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I had started training MMA in Feb 2025. I always thought my first fight would be in Thailand after training for Muay Thai for 6-8 months. But life gets in the way and our plans might not get executed as we expect them to be. Earlier the ICL tournament was supposed to happen on 25th April, but then it got postponed to 16-18th may. I had booked VIP package for the Guns n Roses concert which was supposed to happen on the same dates. I couldn’t miss either. So I asked the organizing committee to schedule mine for 18th. They agreed on call but I needed written confirmation, so I got it on WhatsApp. I wasn’t nervous during my training initially. But as the competition approached I could feel the anxiety crawling in.

The three moves I knew were, clinching, hip thrust and American arm lock. I knew I was getting into something serious, something I hadn’t done before. During training and sparring, I knew I will be safe. However, sparring is different from fighting, during sparring we try to prolong the game, there is no urgency to finish the fight. But during fight, decisions were supposed to be made within split seconds and there is a sense of urgency to finish the fight.

My team had gone on the scheduled dates for weighing in. I did mine online. As I went for the concert in Mumbai. There were 5 songs which I wanted to listen, Sweet Child o Mine, Welcome to The Jungle, Paradise City, November rain and Knocking on Heaven’s door. I reached the venue, Mahalaxmi race course, I went solo, time to time I need a solo trip clear my head. I was actually excited that I would first go the concert gather some motivation and go to the fight with my head buzzing with Rock n Roll. I needed something to stop thinking about the fight. To interrupt the pattern in my thinking.

Luckily Axl Rose was not late this time, and the concert started on time with welcome to the jungle. I had a cocktail in hand and cigarettes in my pocket. It rained earlier that day and the vip section was muddy. That didn’t stop me from getting my feet dirty to stand right in front of the stage. Seeing Slash and Axl Rose on stage from a 40 ft distance was thrilling. I was in the zone and wasn’t thinking about the fight. It lifted my spirits atleast for the time being. I also wanted to meet people there, but no opportunity presented itself for me to approach.

I wanted to numb myself with alcohol and cigarettes’ and enjoy the show. Which I did even though my brain was saying it was a mistake to smoke and drink right now. The songs were slightly different from the versions that I listen to on Spotify. The studio version is crisp whereas the live was depended on the crowd. Also Axl had put on weight but I can cut him some slack, he was getting older. Slash still looked muscular.

There were two more guitarists, 2 on keys and a very energetic drummer. The drumming was on point. Towards the end of the concert, I thought I could leave early and get back to my cousins place in time. I tried asking about the shuttle service to go outside but the organizing team didn’t know. So I went to the smoking area. I had probably only finished half of my cigarette and I could hear the roar of the crowd and and a familiar tune. This was paradise city. I threw my Cigarette in the trash can and ran back into the front to see the last song. I didn’t record all of the songs. I asked a guy standing right behind me to send me his recordings. I took his phone no. but he never sent me the videos. But its okay. I wanted to enjoy the concert. And I knew if I ever wanted to find the videos of the live concert, it would be available on the internet.

As I finished the concert and some how found the shuttle to the exit, paid 5000 for the black and yellow cab to take me back to sister’s place. I reached my sisters place and tried sleeping for a few hours as I had to reach the airport at around 4 am. I couldn’t sleep. Shit was about to get real very soon.
At some point during the concert I got a video of my friend Zoravar breaking the the nose of his opponent. I was just hoping that Ajay wouldn’t break mine. I had a trip planned with my girl friend afterwards so I had to reach the airport next morning in one piece to pick her up.

I was early for my flight, I was relieved that I had reached the airport and did the security check in in time. However, my gate had two entries A and B. My flight was from the B gate and I was sitting near Gate A and I didn’t realize it until I heard the announcement for the final call. My heartbeat raced, and I quickly stood up to queue, there was none, all the passengers had boarded the flight. As I boarded, I was informed that my seat had been upgraded from economy to premium economy. I tried sleeping in flight but couldn’t. As I landed, I asked Farm Boys MMA team what time their team member Ajay would come, they said 1. I had time so I went to my father’s friend’s house. Had break fast, smoked my last cigarette, and tried to take a nap for 1 hour. Again, no sleep.

Then I went to the venue, Talkatora stadium. My team and my opponent’s team wasn’t there yet. While I was there, I didn’t see anyone get injured and there were young boys fighting, Watching those 14 year olds fight, gave me strength and courage. I thought to myself it wouldn’t be that bad. My team had arrived and that gave me confidence a boost. They were there for me, I wasn’t alone. Soon Farm Boys MMA team arrived, and my team mates went to the organizing committee to arrange my fight.

All welter weight fights were supposed to happen on 17, but I requested mine for 18th. Suddenly they announced my name, I thought I had more time and fight would be conducted in the evening but shit just got real, and I quickly changed and got ready for the fight. I briefly bumped into Ajay and we nodded and said hello to each other. He was wearing a loose shirt. I thought this guy is a boxing coach and he is not fit. Maybe I have shot at winning. At that moment, he took his shirt off and I thought to myself, I am fucked. He packed serious muscle, same weight as me but a little shorter height means more muscle mass which equates to more strength. We entered the cage.

I can’t recall the fight accurately but I have a video, I will watch it now and try to understand what decisions I made during the fight and why.

I remember I was completely zoned in, I had felt this before mostly when I used to approach women or when I had to give exams. The refree briefs us with the rules, I didn’t know what I would do in the beginning, I had no plan of action or strategy, I try to hit him with a few punches, they land no where, I was trying to get points, then I got hit with 3 punches, I couldn’t block nor did I saw em coming, even now while watching this on video while drinking Kingfisher Ultra, I did not see em coming, so what this tells us, when you are in a fight, whoever takes the first move, should expect a counter move from the opponent and prepare accordingly.

He punched me a few more times, and I land a punch on the side with the help of some momentum. I don’t think it would have done anything. Then I heard someone say Harshit clinch, I knew my coach Nitish had said, if he is a boxer, you have to do grappling, seedhe clinch karlena, and I remember from the practice that you could take a fake shot and go into your planned move, so I attempted a fake shot clinched him, but I think my eyes were closed, because I don’t recall planning to get his arm in the clinch, I don’t know if this was an advantageous move in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or not, but at the time of the fight, I thought I am in an advantageous move, I have got his hand, but on a second thought, now I think it is not an advantageous position, he has more control over me that way, but I also have some control over his arm movements.

At that point I gave up, I knew I could only stop him 10-15 seconds, before he plans his next move, because I had no plan of action, someone was saying niche, take him down, but I didn’t know how, I mustered up a lot of courage for the clinch, and I ran out of gas, I knew he would take me down and the only thing I could do was prolong the duration of the fight, I hit him with a few punches on his face, but there was no torque because I was at the bottom, then he hit me with two punches one from each hand, then another punch and I grab him by the neck and got him into guillotine, but he easily released himself from it, then I got hit with two punches, and I think one landed on my nose, at that point I could see blood, and I recalled my father saying, stop when it gets too extreme, you have only trained for a few months, and your opponents will be experienced, I tapped out, then he hit me with two more after tapping out, fucker, bhai hoo gay ana, tap kar toh diya, fir kyon mar raha hai.

This is where the video ends.

I have tried to recall the reasoning of my moves to the best of my ability, what I am trying to do is create a fighting strategy for myself. Understand what specific moves I will make and in which order if I am in a situation where I have to fight.

I recall getting surrounded by people, I was not in the position to understand who was who, but I recall Abhishek’s voice saying, agar kuch toota hota toh abhi kuch bol nai rahe hote, that gave me reassurance that nothing serious had happened, I am alive and I can go on a trip with my girlfriend, and I was feeling very relaxed after the fight, I had faced my fears head on. And I survived.

They took me into the medical corner and they checked and everything was fine. I was not nervous anymore, I felt relaxed and a sense of accomplishment I haven’t felt in a long time.
In retrospect, I think I gambled and played a high risk move, I had a vacation planned with my girl friend and I had to reach the airport to pick her up in one piece. Had I ended up in a hospital, my trip would have been ruined.

I think that day I earned street cred from my team. Then we collected our medals and certificates, I dropped Anurag at the train station and I went to my aunt’s place.

Few learnings

He landed 2 punches on my face even after I tapped out, I think, and I can only guess right now, that he was teaching me something, don’t be afraid to hurt someone physically. When the situations demand, you have to attack, hard.

I think I will continue training for self defense. I know I will start with BJJ, and then add Muay Thai, Russian Sambo and Krav Maga in a few years time. I know if I train for 10 years I will be good enough.

Another thing that I realized was, and I draw inspiration from my school’s teaching style, if I give tests often, then when the final exam happens I will be good and prepared. The more often I compete, the more I learn.

I also realized that I learn more in fights than I learn in sparring. If I keep competing, sooner or later I will find a winning strategy. My gut feeling says there are a combination of few moves, that can take me further as opposed to mastering every technique.

My opponent Ajay was a nice guy. He said two things to me that I will remember,

1. You have got the heart for it, and

2. He mentioned his coach said to him, don’t go easy on your students even if they are noobs.

Here is a video of the fight if you would like to watch –

https://youtube.com/shorts/l5P0_DZBz-Q?si=5AuUXqxV4pC622O5

https://youtu.be/5jfkg5KDu00?si=45vmDc90aiy02x-F

Thanks for reading.

-Harshit

Step 1: Join a gym and start doing a bro split and eat 6 meals a day. Do this for 2 years and have very little to show for it.

Step 2: Start running 10 Kms. Lose some body weight but have no muscle mass what so ever.

Step 3: Run a half marathon. Do a sprint finish. Barely walk for 2 days but make sure to wear the finisher t shirt the next day to show every one that you finished a half marathon.

Step 4: Accidently stumble upon skinnyfattransformation.com. Realize you need to seriously change your dietary habits and lose more weight to the point you look anorexic.

Step 5: Lose a lot of weight by practically starving yourself and do push ups and pull ups. Ignore legs even though you have knock knees.

Step 6: Hire Oskar from Skinny fat transformation.

Step 7: Build some muscle mass and gain the ability to do 15 pull ups. Start training heavily at the gym and increase fat intake. Start doing legs some times.

Step 8: Finally be lean with a 4 pack but still get frustrated by love handles, gynecomastia and large areolas.

Step 9: Get love handles liposuction and gynecomastia surgery. Wait for 6 months to see the results.

Step 10: Still stay frustrated with the results because your choice of surgeon was wrong.

Step 11: Keep going to the gym, make it your priority and completely ignore work. Get obsessed with nutrition.

Step 12: Have an accident, lose all your strength, get mentally unstable, hop on anti psychotics.

Step 13: Get gynecomastia again because of increased prolactin from Risperidone and Divalproex, have issue with confidence and self esteem, and struggle with performance in bed.

Step 14: Start a bulk and make sure to grow your hair while at it to look dangerous even though you are not dangerous yet.

Step 15: Gain the ability to do 40kg weighted pull ups, 50kg x 2 db incline bench press, and 40kg weighted dips.

Step 16: Get fat while bulking. Lose the motivation to workout. Do the bare minimum to keep the flame alive while you deal with your personal issues.

Step 17: Decide you want to be lean again as you cant afford peptides yet to look shredded.

Step 18: Get gynecomastia surgery again along with love handles and lower belly liposuction, lose 3 kgs with the surgery.

Step 19: Recover for 1 month, jump on keto carnivore diet. Lose further 7 kgs in 2 more months.

Step 20: Get lean and small again.

Step 21: Get satisfied with the results from the surgery. Start eating some carbs again and gain some % of the previous strength back.

Step 22: Get in decent shape, hire a personal trainer, take cabergoline to reduce prolactin and decide go under the knife again and get areola resized.

Thank me later.

Harshit Godha

This essay was originally written for a lecture given to first year business students at IPER University, Bhopal on 13th November, 2024. Link to the recording of the lecture is given at the end of the essay.

Contents

• Innovation Adoption Curve
• What happens when you choose something that’s at the center of the curve
• How to choose the right product or service
  • Incremental Innovation
  • Disruptive Innovation
  • Cultural Innovation
• How monopolies are built?
• Now you have the mental model, how do you find new ideas?
  • Travel solo
  • Talk to people
  • Copy & Paste
  • Personal Branding
  • Read books
• How to position your brand?
• How to differentiate your brand?
• How to reposition your brand when you have competition?
• Go-to market strategy – minimum viable audience
  • 1000 true fans
  • Target market
• Creating barriers for competetion
• Recommendations and sources

Innovation Adoption Curve

Innovation adoption curve shows us how ideas and products enter into a market and are eventually adopted by the masses. You will notice that at the fringes you have the innovators who are consistently producing new products, some of these products remain at the fringes while a very few are adopted by the early adopters and then by the mass market. At the last you have laggards, they are often the last ones who buy that product, for example your grand mother buying a smart phone.

This will help you understand how to choose the right target market for your product. You have to ask yourself, who is it for? Your product or service has to be so good for the early adopters that they talk about it and push the product to the masses.

So, you have to

– choose a product that is at the fringes of the innovation adoption curve.

– but choose something that has the potential to break into the mass market.

– some products are destined to remain in the niches (like mulberry/shehtoot) while others can move to mass market (avocado), this is done by market forces.

For example, if you decide to sell a cricket bat, it will be tough to create a business out of it, but pickle ball on the other hand is a new sport in India. You can sell pickle ball paddle and can create a brand name before the big players jump in. Eventually the market for pickle ball paddle will get saturated but if you move early and create a brand on the internet fast, people will buy from you and you would have established yourself. That will allow you to make investments in marketing and branding once you have competitors. And believe me you will have competitors.

I knew in 2017 that the avocado trend would eventually come to India, and if I get into farming avocados and create content around it, then by the time the trend is here, I would have a brand that comes up first on the google search.

What happens when you choose something that’s at the center of the curve?

If you choose something that’s at the center of the curve and is already adopted by the masses, then you have to compete with bigger players who have access to a lot of capital and a network of distributors which you as a new entrant, don’t.

Usually at the center, the industry is consolidated (oligopoly). There are already a few players, who have the majority of market share and all the smaller players are competing in a perfect market, you will have to take average profits or sometimes losses, which is again governed by the market. For example, trading apples or button mushrooms.

If you have access to a lot of disposable capital, you can perhaps compete with the bigger players, but that also requires cultural innovation. I will touch on this again a bit later. Usually if you cater to this market, then you have to play on relations, and not on branding, you can make a living out of it but you will never be able to create a long lasting monopoly.

How to choose the right product or service?

When you are bringing something new to the market, you are doing either of the three things,

1. Incremental innovation,

2. Disruptive innovation

3. Same product but an ideological innovation

Incremental Innovation

Adding new features to an existing product is incremental innovation. It might work for a while, but it can be easily copied by the existing players. You will lose that edge over time. For example, the when the IPad came out, it was new for a while but then all the other companies came out with their versions of it.

Disruptive innovation

This the kind of an innovation that Uber or Airbnb did, they built different business models that have killed a pre existing industry or changed the way an industry works, this is very hard to do and generally requires you to have access to venture capital and some kind of new technology.

Cultural innovation

This is the kind of an innovation where you are essentially selling the same product, but the ideology behind it, propels the product from the fringes to the mainstream. For example, Liquid Death. It sells water in beer cans, because beer cans are recyclable. But the name and marketing is so different from legacy brands of bottled water that you would think twice before purchasing it. It is valued at 1.4 billion $. What they did different was the branding and marketing coupled with the ideology of sustainable consumption.

How monopolies are built?

To build a long lasting brand you have to apply all these innovation tactics within a coherent strategy. The plan should be to have an ideology that your brand champions, that ideology can be so new and so fresh, that the mass market adopts its and it can create a disruption in the industry, but doing that once is not enough, then all your marketing, advertising and incremental improvements in the product are governed by that ideology.

Now you have the mental model, how do you find new ideas?

Travel solo

Spend some time alone. It gives you time to think and you become open to new ideas and meeting new people. This can be a bit challenging for women. So travel with precautions.

Talk to people

Learn the art of conversation and persuasion. With the internet we are more connected yet lonely. People are craving for meaningful connections. Go talk to them.

Copy and Paste

A small hack in choosing the right product, and it doesn’t have to be fancy, just choose something that is already being consumed by the masses in some other geography and bring it somewhere new. I chose avocados because it was already popular in the west and luckily its going good so far.

Personal Branding

Once you have the product or service you want to sell. Start with personal branding. When I decided I would pursue avocado farming, I made it my online identity. As I kept posting content online, new opportunities started coming my way. It will not happen overnight, but consistent effort executed strategically will be rewarded. When you are starting out, you are strapped for cash, but you have one thing on your side, internet. Have faith and execute.

Read Books

I am adding a few in the recommendations at the end of this post. Success is not guaranteed and the strategies might not be applicable everywhere, but this essay and the book recommendations will give u a mental model, to understand which businesses have potential and which don’t.

How to position your brand?

You would need to do some market analysis to understand what your competition is and how and where your product is placed in the eyes of the consumer. Draw some positioning maps like I did in the picture above. In the fruit business, avocado is the only product category that is new and healthy.

How to differentiate your brand?

Odds are that you will not be the only player in the marketplace who can identify a market gap. Competition will jump in and they will try to copy your ideas and innovation. For example, when I entered the market no company was doing marketing and sourcing like I did. Competition saw what I was doing and copied my business model.

How to re-position your brand when you have competition?

Circumstances and market forces will require you to reinvent your business strategy and reposition your business. I am in process to make my business more sustainable. That will again differentiate my business from the competition at least for sometime.

Go to Market strategy – Minimum Viable Audience

Coming back to the the innovation adoption curve. You have to create a product for a small group of people. Delight them with your product and make it so good that they talk about it. In marketing we call this the idea of 1000 true fans. Imagine a group of 1000 people and cater only to them and not to others. In fact, your product should hated by the laggards.

You have to know how your target market behaves. These will be your first 1000 customers, who will further spread the word. I have painted a picture of the target market for Indo Israel Avocado. Not all your customers will be the same but you will be able to see similar patterns of behavior.

Creating barriers for competition

Once you start your business, you would have to constantly create barriers for others to strengthen your position and increase market share. This can be done through marketing, advertising and strategic partnerships.

Recommendations and sources

1. Art of Innovation
2. How brands become Icons
3. How to win friends and influence People
4. 1000 true fans
5. This is Marketing

Play

PPT of the presentation –

-Kind regards,
Harshit Godha