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Key Takeaways Genuine curiosity can sometimes be better than expertise.
The best teachers are on the ground, not just in the boardroom.
Integrity is the backbone of a successful business.
What’s your relationship with uncertainty? I come from a part of the world where it’s good sense to cling to certainty.
For most of my life, I stuck to the safe road. By my early 30s, I’d built SEO Corporation, which grew into a solid digital marketing company with steady clients and decent margins.
But even comfort has a way of making you restless inside. So I’d often go hiking in the Himalayan hills just to clear my head. During one trek in Uttarakhand, something happened that’s stayed with me.
Our group stopped at a hillside hamlet outside Chamoli, where our local guide Vijendra pointed out bundles of dried stalks. “That’s hemp,” he said. “Strong fiber. But nobody wants the stalks. It mostly gets burned or left to rot.” I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a story in that waste pile. Even when back in my Delhi office, my mind kept drifting to those hemp stalks.
Even though I had zero background in materials science, but I knew two things:
There was untapped value in those stalks.
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