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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Neither of these are particularly useful worldviews.

Just do things, observe how they turn out, and then try to do them better. The reason "pivot" has spread throughout the lexicon is because it better describes reality today. What does "failure" even mean, that you ceased to exist when things didn't work out? No, of course not - when things don't work out, you're still here, you go and do something else, hopefully with the benefit of experience.

And similarly, what does it even mean to be "better than they actually are"? As if there's this national ranking scale of people from bad to good? The idea is nonsensical - people have different standards for what constitutes "good", and your only responsibility is to lead a life that you can feel good about by your standards.

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I'm sorry, but your response is a perfect example of exactly what I'm talking about, it almost seems scripted.

"What does 'failure' even mean..." Really? Seriously? Failure means admitting and acknowledging that you were wrong, that you things didn't work out the way you expected them to, and taking responsibility for it, instead of treating it as just another tick in a line of never-ending experiences that you "learn" and "iterate" from. I'm not disparaging learning from mistakes, but a more subtle difference: that sometimes you just have to admit that you were totally off course and that the only thing you can learn the situation is that you should throw away everything you thought you knew and go back to square one. You say "pivot" better describes reality? That is the problem. In your worldview, it is acceptable to just change direction in the face of failure. No, sometimes you have to go backwards, and the inability of young people to admit this or understand this is the problem.

I don't even know where to begin with your second point. Suffice it to say that the world is not some cuddly place where everyone is a winner and everyone gets an award for participation. To think otherwise is to live in fantasy -- indeed, a fantasy world where you can always feel good about your life according to your standards.

"Failure" usually has a connotation of finality that's unnecessary today. You can admit that you were wrong and adjust course without being a failure.

I recognize that you probably think I'm an idiot or terribly misguided or just denying of reality. In my mind, you just haven't gotten it yet - I didn't always think like this, but I came to accept it after much effort, both because it makes me happier and because it's actually led to more success, by your definition, than believing that some people are just smarter and more capable than others. But that's okay - either you will or you won't come to accept it, and either way it doesn't really affect me, and that's the other half of my point: we each set our personal standards and have our own lens through which we see the world, and that's fine.

Fair enough, and for personal ideologies, you are right that it doesn't matter. But I don't think it's a futile conversation to talk about the how one mindset vs another has effects at the collective scale, e.g. when it comes to social development or politics, etc.

Seems like you guys are talking past another a little bit and just having a semantic debate when you both largely agree.

You're both describing the same concept -- taking a 'non-success', learning lessons from it, and then using those lessons to do better things in the future.

It's just one of you is OK with continuing to describe that situation with the term 'failure', with all the existing negative connotation baggage, while the other prefers to find a new word to describe it.

if you are changing or pivoting a business plan, because one wasnt successful. The first plan was a failure and you pivoted/changed to a new one. I think both terms are applicable and can be used together.

You can also re-cast the process of founding a startup as searching for a business plan and the goal as discovering information about what the market will bear that nobody else has. In fact, several prominent startup methodologies (Lean Startup & YCombinator's process) recommend doing so. Then you haven't failed at all, because the goal wasn't to execute on the business plan (which you just made up anyway), it was to discover what the actual facts were.

The advantage of this, from a purely utilitarian perspective, is that you don't feel the emotions of shame & disappointment that "failure" usually connotes. And so you can jump into the next idea more quickly, with an open-mind, and pursue it with the same thrill of discovery.

Or maybe the first one wasn't successful yet, or you realize your upside is capped, and you've identified an opportunity that will be potentially more lucrative or have a smaller downside risk. Changing what you're doing doesn't necessarily mean you can't make the original plan work - it might just mean you came up with a better place to put your effort.

One of my favorite business stories is that of the Nintendo Playing Card Company of Kyoto, whose CEO came to the US to visit the US Playing Card Company. He realized that even if he captured the entire world market for playing cards (this is before MtG) he still wouldn't have a very big business, and set out to find something better.

I'm sorry, you just come off as grouchy. People who screw up deserve to keep trying, just like first timers have a right to get their feet wet.

You seem to think there's an element of guilt and extrinsic punishment that needs to be attached to not getting something right the first time. To use a trite analogy, should Edison have been wracked with guilt every time he failed to produce a lightbulb? People who can screw up and immediately pick themselves back up are going to make it farther than even most of the wunderkinds of this world.

The people who really fail, in a terminal sense, are those who constantly flagellate themselves for their mistakes, like you demand, until they're so beaten the refuse to keep trying.

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