The safe road can actually be the risky road. This is something I have tried to follow in my many years in advertising when marketers wanted to tread the trodden, be safe, do what has been tried and tested. My submission has always been that if you walk on someone else’s footsteps, you leave none of your own. If you travel the road less travelled, chances are that you might be on to something and someone, somewhere will stop, turn around and look at what you are doing. By making your own footsteps, you tend to stand apart from the crowd and often end up creating something new and unique.
Oftentimes, people disregard this dictum, and then weeks and months later wonder what went wrong. Why something that should have taken the world by storm, turned out to be little more than a storm in the proverbial tea cup ... if that. If only people had the guts to risk a little bit more. History is made by people who tread off into the unknown, with little more than a flicker of hope and a dream. Of course, I am not suggesting fanciful wishes with little in terms of an edifice. What is required is a solid foundation, a well thought out and articulated plan, a measured plan of action, with each step a concerted one, deliberated upon, with safety clauses in place. The world is full of people trying to make a better mousetrap. Even if you come up one (which is yet to happen) you will still remain number two.
How many things have really changed the world? Not many. The wheel, many centuries ago. Electricity. Now the internet and mobile telephony. The computer has not changed much from three decades or so ago. Sure, it has become faster, but what changed the way we use computers was Apple. The Macintosh and Desktop Publishing changed the world. DOS gave way to Windows. With all the advances in science and technology over the past hundred years, little path breaking inventions have happened.
Let us all try and be entrepreneurs and not traders.
Another analogy to the Safe/Risky story is Cheap/Expensive. Save a penny to lose a pound. Compromises. Cost cutting. Finding the cheaper alternative. For many of us this is how we live our lives. And I not talking about those who believe in conspicuous consumption, that is different story. I am talking about our professional lives ... and sometimes the choices we make in our personal lives. A shirt worth Rs 100 will not look as good or last as long as a short that costs Rs 500. The latter will make you look better and last more than five times the duration. Not a good idea.
I have been filming lately for a television series and given budget constraints have had to be ‘creative’ in spending. And I have just accepted (I realised some time ago) that a lot of what I have already shot is just not good enough and I have to re-shoot. Expensive. Time and money. Both that could have been better spent. If only one had invested a little more time and money in the initial stages all this heartache could have been avoided. Lesson learned. Cheap can actually turn out to be quite expensive. One might get over extended in the short run, by in the long haul, it is money well spent, it ends up showing in the final product and ultimately it pays back. German engineering versus third world assembly lines. And the end consumer gladly forks out a premium for better quality. Quality that is ensured by not being cheap in the first place.
Being cheap, more often than not, turns out to be more expensive in the long run. Like being safe actually becomes risky as you travel down the road. So be aware of the pitfalls and make the right choices, take the correct decisions, even if it means going off the beaten path, even if it means scraping the bottom of the barrel. There is no shortcut to any place worth going, but then the road to a friend’s place is never too long. There is a friend waiting at the end of the road, do not short change him!
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