Mindset vs Education – Which Matters More in Business?
A few months ago, I was invited to the Praxis Business School to attend a Startup Brilliance Meet, an award we, Incfrog, won in 2025. When my turn came to talk about my company and share my thoughts on business and entrepreneurship with the students, already a bunch of other business owners had delivered their speeches. I turned around to see the tired and ‘almost’ exhausted faces of the students who sat there for over two hours, now waiting for the event to be over.
It is always a challenge to cater to an audience who does not know you that well, and apparently not even much interested to listen to you but you have a duty not to give a speech, but to deliver value. When I took the microphone, I stole Emiway Bantai’s phrase “kya bolti public!”. That was my opening monologue while tapping the mic! The students laughed but I got their attention. “That’s what I do for a living” I exclaimed.
I think business is more about the mindset of building something worthwhile and generating revenue in the process. A person can earn money in a lot of ways. I had open job offers from big companies; I am not suggesting that a job is a easy thing to do, but I chose a tougher path to start my own company. When I started in 2007, my first venture was Digisys which eventually became a roadside shop after an year that sold computer parts and inside I used to have a small photography studio for instant photos. I used to visit people’s homes to repair computers, until I learned that I could outsource that part, and focus on the product business. In 2013 I shut it down to focus on my website design and digital music distribution business. In all those years, starting from 10-30 rupees per day to reaching 500 rupees per day was a learning curve that not only taught me to make myself a better entrepreneur but also helped me expand my vision. I could have joined an MNC like my friends and could have made a comfortable salary at the end of every month – but the mindset shifted long ago for me, when I learned it the hard way that business can make you rich, but the real wealth is freedom.
My mother slipped and fell off the stairs, got seven stitches on her head, while I was juggling between the shop and a new job in Salt Lake Sector 5 back in 2010. When my manager asked me to come to office the next day, I felt like it was a privilege to be available for my own mother to take care of her – a privilege that was controlled by my manager and not me. I left the job just 1.5 months into it. I made sure that I am never comfortable with trading my freedom in return of absolutely anything! THAT – is a mindset. I didn’t set out to earn money, I set out to be free, to be location independent, to build real solutions for real problems, to create wealth, to create a legacy that could feed several families in the time to come. So with every stage of brain expansion, your investment on yourself increases, your goals change and that 500 rupees per day average doesn’t make you happy anymore.
One day I sat and started calculating what do I need to do to earn not by the hour, but by the minute! That called for creating systems in the business. And that’s how you identify gaps in business and find apt solutions. The idea was, what if I can earn 500 rupees not in a day but every minute – now that changes the game, doesn’t it? It changes all the questions you have been asking yourself, all the perspectives you have been looking at your life from.
Then came the need for education. I wanted to learn something that I didn’t know and business exposure was not enough anymore. I wanted to learn how to build sustainable models, how to think innovatively to create real life solutions. I started doing various online courses, few of which were good, but not good enough. Then I signed up for Harvard Business School. That changed my entire perspective of problem solving and scenario analysis.
What I am trying to say is – you first need the mindset, then the education polishes your mindset with the elements you need to excel. There’s always a counter argument that says, education might expose a person to newer concepts, which is also true – but to be honest, studying business in one thing; running a business is totally different – real challenges, real contingencies, real people. A person can be great in business without any formal education in business, but a business management student might not be that great in business. It’s about the acumen, and finally it’s about the mindset.
At Praxis, I explained about these concepts to the students, and many of them actually agreed that they were sitting in a management studies college because their parents wanted them to. The problem here is not that they are following their parents’ will – the problem here is if sitting in a five star infrastructure, getting the best of professors and industry insights cannot light up the curiosity in a person, then that person can never understand what ‘business’ really is.
