Homi Bhabha knew he was in danger as he sowed the seeds for India’s nuclear proliferation. Leaving Cambridge behind for a country where funds depended on the camaraderie you held with the imperial rulers was no easy task, but Bhabha did leave. He knew his scientific pursuits would suffer back in India, but he still made the choice. The struggle was not entirely because of India being an imperial state. Even after India’s independence, there were a thousand problems to solve in every direction, and Bhabha’s aspirations were not a priority. Nuclear proliferation and launching satellites are a luxury a country being reborn post-independence just months back can’t take on its plate.
This story is not about Bhabha. It’s about the underlying theme - The relentless pursuit of excellence.
When a genius has their back against the wall, remarkable things happen. Such is their nature, and Bhabha was one. Bhabha started by demonstrating how nuclear reactors could solve India's energy needs and went out of the way, tip-toeing on international geo-political issues, collaborating with scientists worldwide in that era of telegrams and telephone calls. Ofcourse, the energy needs were just a starting point because Bhabha was of the opinion that peace can be attained only when there is equal power on both ends. His true belief ever since the first nuclear attack happened in 1945 was that war is a choice nations engage in because they think they have the upper hand. Since an atomic bomb was not what India wanted to talk about after the independence in 1947, Bhabha waited for the right moment. And that moment came. After India's defeat to China in 1962, when the attack happened without India having done anything, top leaders realised that the bomb had become necessary.
Necessity breeds invention. India’s attempt at building a nuclear bomb was finally set in motion. Ofcourse, those in power did whatever they could to stop India, such as restricting access to weapon-grade plutonium via international pressure, threats and whatnot. Our genius had his back against the wall again and figured out a way to produce weapon-grade plutonium indigenously. Bhabha was quite a prominent scientific figure, and his intelligence and self-reliance upset some powerful people. Ultimately, he died in a plane crash, which allegedly was a murder plot.
I can think of a hundred other stories like that of Bhabha. For example, Leonardo da Vinci jumped from one invention to the other, sometimes termed a genius and sometimes a traitor. However, he did not work on new things so others could applaud him. He worked to meet his standards. Michael Jordan played the best game of his career a hundred times only until he stepped foot on the court again for the next game. There are countless such examples, but the common thread tying most of those examples would be the same – the pursuit of excellence.
Excellence is never a destination. It’s like an aeroplane flying between continents, where each continent represents a tentative destination. As soon as it lands, it’s assigned a new sector. There is no concept of the final destination when it comes to excellence. That got me thinking about how visionaries set their goals. Would Homi Bhabha have stopped if the bomb had been achieved early on in his lifetime? Certainly not. He would have crafted a new vision. Probably, that’s why we call them visionaries.
This is probably also why visionaries are rarely happy for a long period. They know they have achieved more than most could ever hope for, but their race is not against others but against the version of themselves. Visionaries tend to be very hard on themselves.
“Do you think you’re proud of something you have achieved?” My wife popped this question to me just this weekend. Before I could even internalize what the true answer was, came another question. “What’s your dream?” I realized I had never settled on one true destination. Dreams are truly dreams when they are about unlocking something impossible today. Otherwise, it’s just a plan. I had a lot of plans to achieve various milestones. And in retrospect, proud is a word I would associate a few achievements with. But I look forward to scaling what I’m doing every day I wake up.
Maybe this is what the founder of Taoism, the renowned philosopher Lao Tzu, meant when he uttered, “Enjoy the journey, not the destination.”
I am an entrepreneur, and every day, I wake up looking forward to a future that doesn’t yet exist. We’re trying to make data democratized. Simply put, we believe anyone should be able to derive intelligence from data, irrespective of background. Every day, I have a destination in mind and more than often, that destination keeps shifting. Sometimes, it’s just a tiny blob of thought floating in my head, but I actively work on making it more and more concrete. Sometimes, blobs burst, and sometimes they manifest. More often than I can comprehend, my destination has changed. What remains constant is my determination to rally everything within me, no matter how tentative the destination may be. It’s natural for someone in my shoes to think deeply about the best way to navigate this ever-evolving landscape.
So, what makes visionaries, visionaries?
This past week, I’ve been introspecting on what defines the lives and mindsets of people who excel remarkably. What made Homi Bhabha, Homi Bhabha? How would I have reacted if I was told that a nuclear program made no sense because there are other, more important expenses such as grain and milk production in Infant Independent India? Can I draw a parallel to what I, as a founder, have to go through when I face rejections? Be it related to a VC saying; I don’t deserve what I’m seeking or be it a customer saying my product solves for nothing?
As an entrepreneur, I’m surrounded by demonstrations of what some people call success. For some, it's a billion dollars in net worth. For others, it's fame. Some think it’s the freedom to do whatever they want, which largely is tied to their financial achievements. Some others think it’s about creating a product others admire. Some find their success in helping others. Some find it in buying things they always felt alien to. Some find success in building a house next to an ocean cut off from everything else in the world, and some may find success in showing off what they have achieved. Deep down, probably all these definitions of success are also borrowed.
If I try templatizing what they did for my journey as a software entrepreneur, I would mostly land on a version of this. First, build a product that the world needs. To discover what the world needs, talk to the people. Once you have the product, work on distribution and make sure you start with people who truly need what you’ve built. And oh, make sure you’re spending as much time marketing it because without marketing, how are people going to discover the product?
From the sidelines, it’s easy to develop models that likely will result in my success. However, it is only when you get your hands dirty you realise plans never get executed the way you wanted them to, and often, the best learnings are found in the archives of failures. Unfortunately, as a founder, I’m more surrounded by stories and logos of success than by stories and logos of failures, even though for every successful founder, 99 others fail. In my case, building something others need is not good enough because I’m building in a domain where there are alternatives available, and when it comes to making decisions, a ton of variables pour in. So, naturally, a good starting point for any template I make would be to run it by the thousand instances where someone failed doing precisely all the things that I am doing now. Eventually, I will probably realise that until it works, it’s all just someone else’s story. In the process, I will likely find my unique way of succeeding, and someone will make a template out of it.
What is it that gave Homi the energy to go through the ups and downs of his journey? It is easy to err his achievements as a mere result of other developments in the world. When Bhabha was making a case for a nuclear innovation, Oppenheimer was working on the infamous atom bomb that was dropped in Japan. But what is just this coincidence that made Bhabha, Bhabha? Definitely not! From a distance and retroactively, it’s easy to pinpoint every achievement as an outcome of being at the right place and at the right time. However, it is only the protagonist who truly knows what it is like.
The more I think about it, the more I realize. Ultimately, it all boils down to one thing – Determination.
Determination is nothing other than wilful stupidity paired with discipline. Chances are that if every legend ever born were to be reborn, there would be very few changes in how their life shapes up except for the things they would eventually become known for. It takes a certain degree of stupidity to be so convinced about the vision that come what may, whatever the hurdle, the only response is going to be to recalibrate and work hard. Some people are naturally more determined, but determination is partly a factor of how we grow up. Determination is also of particular relevance when there are new variables unfolding every other day, such as with entrepreneurs and someone like Homi Bhabha, who had it all other ways than easy.
It is important to highlight what discipline means in this sense. Discipline not just of routine but of not giving up when things go wrong. In the case of Homi, he had enough reasons to shut the shop. Research and Development agencies worldwide were ready to hire him. Bhabha would probably have lived a more lavish life had he succumbed to the temptation of settling for the best outcome, which gives some hurdles. In fact, with success, determination naturally increases because the goal is more within reach. However, with success, the temptations also increase. So, there has to be a conscious choice of enhancing discipline.
This is where our choices matter, and unlike determination, which sometimes may depend
on factors such as how we were raised, choices are a hundred percent ours to make. In Bhabha’s case, the determination was not just to work on nuclear technology but to have nuclear proliferation in India.
When determination gets paired with discipline and our choices, beautiful things happen.
It is this determination that gets termed as mindset. It is this determination that gets termed as hustle or hard work. It is this determination that gets termed as genius and eventually, with time, may start to look like talent. It is also this very determination that sometimes gets referred to as insanity. It is this determination that makes bets on people and their success worthy. It is this determination that defines the lifetime achievements of many.
It is this determination that has shaped our world into what it is. For everything that once looked impossible, someone was determined to change the course. It is this determination that takes the form of Ikigai. It is this determination that Oscar Wilde refers to when he says, “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.
So the question is – How determined are you?