Why do I want to become an entrepreneur?
It's a very simple question which for me isn't so easy to answer in a very concise way. I could probably write a 100-page essay on this topic, but to put it very simply, I want to become an entrepreneur because I have a fundamental need to not just change the world, but to save it, and I believe that founding my own start-up is the best way for me to do so.
In this entry I will be talking about the first part of that sentence - How I came to realize that my sole purpose of existence is to "save the world" i.e. make the world a fundamentally better place, namely by bringing opportunities to those most in need of them.
There was a point in my life, during my junior year of college, where I hit an emotional and psychological low point in my life. At the time I was diagnosed with a mild form of clinical depression. I went on some meds and fortunately it was right around winter break so I was able to take a break from the daily pressures and stressors of school and life and just think about how I might've gotten to this point.
Looking back now, I'm able to say that the reason I had gotten to that point was because I had lost all sense of purpose in my life. I felt like everything I did was without any real purpose, any real end. I felt like I was always just going through the motions, and that everything I did was only because society said that someone like me was supposed to act like that.
Fortunately, that low point was the beginning of a gradual turnaround for me, in which I slowly but surely was able to find meaning in my life, and I was slowly but surely able to figure out what I was put on this Earth to achieve and what I would have to do to get there.
They say that if you want to figure out what you're meant to do in the future, you first have to look back at your past and the natural story that you have weaved for yourself over time. And at the time I needed that really badly. I needed to figure out what I was passionate about and what I was meant to do, because I just had no clue, I had nothing to live for and this lack of purpose was slowly killing me inside.
And so over the next few years I started looking back at my life and analyzing everything I'd been through since I was a small child. I looked at what I had always enjoyed in my life, what I had always hated, things I had thought I would enjoy but ended up hating, and things I thought I would hate but ended up enjoying. I looked at the moments where I had felt the happiest in my life and tried to figure out what had caused it, and I looked back at the lowest points in my life, where I had felt most miserable and worthless and empty inside, and again I tried to figure out what the root cause(s) might have been.
After all this analysis I started to see some common themes emerge from my life, these little recurring patterns which you lose sight of and forget about in the day-to-day mundanity of life, as the days and the weeks and the months pile on and blend into each other and you totally forget who you hoped to be and what you had hoped to become when you were young and still "unadulterated" by the pressures and expectations of adults and of society as a whole.
I realized that the one driving force behind every happy and sad moment in my life, the one determining factor which came up time and time again no matter how much I may have blocked out from my memory, was this - I am physically and emotionally unable to be truly happy unless I know that I am somehow making many other people happy first. It was that simple. The happiest moments in my life had always been when I knew that I was making others happy, and on the flip side I had always been most miserable when I had felt that I was living life for myself and for my own wealth, my own comfortable lifestyle, and my own future irrespective of anyone else's.
It all made so much sense, and it explained so much about why I had felt a certain way in certain moments of my life.
It explains the time when I was in the third grade and my school was holding a fundraiser for UNICEF. I was so saddened and distraught when I find out what UNICEF was for, that while other kids gathered up spare change and a few dollars of contributions from people they knew, I went a more extreme route and simply took the $60 or so dollars of allowance I had saved up until then to buy a new Super NES videogame for myself, and donated it all to UNICEF, even though my parents were insisting that I didn't have to donate so much, that even $10 or $20 would have been a lot. I absolutely loved videogames back then and I had saved that money for months on end (which for a child is an eternity), and yet something compelled me to stubbornly refuse my parent's urging and instead go all or nothing with my donation.
It explains my extreme (and some would say absurd) love of superhero films and superhero mythology in general. Anyone who knows me will have heard me tell them of how I have watched the film "Batman Begins" more than 100 times start to finish, easily. And that doesn't take into account the times I'll watch certain parts of key scenes of the movie when I don't have time for the whole thing. I've done this for other superhero movies that I really like as well, yet it's something I never do for any other kind of movie. Something about superheroes strikes a chord deep within me that even I might not have been fully cognizant of until recently. I realize now that I feel a sense of kinship with these fictional heroes because of their self-sacrifice, the overwhelming sense of duty and responsibility that they must live with, and their daily struggle with forgoing a normal life for the sake of a greater good.
It explains why when I got a serious girlfriend in college, I felt so happy and yet so sad at the same time. I was happy because I had a met a great girl who was perfect for me in a lot of ways and who accepted me for all my flaws and eccentricities. But at the same time, I always felt an incessant tinge of sadness, not because of anything she had done, but because I realized that the more happy and fulfilled I was with her, the less focused and motivated I was on helping to save the world. The more I ended up enjoying a normal life, the less I would be able to fulfill my "superhero duties." I've always had this weird tendency where I feel that I don't deserve to be happy or comfortable or fulfilled when there are so many people out there who go to sleep at night hungry and impoverished, physically and emotionally abused, hopeless and desperate. That's why I don't sleep on a bed (random fact about me), and that's why I felt so ashamed and guilty of allowing myself to become happy and complacent while doing less and less towards doing what I was meant to be doing.
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Hope you are enjoying my "Superhero Backstory" so far! Due to the excessive length of this entry, I've broken it up into two parts. Stay tuned for the next installment where I talk about how I came to discover my own various "superpowers," how I plan on using them, and the things one must do in order to unlock the superhero within each of us.
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