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Comment by luckydata | Hacker News Reader

What deep truth was I supposed to take away from this?

That nobody wants to hear excuses.

This as true for a CEO as it is for an entry-level employee. If you don't hit your deadline, your manager doesn't want to hear excuses. That doesn't solve their problem. They want to hear how you're going to fix it.

A good manager should want to know the whole story, to analyze the reasons why something went off the rails to avoid it happening in future.

"Nobody cares why X happened" is to avoid learning a lesson.

It's the same as what Yoda says, "Do or do not, there is no try." Trying and failing is the same as failing. You don't get credit.

Now, maybe you learned something from your failure, in which case you have another chance.

Yoda logic might work when preparing your run-up in the Olympic long jump, but in a business environment it remains in the realm of office banter and who has the best Yoda voice.

Comparing real life with Star Wars got way out of hand years ago.

"The Hero's journey - is what we're living!"... Yep. Okay. Good luck with that. Me, I'm stuck on "tempted by the dark side" and kinda liking it there to be honest.

> If you don't hit your deadline ...

Maybe I'm late, maybe the deadline was wrong.

Waste of effort to figure out which one, still..

In the short term, you're right. But later, when we discuss my yearly performance, it becomes important!

You could have said, "This deadline isn't reasonable" and pushed back then, but you didn't. You agreed to the deadline. And so your team expected you to be finished by then and you weren't, so the entire project and company are hurt because of it.

> You could have said, "This deadline isn't reasonable" and pushed back then

I suppose you don't know the typical enterprise-y management style.

You don't know what I know. It's possible that your problem is that you think you know things you don't know.

1. Ben Horowitz likes football 2. Paul Graham can get you to analyze online rants for free

When times are tough, it's very easy and very common to bury your mind in a blanket of worry and excuses. These activities can absorb a large portion of your time and mental energy. But, they have no return on that investment.

Better to devote all of your energy to doing better. Even if you still fail, you'll fail no worse and probably a fair bit better if you stay focused on the work rather than the excuses.

This is much easier said than done.

Related aphorisms/folk concepts include: no use crying over spilled milk; the serenity prayer; you're only as good as the last thing you did, and no one gives a shit about the last thing you did. It's not a crazy unique or new thought, but it's a good one to be reminded of from time to time.

Fundamentally you have an objective (win games, get more clients, raise money, whatever) and the things you can control to get that objective.

Once something moves out of the set of things you can control[0], no one cares about that thing even if they care about you reaching your objective. If a meeting with a client goes way south and they'll never talk to us again, that client is no longer in the set of things we control. It might suck, but the path to our goal of more revenue no longer includes them, so focus on getting the next client right.

I think you can apply this on an individual level. Sometimes it can be easy to get slowed down or even paralyzed by loss, regret, anxiety, etc. Our brains are wired such that it's easy to mistake wallowing in those feelings as doing something but it's really not. Energy is better spent on deciding what to do going forward instead of torturing yourself re-litigating the past.

[0] Really meaning controlling its impact on you. The fact that you can't control the weather does not mean that no one cares that you decided to send a boat out in a storm it's not suited to handle. No one cares that it's stormy, they care that you make the right decision not to send out a boat.

"""you're only as good as the last thing you did, and no one gives a shit about the last thing you did"""

I'd say the second part of this isn't true in general. You'll often be judged by past success weather that's a good metric or not as long as it roughly fits the domain. The mentioned NFL is a great example of this. Coaches that have won stuff get better job offers. It may or may not be a good indicator but that's how it is. Similarly if you've worked for Google it'll probably be easier to land jobs elsewhere (I'd argue even if the reason for your departure is that you'd be considered a mishire in retrospect). In the domain of startups, if you've done one somewhat successfully funding gets a lot easier (which is a good advantage since you won't waste much time on it). A16Z are on record saying they'll fund people that have done startups before more liberally (in the Stanford video series).

It's a cheeky way of saying don't rest on laurels. So you landed that client? Great, now let's never speak of that again and move on to our new targets! Success or failure, there's very little profit in dwelling on things.

I think there is a better way to put the message than "nobody cares." You might have many loved ones who care.

The better truth is "reality doesn't care." When deciding how to act, the reason you got to where you are is irrelevant. Reality doesn't care about fairness or justification. It just is. You can only move on from where you are, so focus on that.

http://mindingourway.com/how-we-will-be-measured/ seems relevant

Spend more time thinking about what to do instead of the “what if?”s.

That Ben cares only about his money and not an iota about the market or other conditions /s

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