While it may seem from my bio that I have never really failed, the reality is that I have failed far too many times to remember.

The first two decades of my life were littered with failures so serious that my father told me that he was scared that he’ll have to provide for me for life and my girlfriend asked me how I’ll provide for her if we were married (another girlfriend asked me the same question less than two years back).

At my IIM Bangalore interview, I forgot where I was and talked for a full five minutes about why IIM Kolkata was the perfect business school to study marketing.

At Tata Motors, I think my boss was the only person who really liked me. Everyone else only tolerated me because I put in long hours, negotiated ruthlessly, and got things done.

Some of the cool digital marketing initiatives I led at Tata Motors on Indica V2 Xeta and Indica Vista (also see) almost didn’t happen, at least on the first attempt.

The first startup I attempted — a city-centric citizen journalism community called DesiBlogging (imagined as a hybrid of MetroBlogging and Instablogs) — existed for three months and had exactly three users.

The first time I decided to put in my papers and become an entrepreneur, my business plan for an Indian social media agency — Buzznomics — fell apart at the last moment because the rest of the team backed out.

Before I left Mumbai, I made plans to collaborate with two friends on their two different (super-cool) startups as part of my research but realized that I couldn’t find a large enough overlap between my research and their startups.

Many times, I have started podcasts, vidcasts and blog series and left them midway because the rest of my life caught up with me.

I have 280 starred unanswered e-mails in my mailbox, I haven’t really written anything for ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’ in the last three months, I haven’t yet put together the reading material for the course I am teaching in two months, I don’t yet have a team or a line of code for MobiChange, and I haven’t ticked off a single item from my 30 by 30 list.

The list of my failures is long and I am too self-conscious to talk about some of my most shameful personal and professional failures.

The interesting thing is that, after each failure, I have smiled at the mirror privately or laughed at myself publicly, admitted that I failed and moved on to new iterations, or to new projects. The interesting thing is that something good has come out of each of these failures.

IIMB not only accepted me but also put me in the list of top twenty entrants. DesiBlogging inspired my chapter in the first Age of Conversation book. Buzznomics inspired my chapter in the second Age of Conversation book. All my failed collaborations resulted in references for the Yahoo! Fellowship. Tata Motors not only gave me five big roles in five years but also a year-long sabbatical for my fellowship.

Going by this track record, I’m hopeful that all the projects I’m working on at present will also turn out fine, even if they fail.

So, even when I didn’t really know it, my two mantras have always been “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” and “Fail Early, Fail Often”.

Here’s a video of Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address where he quoted the farewell message in the last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog and asks the students to “stay hungry, stay foolish” —

Also see Rashmi Bansal’s new book Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish that tells the “inspiring stories of 25 IIM Ahmedabad graduates who chose to tread a path of their own making”.

Finally, do check out Ashish Sinha’s post on TriedPool (as against DeadPool) and attend Kiruba Shanker’s FailCamp unconference “where people get-together to share and learn from failures”.

I grew up in a rather religious family. There was a prayer room in my grandparents’ house in Munger and both Ma and Baba prayed for at least an hour every morning. I remember standing outside the prayer room as a small child, waiting for my grandparents to step out and hand me the prasad. Even my parents had a small wooden temple in their house in Patna and my father would fold his hands and stand in front of it for half a minute before leaving for work every morning. When we had visitors, we took them to the big Hanuman temple near the railway station. When we traveled to another city, we visited all the famous temples. We watched Mahabharat and Ramayan on Doordarshan (and I read all the Amar Chitra Katha comics). We celebrated all the Hindu festivals. We cheered when the VHP activists demolished the mosque at Ayodhya.

So, there was nothing in my childhood that could explain my atheism. Still, I grew up strangely unmoved by religion, even a little repulsed by its extreme fundamentalism, its trite rituals and its crass commercialization.

As an adult, I struggled with my atheist label. I wanted to believe in God. I tried to believe in God. I attended an Art of Living course, but could not surrender myself to Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. I practiced Iyengar Yoga, but benefited more from it physically than spiritually. I read ‘The Secret’ — and realized that I was already using it — but chose to read it as a secular text. I dated a devout Catholic for a year and a half, started reading the Bible and attended the Joyce Meyer Ministries Conference in Mumbai, but couldn’t accept the idea of repenting for my sins.

So, I was as shocked as my friends when I woke up one morning and sent out this Twitter prayer –

I have been walking in darkness for far too long. Dear God, forgive my sins and help me step into the light. Amen.

I’m a big believer in synchronicity. I asked for the best year of my life, and it was delivered to me. I have much more than I need, my heart is overflowing with gratitude and my energies are dedicated to a purpose that is bigger than myself. I’m more open than I have ever been before and I feel that I’m ready to surrender myself to God -

Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee;
Take my moments and my days – let them flow in ceaseless praise,
Let them flow in ceaseless praise.

Take my silver and my gold – not a mite would I withhold;
Take my intellect and use every pow’r as Thou shalt choose,
Every pow’r as Thou shalt choose.

Take my will and make it Thine – it shall be no longer mine;
Take my heart – it is Thine own, it shall be Thy royal throne,
It shall be Thy royal throne.

Take my love – my Lord, I pour at Thy feet its treasure store;
Take myself – and I will be ever, only, all for Thee,
Ever, only, all for Thee.

(From today’s Sunday service at Grace DC.)

The only problem with being your truest self is that there are multiple selves within you –

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

– and your truest self is often not your best self.

Your truest self is the sum total of your past, your best and worst moments, your biggest triumphs and your most abject failures. Your truest self is like a difficult lover; it’s the self that you most love and most loathe, because it’s the self that’s most you, with all your potential and all your imperfections. It’s easy to become a slave of your truest self because it’s easy to forget that even though your truest self is the sum total of your past, it’s only one of your possible future selves.

Yes, that’s what your truest self is: one out of the infinite number of your possible future selves. Your best self is also one out of your infinite future selves, but it’s the self that rises about your past mistakes and present imperfections and embodies the best of your talents and motivations. It’s the self that steps out of the shadow of your truest self every once in a while and surprises you with its pure, perfect splendor –

Wow! Was that me? Yes, that was me! Wow!

The good thing is that even though you can’t choose your past, you can choose your future. You can choose to be your best self, instead of your truest self, and, slowly, your best self and your truest self will merge into each other.

So, start today, start this very moment, stop whatever you are doing, and ask yourself if you are being your truest self or your best self, and remember that you have a choice.

Sometimes, I think that there’s enough in there for a book already, in my journey from that world to this. But, sometimes, I feel that I’m, in fact, standing in one place, staring at the hourglass that is my life running out of time.

So, I have decided to do more with the time I do have; the result is a list of thirty things I want to do before I’m thirty. The interesting thing about my 30 by 30 list is that every single thing on it looks impossible today. As impossible as being ‘the man I am’ would have looked to ‘the boy I was’ fifteen years ago.

In the worst case, I’ll give up on the list in a few weeks. Even if don’t, I’ll probably be able to do less than ten things on the list by the time I’m thirty. But, if I do manage to do all thirty, what a story it will be!

So, even though I know that the odds are impossible, I’m doing it anyway, because, never again in my life, will I be young enough, or foolhardy enough, to even try something as insane. And, maybe, as I try to find ways to do these thirty things, I’ll also find the answers I’m looking for, by trial and error.

So, twelve months after I made the list how many items have I ticked off?

None. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Zero.

But I knew that when I made the list. I knew that it won’t be easy. I knew that I’ll not be able to tick off one item per month. I knew that the key was to not give up, to keep working on my goals, until the impossible became possible, until the odds tipped in my favor, until ticking them off felt as easy as thinking of them.

So, twelve months after I made the list, eighteen months before I hit thirty, I am happy to tell you that I haven’t given up on it. I have kept working on it, through a difficult year, until I hit 2008 and the tide started to turn my way.

So, twelve months after I made the list, I am happy to tell you that, out of the thirty goals that looked equally impossible then, at least five to ten look possible today.

Some of the books will happen, the column will happen, the startup will happen, the teaching/ consulting gigs will happen, even the target to ‘have assets of more than a crore’ will happen, and I still have eighteen months to figure out how to do the rest.

What’s more important, I have also found some of the answers I was looking for; my year long book-as-a-blog experiment ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’ is a result of that.

So, here’s my 30 by 30 list, once again. Even as you smile indulgently at my audacity, do wish me well.

- Publish a novel.
- Publish a best-selling management book.
- Publish an anthology of my poems.
- Publish a travelogue.
- Write a movie screenplay.
- Write a weekly column for a national newspaper.
- Host a talk show on TV.
- Put up a play at Prithvi Theatre.
- Put up an exhibition of my photography.
- Take Gauravonomics into the Technorati Top 100 list.
- Start my own web startup.
- Start my consulting practice.
- Teach at an IIM as a guest lecturer.
- Buy a house on Worli Sea Face.
- Buy a second weekend house in the mountains.
- Have assets of more than a crore.
- Run the full marathon.
- Climb to the Everest Base Camp.
- Scuba dive in the Egyptian Red Sea.
- Take a river cruise down the Amazon.
- Take a month off to backpack through Europe.
- Take a month off to drive around North America.
- Travel to at least thirty countries I haven’t visited before.
- Live in Europe for at least three months.
- Watch all the movies in the IMDb Top 250 Movies list.
- Read all the novels in the Time Magazine 100 Best English Novels list.
- Learn French and watch all of Francois Truffaut’s movies, without the subtitles.
- Learn Italian and watch all of Federico Fellini’s movies, without the subtitles.
- Learn Spanish and watch all of Pedro Almodovar’s movies, without the subtitles.
- Date Sushmita Sen.

To add insult to injury,
I have a second mistress now,
In addition to my first;
Between them, they almost own me.

But you remain my first love,
Dear Diary, and I often think of
The headiness I felt when
I first fell in love with you.

In short, I miss you much,
Even yearn for you at times.
So, if you let me, I’ll try
To make it up to you.

You’ll be my muse and
I’ll write once more, woo you
With poem, story, or essay;
If you let me, that is.

I asked myself this question first in 2001, and after that, for five years in a row, the answer was “yes”. Every year, from 2001 to 2005, was the best year of my life! Imagine that! It felt as if everything I wished for was within my reach; all I had to do was to ask for it and it would be mine. It felt as if every possibility was like a low hanging fruit; all I had to do was to raise my arm and pluck it. My life changed in those five years; I was literally transformed into a new man.

Then, the bubble burst. I had two difficult years in a row. Suddenly, nothing was easy anymore. In fact, the harder I tried, the more difficult it became. Every important aspect of life — love, work, money, health — came to a standstill, or, devolved. I felt frustrated at work, didn’t save any money, broke my heart twice, ignored my interests, ate junk food and put on weight.

Towards the end of 2007, I decided that I had had enough and promised myself that 2008 will be the best year of my life so far.

I’m happy to tell you that, six weeks into the year, 2008 has already been the best year of my life.

At office, I do work that is both interesting and challenging. I handle sales and marketing for one of the most respected brands in India with annual revenues of more than $1bn. I’m one of the few brand managers in India who “get” both marketing and technology and I have a budget that allows me to experiment with emerging models of marketing.

I stay in a beautiful sea-view apartment, in the poshest part of Mumbai, five minute away from office. Even after working hard for ten hours, I have enough time and energy to pursue my interests. I read blogs, listen to podcasts, read at least one book every week, watch at least one concert/ play/ movie every week, work out at least three times a week, and host a house party every Saturday.

I earn more money than I can possibly spend. I save enough money every month and invest it well. For the first time in my life I feel financially secure — I have a portfolio of investments, a systematic investment plan, a demat account, and a portfolio manager to manage it all. I have made my investments when the stock market is down, so I have already secured my returns.

I’m working towards building my own startup. I have identified the market opportunity and I’m researching the space, experimenting with new tools, networking with other players, and preparing a business plan for the startup. After putting in a fifty plus hour work-week, working on a business plan can be overwhelming, but it’s also deeply fulfilling.

I have the time and energy to go out of my way to meet new people and make new friends. I have more friends than I have ever had and I’m making new friends everyday. I feel happy myself, so I’m more fun to be with, than I have ever known myself to be.

What’s more, I “know” that 2008 will end up being an even better year for me by the time it ends. Here’s a snapshot of where I see myself at the end of 2008 –

I’m the CEO of my own startup. We are at the forefront of a fast unfolding market opportunity. We have a close-knit team that is excited about the business, a well-packaged suit of offerings, dozens of delighted clients, and a library of well-executed projects. I have published my first book, primarily to build thought leadership for the business, and it has become a small bestseller. Version 1.0 of the business basically runs on its own and I spend most of my time building version 2.0.

I earn almost one-and-a-half times more than what I earn now and my portfolio of investments is twenty times bigger. The line between work and play has blurred and I feel that I have enough time to pursue all my interests.

I am married to a beautiful, independent and intelligent woman and we are deeply in love with each other. We have bought a beautiful sea-view house, five minutes away from work, and spent weeks setting it up so that it feels like home. We socialize with large overlapping sets of friends and every weekend is a whirlwind of plays, concerts and excursions. We love doing things together, and teaching new things to each other, and each new day is a new discovery.

Wish me luck.