Passion Guard

Wine vs Winery vs Wine Tech is my recent analogy for zeroing in on passion.

This happened during my grad school days when I took a Food Anthropology elective. I was/am fascinated by all things Michael Pollen and couldn't stop talking about food, cooking, recipes and cultures. As luck would have it, I live with a MasterChef at home - my mother. She can taste one bite of anything and identify all the ingredients and cooking styles. I grew up watching her cook from first principles, ratios, proportions, and elements. Everything she cooks is heavenly.

During my MBA days, I continued my lingering love for food anthropology and started a food startup as my dissertation project. My MVP had 423 active paying clients. I couldn't handle the delivery and the production volume.

Slowly, I developed the food business into a food platform even before Swiggy became cool using no code to manage the client asks, food quality and volume. So, the food business became a food tech business. I took the interest far and even ran a restaurant for a year or so.

Just because I loved food, I went into the food business and scaled using food tech. I did the same thing with design.
Just because I love design, I started a design consulting company, and the rest is history.

We love something so much that we start doing it as a business. It is a common pattern we all fall for. No one tells you what happens after the fairy tale endings of starting a business of your passion. Let me tell you today, 90% of the time we lose the heartfulness of the passion. We just push it because the resilience comes from the passion.

Truth to be told, after starting a design consulting company, I hardly had time to sit down and play with pixels. After starting a food business, I hardly had time to sit down and relish varieties of recipes.

I get 100+ ideas in a week, and I passionately discuss about them. The process of just discussing ideas gives me so much energy. Some ideas seriously make me think about a business and that is when my better half and my best friend warns me: "Taste wine and enjoy. Don't start a winery or a wine tech. You'll lose the beauty of enjoying wine."

That was a profound analogy and it saved me from investing my resources in several ideas that may be great but are not heartful to me. These days, I say no from my heart because I don't want to spend a few weeks of my 4000-week life on things that are not heartful to me.

Hopefully, this gives you the courage to hold onto tasting amazing wine as a passion and not starting a winery just because you're passionate about wine.

🥂 to passion!