The Monk & The Riddle

 

“Imagine I have an egg and I want to drop the egg three feet without breaking it. How do I do that?”

The riddle started the book and got me thinking while reading it, wishing to find something within the lines to decipher it. However, it didn’t come to me until the end of the story. We’ll get to that later.

The topic of entrepreneurship always interests me, and this book has been a delightful read, thoughtful and inspiring. It takes you throughout the journey of Lenny, an entrepreneur scraping his way to breathe his venture into life. Along the way, he bump into many walls, but then again, they are there to teach him, they are there to show how badly somebody wants something. And indeed, he pushes his way to finally win the funding from a VC.

In between, he learned that though a start-up is made surely to earn profit, he needed something more than just money as the fuel to keep him fired up. A business is merely a financial institution. There must be something more, a purpose that will sustain him when things look bleakest. Something worthy of the immense time and energy, even if it fails. It’s not only the finance, it’s the romance.

In essence, the book inspire me about process. That our primary measure of success should be our excellence – not simply the spoils that come with good fortune. Or in Komisar’s words: “You don’t want to entrust your satisfaction and sense of fulfillment to circumstances outside your control. Instead, base them on you’re the quality of what you do, and who you are, not the success of the business per se.”

Because, when all is said and done, the journey is the reward. There is nothing else. Reaching the end is, well, the end.

"If the egg must fall three feet without a crack, simply extend the trip to four."