“I sold a township.”
Mr. Sumer Singh Saini of Riyasat Group said this during our conversation yesterday.
That one sentence stayed with me.
Not I bought a house.
Not I bought a plot.
Not I built a villa.
I sold a township.
Look at the unit of thought: a township.
I have spent my professional life as an employee. My environment has naturally trained me to think about responsibilities, targets, processes and execution.
But a business owner operates in a fundamentally different environment.
The biggest difference I am beginning to notice is ownership of risk.
An employee can have enormous responsibility, but ultimately the capital at risk belongs to someone else.
For the business owner, the consequences come home.
Capital gets committed. Salaries have to be paid. Customers have to be found. Receivables have to be collected. Mistakes consume real money. And if things work, the upside belongs to the owner too.
Perhaps that ownership of risk also changes the scale of thinking.
You stop thinking only about completing tasks and start thinking about assembling capital, people, land, customers and systems to create something much larger than what you could personally execute.
A township.
For a long time, I believed reading books was the best way to learn. I still believe reading is immensely valuable. But increasingly, I am discovering the power of proximity and emulation.
I can see it happening with my three-year-old son.
He learns by copying everything around him. But in just three years, he has copied so much, from so many different people, that now whenever we see him doing something, it often looks completely different and new.
The copying has blended into him.
If I want to understand ownership, risk and scale, reading about business owners cannot be my only input.
“I sold a township.”
Today, I don’t have the experience or skills to say anything remotely like that.
That gap fascinates me.
And that is precisely why I increasingly want to be around business owners—not merely to meet them, but to listen, observe, learn how they think and gradually become part of the conversations they are having.