#28: Jaipur and I circa 2017 | #kurtaboy
Persistence: Story of first of 7 lessons Stories Worth Sharing taught me!
When building Stories Worth Sharing, we hosted at least one offline storytelling session every weekend somewhere in India for 102 weeks straight!
In the previous post, I shared 7 lessons that Stories Worth Sharing taught me. Next seven will share a story for you to enjoy based on every single note I made there!
If you have not checked , I recommend you visit it once for the context 7 Things Stories Worth Sharing taught me!
The first lesson was Persistence. This post is a story about how this got imbibed in the entire team. I did something that set an example for everyone on board to recognize and learn. What happened next?
Well, It established a culture of a session every weekend, a streak that went on for ~2 years. Figure all of it out by the end of this quick story!
July 30, 2017: We hosted the session in Chennai
August 13, 2017: blocked for the Delhi
August 20, 2017: Pune session
August 27, 2017: Already scouting for venue in Ahmedabad
In this well synced calendar, missing was the weekend after Chennai. The blank one! Since the August was busy, I thought it would be cool to have a chain with this missing calendar as a pearl of this string.
I vividly remember sitting in my living room on July 31 and scratching my head while staring at the screen. I was trying to fix this black dot. At around 2000 hours/ 08:00 PM, I contacted our Associate Partner in Jaipur.
Before this streak of 102 weeks started, we had done two sessions: Delhi (March '17) and Bangalore (June 2017).
A young lady who attended our session in Bengaluru took an initiative to take this concept to the city where she studies: Jaipur.
While she was enthusiastic in helping us add the Rajasthani capital on our map, in her words, she "lacked the desired skills to host". (She did not, as I later figured, but bit hesitant, just!)
Now come back to my living room. I explored prospects of a venue and marketing campaign to bring people in just four days. To my surprise, this introvert looking person was confident of both but...
...it came with two challenges:
She wanted someone from our core team to host it.
The venue owner wanted rent for 3 hours (ours was a free session to attend)
Determined to fix it, I negotiated the rent to ₹2,000/- as against their first ask. Now the problem was who hosts it?
By now, we are sitting on August 01 and time on watch reads 0100 hours. I immediately sent few SoS texts seeking help from friends across Indian universities if they could help us get someone to host it for us in Jaipur through their network.
After I posted this, two things happened:
A couple of people sent details of professional anchors who do it in exchange of money (and I had none to give. Free session, remember?)
I conceded no other person better than us to do this!
Boom, decision made!
I summoned my teammates in Delhi (we were three people core team then) to my place in Delhi on evening of August 4. Next morning, I took the wheel to drive all three of us to Jaipur.
We experienced a great time hosting in the town. We hosted some 30 people and got immense love. It was first time roaming around in the city later in the evening with new friends we had made at the session. We spent doing some weird shit like the one in image below at Nahargarh Fort; by the same evening, we were back in Delhi. (Had to prepare for the August 13 session of Delhi, sigh!)
What did we bring back?
1. Both my teammates saw me passionate about consistency. Later I took a backseat from active operations of the meetups to lead other instrumental projects in the company. However, this one thing we built as brothers in Jaipur stuck with everyone. One session every weekend, A MUST, for 102 weeks! No one else in India can boast of this :D
2. A kurta to flaunt at the next session in Delhi. Reply me bta sakte ho kaisa lag rha tha ye kurta! *wink wink*
Next week, I will tell you another fun story about lesson number 2:
You do not need (a lot of money) to startup!
STAY TUNED
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