Strong Desire + Necessity = Acquiring Skills

Posted: August 18, 2012

Guest Blogger Sai Gayathri describes herself as an aspiring entrepreneur. In her own words, “I am curious, ambitious, take initiative when needed and optimistic. I love reading books, mostly fiction (mystery and adventure genre ) and watching movies in my free time. I found that writing about what I want to express is very liberating.”

I feel the experiences of bargaining for dress materials in shops taught me the negotiation skills essential to my future as an entrepreneur. When I was young, I always looked in awe at my dad when he was bargaining for anything, let’s say fruits or vegetables. I used to wonder how he used to do it. After my Inter exams in between the holidays before I joined Engineering, I went to dress materials shops in my locality and learnt bargaining and bought dress materials on my own.

So how did I learn bargaining?

I wanted to buy clothes on my own because my taste and my mom’s taste in clothes was different and that was at a time when I was an adolescent when my individuality started to develop. Before, in my childhood, I never bothered what clothes I wore. Till I was in class 8, my mom bought my clothes and I never really bothered. We used to live in the suburbs of Hyderabad then. At the beginning of class 9, we shifted to an area of the city which was one of the main educational hubs for my IIT coaching. In between class 9 and Inter II year, for a period of 4 years my Mom took me out a few times giving me a choice to choose my dress materials.

But it started getting uncomfortable going out with her for my dress materials shopping because I used to take my time to select a dress material and she used get impatient and pressurize me to pick the stuff fast. Well, I don’t blame her for behaving so because she was a working woman and she had to handle work at office and responsibilities at home too, so obviously she would have been tired and had a reason to be impatient because mostly the few times we went shopping, it was after she came back from work and after the shopping she had to come back to responsibilities at home ( I have a younger sister too!) And when it came to my purchases regarding dress materials (actually they were the only significant purchases I made with my parents’ money till I earned my own), I used to think twice before buying anything.

I had to be convinced of three things when buying dress materials:

1) The dress material had to be awesome.

2) It should show me myself in a new way and should suit me.

3) The price should be value for money.

Sometimes I could decide that I was buying a dress material for sure within 5 minutes of entering a shop and sometimes it would take 1 hour. Since I wanted freedom of time and choice when it came to shopping for my dress materials, I decided I want to go shopping alone which was very comfortable for me. I needed to bargain in order to convince my mother that I could do shopping on my own, that I could get good materials at affordable prices. Actually she used to spend more when she used to take me out because she used to take me to fixed-price shops and prices were high there. So now I am doing great – getting more clothes at lower price for the last 4 years. She had some issues in the beginning but after a while I improved a lot and had my own way which meant a lot to me as I was getting freedom in at least one area of my life.

The point I want to make is, since I had a strong desire to do my shopping on my own and bargaining was necessary for me to do so, I tried and learnt it.

Necessity is the mother of learning; often, the difference between “wanting to have a skill” and “having it” is necessity and making a start to learn it.

Pic credit: Leeds Museums And Galleries (Used under a Creative Commons License)