By Rakesh Ahuja, DMM Founder
My DownloadingMyMind (DMM) idea is now in place. It has taken over two years to get here (mainly because of my technological illiteracy). It conforms to the vision I had in Landour in 2017. It is probably 90 % ok, but I now know that websites have to be continually improved week after week as new ideas and thoughts emerge to drive them forward in the marketplace.
So now where to from here? DMM is now drawing ‘hits’ on Google. I now have to advance the DMM project – advertising, enticing Angel Investors to invest, and getting professional advice to advance the DMM concept. These are the early days. Views you readers might wish to offer on improving the site and taking the DMM core propositions forward would be most appreciated.
Meanwhile, I recall the writing of the Stoic, Marcus Aurelius (“Meditations”), on the motives of people launching a new idea in the public place, and how they should deal with the results of their initiative:
“Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do;
Self-indulgence means tying it to things that happen to you;
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”
The point Aurelius makes is that an individual faces a unique problem when launching an idea. On the one hand, judging one’s well-being through the prism of Ambition or Self-indulgence, one looks to the marketplace, the outside audience, to validate one’s idea. And yet, on the other hand, one knows that sometimes an idea can be ahead of its time or is not fully understood by the external audience or one has not presented it well. History of innovation proves that the marketplace is not always the best judge of the value or quality of a new idea at a certain point in time.
Therefore, the inherent contradiction is that we want our idea/product to be validated and valued by the market, but not at the cost of the integrity of the idea. Therefore, one has no choice but to find the middle ground between the core of the idea and what the market wants to make it successful.
So? Aurelius advocates that all one can do is to take full credit for one’s initiative and effort, to be patient, not appreciate it too much, not depreciate it too much. And acknowledge that luck is integral to it all, and one has no control over that. In sum, the sane course is to accept that the results of the launched idea, positive or negative, are tied to one’s own actions and perceptions. Not to the views of the outside world.
My conclusion? DMM’s core value proposition is valid: All humans have an autobiography in their minds, but most do not have the platforms to tell their story. Scattered comments on social media, trying to express their minds, disappear into the ether within days. They do not tell the holistic story of who one is or was. Hence DMM’s Library of Minds, where one’s emotional and intellectual legacy remains stored indefinitely.
This self-reflective post is to acknowledge that having worked hard on the DMM project, my self-perceived well-being lies in the universal value of what I have launched – not the results, for better or for the worse.
