You either win or you learn but you never fail: Creator-Entrepreneur Deepak Pareek

Founding a startup has become a common dream for the majority of youth in India. When top global investors look upon our country, they see a large population withholding unimaginable potential. Those days are gone when entrepreneurship was explicitly linked with a particular product or service. As cutting-edge technology is on the rise, the art of content creation is becoming an integral part of entrepreneurship. Here the creators are marketing the commodity that is and will continue to remain a hit in the future which is – themselves!

Deepak Pareek started his entrepreneurial journey with his first startup venture, Career Keeda, where the idea was to impart profession-specific practical training.

Since this was his first venture, he had his fair share of wins and losses. At the end of the day, Deepak feels, “you either win or you learn”. He then went on to start another venture, Iceberg Creations (a media production house), where the goal is to work with brands, and focus on regional content as Deepak feels, “the scope of regional content in our country is massive!”

Here are 5 lessons that Deepak learned from his first entrepreneurial venture, which might be useful for you if you plan to start your own business.

Many startup founders get stuck thinking about the future embarrassment they might face if they fail while turning their idea into reality. Deepak says that “You will embarrass yourself when you start something new”. He believes that failure does not mean one step back rather it means one step forward as one can only become a better version of them when they stand up after falling.

When building a startup, the founder should be open-minded in their approach. If only Deepak had stayed adamant about pursuing CA and seeing it through till the end of being unhappy, he would not have a whopping audience of 137k on his Instagram page. The point is to enjoy what you do and to find out, what is ‘that’ exactly; one has to stay open to experimentation. 8/10 things might not work out for you, but the other 2 things might just do, as Deepak says, “Think Long Term, it is not a race, it’s a marathon!”

Any entrepreneur or content creator shall note that it’s not just 1 hardcore skill that will lead them towards success. The lesson lies in mixing that one hard skill with multiple relevant soft skills. For example, if Deepak’s field of profession is taken, that is, content creation, in here only creating the best piece will not drive traffic to the digital page, but knowing how to distribute that content or how to present it to the audience will widen its scope to go viral.

Deepak Pareek has highlighted that the most underrated strategy of all time is the ‘Art of follow-up’. It is one of the biggest mistakes many upcoming founders and entrepreneurs make. In today’s economy, collaboration is the key plus thus following up the un-replied direct messages and cold emails is a must because most of the time it goes unnoticed by the recipient.

Every professional should know about ‘Planning Fallacy’, what is it? It is nothing but the prediction of what amount of time will go into finishing a given task. In a startup there are several things to do, thus to always stay ahead of deadlines every founder or creator should keep a buffer period. “Take a little extra time in hand for finishing the task because there might be some unexpected things that we don’t take into account because of which it might cause a little delay”, says Deepak Pareek.

Deepak Pareek is an Entrepreneur, Content Creator and Keynote Speaker who hails from the city of joy, Calcutta, India. To know more, visit dkpareek.com