One of the biggest mistakes I made was not starting my business in college. People think that once their college is over, they'll have enough free time to do whatever they want, they believe that post-college is basically the time they are going to seriously invest in starting up and putting their heart mind and soul to it. 

It brings me great pleasure that I am here to bust that myth. You, the student, have the best free time you will ever have in your entire lives. You don't have to run around and make money, there aren't mounting responsibilities on you, your free time is mostly hanging out with friends, and other assorted activities which I'm sure brought a smile on your face when you read this line. 

I'm not the type of guy who has many regrets, and yet, one of the biggest regrets that I have right now is the fact that I didn't actually bother to take time off my monotonous college life, which I intensely hated including all my classmates (sorry guys), and that I didn't act upon the many ideas I struck upon while in college. Believing that I was too stupid, too poor or too lazy to do so, the last part of which is absolutely true, I wasted away 4 years of engineering doing absolutely nothing, licking my emotional wounds and dealing with depression. 

I miss being a student sometimes because being one meant I had the freedom to dream. That's not to say that I did not dream, I did, a lot of it, but I never acted upon them at all. My laziness, which I admit is the greatest weakness I have, ruined whatever plans I had of actually going through with my plans. Post-college, if your parents can cover your costs, pat yourself on the back for being born in a house privileged enough for you to do just that, like yours truly for example. 

The thing about responsibilities is that they sneak up on you, whether you like it or not. It could be due to various factors and personal disgust and your wasteful life is one of them. The other thing about responsibilities is that the longer you try to run from them, the harder they'll hit you, a fact I fully understood late last year when I had nowhere to go and was on the verge of another breakdown. 

I had hoped that my startup would be a way for me to take care of my responsibilities later, in a way it was an elaborate scheme to avoid my responsibilities all over again. However, before we digress any further, allow me to explain why you're reading my sob story: one of the biggest reasons I failed my startup venture is because I ran out of time. I couldn't, in good faith, leech off my parents anymore and decided to leave New Delhi and come back to Hyderabad and find a job doing what I wanted to do in the first place, writing. 

I failed because I didn't realise the value of starting up right from college where I would have the time and flexibility to work on my idea and my product, instead of wasting away a year after college and then starting up. We ran into plenty of problems, all of which were handled with a sense of urgency not because we wanted to get work done fast, but because we had an omnipresent feeling of running out of time. Tick tock, tick tock, the clock would mock us, laughing in our faces as we struggled each day trying to get our product out, working on the ground and on our product back at our office, which was basically the home we had rented. I miss that place now. 

But my story is just an example, and this isn't about me. This is about you making your own stories and craving your path when your path is at its softest. Time is not your friend when it comes to startups, every day must be a productive day, every day you must be willing to nurture and protect your idea, willing to go the extra mile to make sure your idea gets further, and the best time to do it is a time where you have no responsibilities, but a gift, a gift of dreaming about who or what you want to be, and also the gift of failure. 

Failure is something you must come to terms with eventually, it is the greatest teacher you'll ever have. Failure teaches you, in excruciating detail, the mistakes you've made. Learning from them or feeling sad for yourself because of them is a matter of personal choice, something that doesn't come easy but it can be learned. 

Of all the teachers I've personally had, failure has been the best. I'm proud to be a drop out today, I'm proud that my startup has failed, because without it I would have never confronted the fact that I have always wanted to write, to share stories, to make stories and to put my thoughts on paper, whether with rage or with love and kindness, that depended on what I was writing about. 

And it is failure why you should consider starting up in college. When you're a student, the safety net around you is big enough to catch you when you fail, and you will fail, eventually, but that doesn't mean it's the end of your life. Failure's singular purpose is holding a big sign right in front of your face, showing you exactly what went wrong, so embrace it, learn from your failures, and keep pushing forward. There will never be a better time to do so than when you're a student, willing to learn from your mistakes. 

Embrace your destiny, because the time to startup was yesterday, and the world will never stop for us.