I have written until now of how my material self influenced my first start-up’s business leadership and the kind of organization we were aspiring to be in the early stages of our funding. But the reverse is also simultaneously true, i.e., the kind of organization we were gradually becoming and our experiences in leading the start-up had a profound influence on my ability to recognise the higher bird (Ātman) in us.

Through these experiences, start-ups enable great personal transformation for individuals who comprise the leadership. The more intense and challenging the crucible of business leadership, the greater the opportunities for deepening our recognition of Being. But this influence is difficult to disentangle from the everyday anxieties of the material self.

As I go over the detailed notes that I made during this period, I am struck by the extent to which my start-up and its business leadership became personalised for me. The company’s difficulty in understanding the needs of the customers in its domain became amplified as my lack of domain expertise in everything I did and in everything I had ever done in my life.

The company’s difficulty in generating investment or customer leads became magnified as my difficulty in relating to others throughout my life. The difficulties we had in recruiting and retaining new employees became my difficulty in working with teams and in delegating work to others. Business life had become personal, and business leadership shadowed my own sense of personal self.

I responded to these unremitting, overwhelming concerns in at least two ways. First, I planned incessantly. I constantly created different scenarios of the future, always making sure to have a worst-case scenario. The planning that I did above all was of ways to extend our runway, the most important term I obsessed over throughout my start-up life. It refers to the number of months that the start-up can survive without any additional funding or uncommitted revenue at current rates of spending (called burn rate) and with existing funds in hand.

The act of planning the future through numbers, events, imagined conversations, and anything else that I could get my mind around became both a source of temporary comfort and an obsession that created more discomfort eventually. It helped because it gave an outlet for the pressure building up in my mind. But it was only a paper model like the business models we had churned through and did not address the self ’s requirement for real and lasting comfort.

The repeated challenges of runway at the start-up brought into sharp relief what the self’s real need is. It reflects the kind of person we aspire to become - to be able to let go of the future, the regrets of the past, and the mistakes in the present and to allow the world to bring whatever it may to us. This surrender to the past, present, and future was my most difficult challenge at the start-up.

I recognized well at a cognitive level that we were designed by evolution to respond to the future’s uncertainty by imagining it in our minds and also that it is this very planning that makes us stumble in our search for happiness. At every crisis related to the start-up’s runway, I read and reread the many passages in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gītā that emphasized the sacrifice of the imaginative faculty in attaining happiness.

Nevertheless, I simply could not stop this incessant planning of the future, especially of the runway that we had. My notes are filled with the detailed plans of how the future could unfold for any particular problem. They testify to the obsessive fear that drove these plans in endless loops, an internal addiction to certainty that proved impossible to break.

But a second way in which I responded proved much more useful in the long run, even as it provided temporary relief in the present moment. Every anxiety or dissatisfaction that I had about how others and I were leading the company became an opportunity for motivating myself. I would repeatedly go back to the reasons why I had started the company and remind myself that these challenges (and even the start-up itself) were not ends in themselves.

I would tell myself that these challenges were means toward self-improvement and for being prepared for a larger battle to come. These reminders and exhortations produced a heightened state of consciousness in me that I can only call moving in the real sense. Especially when the pressure was intense, I found myself moved from my current sense of self, which cared only about being effective in business, to one that cared about the larger context in which I had founded the company.

While many of my writings and reflections from this period were naïve and sentimental, and almost all of them were certainly bad poetry, they served a crucial purpose in their ingenuousness. In the context of Beingful leadership, this heightened state of consciousness served the role of expressing my own indistinct recognition of the golden-hued bird. The company’s travails now had a broader perspective from which these specific difficulties seemed less important. These reflections helped me tremendously in coping with the enormous levels of stress, uncertainty, and self-chastisement of entrepreneurial life.

This second way of coping with past regrets, current mistakes, and future uncertainties also served another longer-term purpose. It created Being memory, specific ways in which I could access this heightened consciousness, especially when I was under great pressure. The repeated self-exhortations, the internal conversations with a higher self, the recall of dreams, the reminders of the motivation for starting the company, the mythological stories of the heroes of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gītā, and the desire for detaching from the outcomes of actions all became pathways of memory for expressing recognition of Being (however faint it often was) in my own unique ways.

In these ways, my general aspirations for a higher sense of myself that I had before starting the company became a source for slowly assembling a better way to experience my recognition of Being. It became the company’s greatest gift to me. Despite these experiences, I continued to struggle with the next set of practices related to Beingful leadership: being steadily and consistently anchored in this recognition of the higher bird.

Business Leadership to Recognize Being