This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.

I am glad to start a new week, but it’s going to be crazy.

Last week, I was supposed to launch a free downloadable ebook called “How non-NLU students can perform 10x better than NLU students”. While the name is provocative, I spent over 3 months researching and writing this book. My intention is not to diss the NLU students, but I had enough of non-NLU students moping around thinking that somehow they are worse off and have no opportunities. I want to tell them that there is a way to do amazingly well, provided they take responsibility for their own success.

I hope the title will provoke some NLU students to read this book too, because the lessons will help them a great deal as well.

Nitin Potdar, senior partner from JSA and one of the most well known M&A lawyers was kind enough to write the foreword. The feedback I received from the early readers is fabulous. All in all, I am super excited about the book.

A couple of people criticised a few things about the book too. And their criticisms are valid. I am going to do an updated version of the book in times to come.

But for now, I am impatient to ship what I created! I can’t wait for thousands of law students to download this and start benefiting from it, and getting feedback so that I can embark on the next level of the game!

There are levels. You need to complete one level to get to the next.

That’s why shipping is so important. Way too many people wait forever to launch whatever they make because it is not perfect yet. Worse, they never finish because they do not feel what they are making is good enough. Projects get shelved. Dreams get postponed. Lives get wasted.

I have done that when I was less wise. But the rigours of entrepreneurship has taught me the importance of early shipping and that everything is a work in progress.

That does not mean you are getting away with not generating enough value and just make something mediocre and crappy. This is not an excuse for bad quality.

You have to ensure that you are generating value, but you do not have to ensure perfection. Do not crucify yourself for non-perfection right where your journey begins.

Sure my book is perhaps not as good as some of the bestsellers I read. We will get there someday.

For now, I just had to ensure that my book works for the purpose that I have designed it for. It should inspire a generation of law students to go beyond their perceived limitations, and find a clear path laid out for them!

 

Do not be afraid of failure, do not be afraid to make mistakes publicly. I have learnt that this is an inferior approach if your eyes are on real results. People who try to hide their mistakes are not authentic. They are not trusted. They are not believed. They rarely move fast enough to make an impact.

I am ready to make mistakes while I am trying to do something difficult and worthwhile. I am ready to publicly own up to those mistakes, and I am ready to learn from them. That is because I am committed to massive growth.

Let me tell you a story. When I started iPleaders blog, I wanted to post one blog post every day. So I began to ask law students to write. I encouraged them. Most of their writing wasn’t that great. Most law websites will not publish such articles. But I did.

It was OK. We gave a platform to people who wanted to begin publishing their very first articles, and it was OK if they made mistakes.

My strategy worked. Thousands of law students wrote thousands of articles. A lot of people loved it and benefited from it as an avalanche of legal information was made available online for the first time. Still, there were critics who abused me for this. They said I am running a scammy website with unreliable content and I should be ashamed of myself. I couldn’t care less.

They were right that I should have better content, but iPleaders blog was going through a journey, and I understood that.

I was not going to hold everything up until everything was perfect according to other people’s standards.

I knew what I was doing, and I believed in it. I had a mission, and this was just one necessary step in the journey. Over time, we made enough money to dedicate some resources to the blog. We hired editors who helped the authors to write better. We made it mandatory for our LawSikho course students to write and publish, and we offer tons of live writing classes and recorded tutorials for them to get better at writing. We give extensive feedback on how to make their research and articles better.

And the process goes on. We are introducing more and more exciting avenues of teaching writing to lawyers and encouraging them to see writing as an important brand building activity.

However, we are today one of the biggest law blogs in the world. Only a handful are as big in the entire world. In India, only LiveLaw is bigger, but that’s because they are a news reporting website. There is no website covering legal knowledge that has reached the size that we did.

We have also drastically improved the quality of posts! That brought more and more loyal readers.

But you know what? Those days when we had not so well researched or well drafted articles by rookie writers, were very important. Without crossing that bridge, we would have never made where we are today. I had to grow a thick skin, ignore the criticism and ridicule, and follow my vision. What do they know about what I am upto?

I have other major levels of the game to upgrade to. We are just getting started, this is nothing yet. You don’t know what is possible, but I dream about it. I can’t sleep. I will never be at peace unless I see these things happening in reality.

I am too busy to bother about puny criticism. I can make mistakes, I can handle rejection, I can own up my failures publicly. That gives me tremendous power.

My brain space is freed up from social anxiety, so that I can do the real thinking that counts.

If what you care about is your desire to make a difference, you have to put yourself out there. You have to put yourself at risk.

It’s not comfortable, but it works.

What have you been trying to do that is held up due to fear of failure? What projects are left unfinished? What journeys you have embarked and then abandoned out of fear? What are the goals that you really, really wanted to achieve but failed to stick to?

Another thing I want to share is that several well known publishers were interested in the book, but that would have restricted the book and the ideas from spreading. It would have taken more time.

I wanted to reach as many law students as possible, and as fast as possible. The tag of a published author is less important to me. What is far more important is the impact my work will have on the people who really need this information, people who can really benefit from it.

If people benefit, I will get back some benefits myself. That’s how the universe works. If you generate value for people at large, you get some of it back. At the moment, my biggest concern is to impact the maximum number of law students.

And yeah, we missed the internal deadline for launching this book several times. However, we need to keep at it until we get where we want to get, right? So here we go. A week late, but done and done. And very proud of the results.

So here is a link to the page we created, where one can download the book. Please read it yourself, and share this link with your friends. Tell them to download the book from the page so that we can keep sending them these mails also! If you just send them the already downloaded book, they will miss the opportunity to read the amazing mails I am going to send otherwise!

Help me to reach out to as many law students as possible. If you share value with other people, you will get some back, remember?

Here is the link, once more: https://lawsikho.com/book/10times-better/index.html

Also, our most popular courses have new batches starting from 1st May. Check them out. The prices significantly go up from 3rd May. If you have been planning to do them for a while, don’t miss out on this opportunity to enroll at 2018 prices.

Here are the courses:

Diploma 

Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution

Diploma in M&A, Institutional Finance and Investment Laws (PE and VC transactions)

Diploma in Entrepreneurship, Administration and Business Laws

Executive Certificate Courses

Certificate Course in Advanced Corporate Taxation

Certificate Course in Advanced Civil Litigation: Practice, Procedure and Drafting 

Test Preparation

Judgment Writing and Drafting Course for Judicial Services