Book Notes: Dream With Your Eyes Open

Dream With Your Eyes Open: An Entrepreneurial Journey by Ronnie Screwvala originally published in 2015, is a biography detailing the journey of a first-generation entrepreneur from Mumbai.

Through simple narrative, Ronnie is successful in putting us in the backseat of his entrepreneurial journey starting from his ventures in school days to his second innings.

“Good luck can be enticed by accepting opportunity” — Book: The Richest Man in Babylon Lazer brushes, his first venture in his 20s happened simply by he choosing to open the door when the opportunity knocked.

Lucky are the ones who choose to accept opportunities. Throughout his journey, we will see many opportunities knocking on his door to which many would have just chosen to ignore or won’t have dared to open. But he dared to open and ride along with the opportunity. Some gave him fruition and some gave lessons.

When in doubt, always ask questions without worrying about what people will say or think. When you are starting out you have nothing to lose. What’s the worst that can happen? They’ll say no? Who cares? As with opportunities, it all comes down to either fruition or lessons. Just Ask.

Questions for defining target demographic:

• Who are my target consumers — age, gender, socio-economic, status, education?
• Are they going to be spenders or savers?
• What and how are they going to consume over the next five years and more?
• How do they move? Communicate? Stay in touch with the world?
• How (and how well) are they going to keep up with technology and social and media spaces?
• What will their daily lives look like?
• And, most importantly, what impact and role do I want to play in all this?

To make innovation and disruption first understand the market inside out

Excuses reflect a low level of ambition and a lack of confidence in your own ability and potential.

Ambition leads to sacrifices: Those with more ambitious goals will generally be more willing to make sacrifices to reach those goals.

While pioneering Cable TV service in India — “If I had not personally gone for all those sales calls — Where some didn’t want to even let us through the door, and many asked us to come by after 9:00 p.m. — the idea of dual pricing would not have popped into my head.”

In the early days of UTV — “We just recognized a rare opportunity and seized it.”

Getting into a deal to produce animation series even before having an animation facility — “I agreed that we would deliver a trial order of twenty-six episodes of one of their up-and-coming series for production in our yet-to-be-created studios”

If my entrepreneurial DNA hadn’t compelled me to keep the scale at the top of my mind, I may not have taken up that initial contract without an animation facility. Nor would I have brought in global talent and scaled with hundreds of animators

On negotiation with Vijay Mallya for acquiring Vijay TV — “scale is a reality only if you’re always looking forward and not in the rear-view mirror”

M. Night Shyamalan has a reputation as a quirky, eccentric character who listens to criticism but understands and trusts his own disruptive creativity.

The external view is one facet, but at the end of the day, it boils down to your call as a leader.

Sometimes just asking the right questions presents you with half the solution.

Failure never stopped anybody who didn’t want to be stopped.

Any idea that takes three years from conception to launch risks being outdated for its core audience.

General George Patton saying — “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking”

Envisioning your startup or your established company as the Next Big Thing is tempting and dangerous.

Not all great ideas succeed. Plan for failure. Embrace failure.

Failure is a comma, not a full stop.

Survival begins with knowing and accepting failure.

The only question you need to answer is: When I fail, how will I respond?

Every failure, far from being an impediment, can open the door to a treasure trove of learning.

Be clear about what failure means to you.

When you experience a setback, you reconsider, recalibrate, and rebound.

Most of your critics have never created or built anything, nor will they ever understand the challenges and great satisfaction of steering a ship to its destination. Even so, they act as though they’re the experts in the room.

Let criticism and public failure strengthen you, not diminish you.

The art of recalibration requires confidence and the courage of conviction.

Embracing failure opens doors.

Smart entrepreneurs pivot.

At the end of the day, you’re still here, with the courage and the confidence to write your own story — the one about how you took a few missteps on your journey and, in the end, succeeded anyway.

Trends, unless acted upon, just remain ideas.

Entrepreneurs don’t worry about whether or not the world is flat. They’re too busy building businesses.

On second innings — “now that I have some breathing room, I’m right back where I started from. The entrepreneur’s circle of life”

True entrepreneurs, whether successful or struggling mightily, don’t simply disappear.

Success comes from harnessing ambition, hunger, passion, and potential.

I choose to paint my own dream. I’ve never regretted it.

Worrying about the past only wastes time in the present.

I am too busy working on my own grass to notice if yours is greener.

Growing up watching & listening to TV channels like UTV, Hungama, MTV, and falling in love with movies like Barfi, makes this book both a nostalgic and invaluable read as Ronnie goes through detailing his steps and missteps in all his ventures.

A true inspiration and a wake-up call to start Dreaming With Your Eyes Open.