logic or sense prevails. In this case we never assumed that it can be any other type of rally. We did a classic mistake of not going into detail. I learnt early the importance of attention to detail.
Once we re-focused ourselves back on the task shifting gears was easy, Ketan kept the time, bearing in mind the speed directives and along the way we felt more and more confident. Yes, we won the rally in the end.
This is a true story where we had to literally shift gears within seconds as we were flagged off.
