Before I knew what a balance sheet was, I knew what it felt like to lose in front of people who had come to watch me win. That is the first thing sport teaches, and it is the lesson business takes the longest to teach on its own.
I played seriously through my teens in a village nearly thirty kilometers from Midnapore. I was good — good enough that for a few years it looked like the way out. Then an injury ended it, and I spent a long time believing those years had been wasted.
The arithmetic of practice
They were not. Sport had already taught me that outcomes are lagging indicators. You do not become faster on the day of the race; you became faster in the four hundred mornings before it. Every business I have built since has run on that arithmetic. Clients see the result. They do not see the eleven months of unglamorous work that produced it.
Losing well
The second lesson is harder. In sport you lose in public and you are expected to shake hands afterward. When Umachi & Sons struggled, I already knew how to do that — to acknowledge the result honestly, look at what I had actually done wrong, and turn up the next morning.
Business rewards people who can lose without becoming smaller.
I still think of my injury as the worst thing that happened to me before I was twenty. I also think it is the reason I could survive everything that came after.