Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

> In 2011, I applied to operate a booth at the Toronto Underground Food Market [...] my fingers cramping so severely from peeling 100 pounds of potatoes that I almost called 911. [...] I lost money

So his first experience was extremely painful, almost landed you in the emergency room, and you lost money on it. What valuable lessons he learned going forward?

> I didn’t care.

None.

> Eighty per cent of first-time restaurateurs fail. I knew this. Opening a restaurant was the least sensible, dumbest thing I could do. My wife, Dorothy, a daycare worker, was coasting toward the end of a maternity leave, and we had two kids to feed.

It's so rare to see people brag about being reckless, irresonsible, and wasteful of resources they cannot afford to waste.

> “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

Friends who knew what they were talking about tried to warn him off.

> My shifts consisted of a few leisurely hours chopping veg and prepping salad dressings.

Any opportunity for experience is to be strictly avoided. "The law says I need to know how a restaurant works? I know better!"

> My role was largely symbolic anyway

No it wasn't.

> As it turns out, no one invests in first-time restaurateurs, no matter how mind-blowing they think their cooking is.

Man, I wonder why? More to the point, it's clear he never did.

> I realized it was far from the downtown foodie scene [...] Admittedly, I had an ulterior motive: the place was a 10-minute walk from my house and close to the girls’ school

He purposefully chose a bad location, knowing it was a bad location, because it was convenient for him.

...I've got to stop reading, this is actually enraging me. It's so dumb, and he seems so proud.

To be fair, guys: find yourself in the right position in life and any act to try and enrich the thing you're calling life, enlighten yourself, and improve your lot will be considered irrational by somebody.

Best take a few steps back. He's brazen, and maybe a bit dumb. I'd probably get along with calling him too proud, mostly.

Now to reduce myself to platitudes: at least he did something. That's living. Who deserves in this life to try and come up with something new? I hope not only the few special people who were ever so lucky to be born into the right place, or have the right amount of money, or the timely and rational roadmap laid out before them like some kind of gospel whispered in their ear as if from above.

For all your favourite painters, scientists, theorists, philosophers, chefs, writers, musicians, actors, even just general stop-gap-role human beings (as the preceding rhetoric might lead me to classify them—after all what kind of animal would admire a labourer[/s]), remember: there are millions who died in obscurity, having lived more or less than this goofball, or you, and most of them didn't offer up (or didn't have the chance to offer up) any insight so that you might avoid the same mistakes. It's not that you're necessarily wrong in what you're saying outright, but maybe something else.

The unfortunate thing about social matters, is that social science is kind of trite—seemingly because it can't really be treated like science—the rules' changes depend on too many variables. I think that's the beauty of it.

You're not assessing a matter that is purely business or financial or scientific. You're reading it from the wrong perspective. Put his shoes on and just listen and learn from the experience. I think that's all there is to it. This is why we share experiences. I mean, unless you know everything and have done it all already—then I'd love to hear more from you!

On another note: if that's the response of an engineer, and their treatment of clients with a similar critique, let me know—I'll choose another bridge but those that such an engineer designed to cross any divide.

I think the right response is to ask a question.

> at least he did something.

I mean no offense, because I do sorta appreciate what you're going for, but this is almost the most philosophically, semantically, and most sillily empty sentence that exists.

Everyone does something. People who do 'nothing' do something. We only praise people whom succeed publicly or fail publicly. Even then, we only praise the people who fail when we ideologically align with them. We don't praise people who go out there and try to start a hate group, nor the ones who succeed.

Trying isn't really something that should count to other people. I won't say it shouldn't count to the person who tried it; self-esteem is a very personal thing. Failure shouldn't necessarily be a bad thing personally either, but let's not pretend that it's usually a good thing. The vast majority of failures are just failures. Starting a bead store in 2017 isn't a good idea, and we shouldn't congratulate my mother-in-law for doing it and wasting 30k in investments, nor should we congratulate her investors.

Edit:

Also, can anyone tell me if I should have used 'who' or 'whom' here? I don't 'think' it's the direct object, but I will defer to someone else:

'We don't praise people who go out there and try to start a hate group'

Sure, sure—but you're cutting one small phrase out of my larger sentiment. I know it's a dumb platitude. I said as much. I'd prefer the focus of my comment be the rest of it.

I didn't think I had to break it down further, and I was trying to be cool and all that, but what I was trying to say is: [if you know that area of Toronto, the location he chose was not that out of the way business-wise, but it is a little bit and ] he was trying to bring growth and culture to an area of his city that needs it. He was trying to do something that would have a significant positive impact for his family and his community. That seems like a good thing to me, overall.

He didn't do everything wrong. The reviews he received, being rated higher at some point than Bar Isabel (one of the best, if not the, best Spanish restaurant in the city), and Cafe Boulud (one of the finest French restaurants in the city at the Four Seasons in Yorkville) are substantial.

Wasn't congratulating the guy. He's got a tough road ahead. I'm just encouraging the humanist understanding treatment vs. hard-analytical treatment of the article. He already knows he's screwed He's said as much. That might mean he wrote it for another reason, no? It certainly isn't encouraging charity. Maybe he just wrote it for people like himself to read? I think that's a good starting question.

Apologies, I'm a few glasses of wine in, and your elucidation made it much clearer. Thank you for your response!

No problem, I can see where I fuzzed my own points!

I feel like this story really highlighted all the guy's flaws, and hopefully exaggerated them. As you say, he must've been doing something right.

The story seems like he took a terrible risk he couldn't afford, he didn't prepare or research things well, and his endeavor failed largely due to his own shortcomings. Sure, he learned something and has a story. He also borrowed and lost thousands of dollars from his friends, and severely set back his family - possibly for life. Given that he's unlikely to be a restauranteur again, his lesson doesn't seem that valuable either.

I hope the story was unfair to him; perhaps reality was more complex.

I quit my job and lived out of two bags for eleven months:

http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/

When that failed I had to get a real job again, but got sick of it after a year and a half:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/leaving-full-time-jobs/

Then I took off on the road again and eventually had to return to the full time job/life:

http://khanism.org/perspective/a-tale-of-two-journeys/

I did something. I failed .. well maybe not failed so much as just didn't find a way to sustain myself. But each time I hope I get a little better at it.

And yea ... at least I tried. One day I'll be dead. At least I got to see Singapore, feel the wind of New Zealand, ride through the deserts of Australia, do a radio poetry show on the 8am commute in Perth.

He made some bad decisions. We can see that in the retrospectiscope. I agree I had trouble reading it. But yea, respect for trying. He lost a ton of money? Well as long as he can save enough to pay for his kids' education, at least he has a story to tell and they can learn from him.

It's all relative. I can see the bad and see the good. You gotta try, or else you're just gonna die in your cube.

> Well as long as he can save enough to pay for his kids' education, at least he has a story to tell and they can learn from him.

I didn't get the impression that this was the case from the ending.

> I still have an outstanding HST situation, and I face the prospect of personal bankruptcy.

> We can barely afford the place, but I wanted my daughters to have their own rooms—like they did before I sold our house. I may have to moonlight as a bartender to make sure the rent gets paid, but my girls are worth it.

It sounds like he barely has enough money to pretend their status hasn't changed, since that's important to him. I don't want to rag on the guy, but nowhere in this piece does he seem to consider paying for his childrens education as a significant life goal. Playing restaurant seems like it was his dream, not seeing his children grow up successful.

The cost of education in Canada is much lower then the US. My undergrad CS degree (Earned in 2008) cost me <$30,000 CAD for tuition and textbooks. Decent university, no scholarships.

ehh if you're in state no that's not "much" cheaper, but it is like half off. $12935.28 CAD / year for the university I went to, a four year degree would cost $51740 CAD.

A thousand times this.

I think you made a pretty solid decision when you moved from the States to Australia.

> as long as he can save enough to pay for his kids' education

That sounds like a good thing but there's another story on HN where commenters are complaining that it's bad! Rich bankers paying for their kids' education and helping them become rich too. That it's unfair to poor kids. People have such arbitrary and inconsistent opinions. No matter what you do, people are going to believe it's wrong.

Bit dramatic and a false dichotomy. It wasn't like he didn't have other choices.

Unfortunately I agree with your intent (going after your dreams, trying to enrich your life or enlighten yourself in a way that may seem crazy to most) but disagree that it can be applied here.

He literally did nothing to prepare himself to fulfill his dream other than a mandatory 3 months of lazily being a line cook learning nothing, and a weekend cooking at a festival.

I'm not in the food industry, but off the top of my head here are basic things I would advise to prepare yourself for success:

1. Get yourself a year of runway so that you can spend 1 year being a restaurant owner's apprentice. Spend 3 months being a line cook, 3 months working bar, 3 months wait staff, and 3 months helping with the book. 2. Use this year network with restaurant owners. Agree to buy 10 them drinks so they can tell you about their biggest mistakes. This < $1000 investment probably could have saved him 10s of thousands. 3. Use this year to also network in the service industry generally, which tends to have high turnover and is good to have a network to find replacements.

This plan took me 10 minutes to think of and could probably be vastly improved. Instead he just hoped things would somehow work out. At some point you shouldn't applaud someone for following their dreams and instead just call it what it is, dumb.

> at least he did something. That's living.

Yeah, true. But...let's be honest, the thing he did was very destructive, dumb, and doomed to failure; he didn't get the outcome he wanted going in, he's not happy with the outcome he ended up with, and he's not articulated any lessons he learned from it.

There's a lot of things he could have done. He could have changed careers, gone back to university, backpacked across Europe, sold his house, put everything he owned in storage, and then circled the globe hopping from port to port on tramp freighters. Instead he cached out a chunk of his pension, sold his house, spent all the equity, borrowed money from friends, and basically spent every penny he and his wife had on pretending to be running a restaurant.

Commiting suicide is "doing something", so I guess by your definition that's living? That doesn't seem very useful of a definition. Meanwhile, I have a rewarding job I deeply enjoy, I spend time with friends and family, I have hobbies, I learn new things. Am I not "living"?

> Put his shoes on and just listen and learn from the experience.

That would be easier to do if he'd learned from it first. I think the point of making mistakes and "living life" is learning from those mistakes, and becoming a better person. What do I learn from reading about someone's fatalistic retelling of something he tacitly admits he knew was dumb? "Don't sell your house to invest in a project with no real upside and an overwhelmingly likely chance of 100% losses"? "Don't spend money you need to feed your kids on a vanity project which you've sabotaged for your own convenience?"

You're not all wrong. I live similarly to the way you describe. I'm certainly not setting him up as a model, or defending the subject of the story.

Do you know Toronto well? It might not be to learn from the lessons he has to offer, but may be something somebody (or many people) in this town need to hear.

Like I said, there are so many would-be anythings that fade into obscurity for one reason or another, for a cause that was their fault or not. Normally you just don't hear from them.

Everybody loves an unlikely success story, but are full of venom when shown the other side. Maybe nobody wants to believe it, and would prefer to believe that everything follows a perfect order and all you have to do is follow a prescribed set of rules and you'll be fine. I think the context is important—the story is a tragedy, not an ode.

Every single successful entrepreneur in the food industry that I know, and most of the unsuccessful ones as well, work their asses off. I know this because I have worked in the food industry at every single level, from farming to sales to prep to cooking to event planning / catering to waiting tables to washing dishes. And for the most part, not established businesses but startups, where it is very easy to keep a close eye on the business decisions of the founders.

I've seen a lot of different people fill those shoes. Their roles aren't symbolic, and it is an impressively grand delusion for a founder of any business to think as such. They are supposed to set an example for everyone else.

Only one of my bosses could not understand this, and his business has sunk millions without turning a profit because, initially, he was lazy and would blame every problem on his workers, the industry, the weather, etc. instead of his own laziness and lack of planning skills. He didn't seek to eliminate his problems, he relished in them because they let him feel like things were out of his control.

The rest of them worked themselves to the bone to provide good service and a good product. They took responsibility for all decisions and gave at least some thought before making stupid, risky decisions.

Literally the first thing you do when creating a brick and mortar establishment is research the area and find where the most profitable location will be. This guy fucked up from day one, choosing laziness over rational thought, and then denies responsibility for it. This is downright pitiful and he deserves to lose every penny that he did.

> It's so rare to see people brag about being reckless, irresonsible, and wasteful of resources they cannot afford to waste.

I hate being sardonic, but we are on hacker news.

I think his behaviour is already well described by Carl Jung. His world view is skewed by mythology (like movies and hero worship) instead of by rational thought.

Not much different from some tech startup founders I’ve encountered.

Any particular work by Jung you’re thinking of?

So was the world view of Richard Stallman in Richard Stallman's Sedentary, Physically-Debilitating Quest for the Gnolden Treasure.

I'm not saying that you imply his wasn't equally skewed. Just that when I read about Stallman or other people who rightly attract admiration this truism tends to be conspicuously absent. But the mythology is just as strong there too-- a rational person would not take years to find out from a specialist that their chronic hand pain was due to repetition caused by an unreasonable amount of typing[1].

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Plenty of us dorks complain about Stallman's worldview and philosophy. I won't complain about the contributions he's made to computing, or even the world in general, but striking it lucky doesn't make you philosophically pure.

Not going to get anywhere assuming you're in the bottom 80% and not trying.

I don't think it's a strictly necessary attitude for success. Buffett seems like a good example of someone who manages to have a clear and rational mindset, yet with no trouble succeeding.

Lol. Same here, I stopped reading after a while as it was pissing me off. How can someone be so dumb and explain it in excruciating detail. You brought up good points, there's a ton more. For ex. $3000 spent on lawyer to register a company, who later told him he could do it online for a couple hundred! This kind of information is just a few Google searches away these days.

Have you ever heard the expression hindsight is 20/20?

Yes, he made a lot of mistakes but it wasn't clear to him at the time. And of course he didn't know what he was bad at. We are all bad at several things.

It's good to keep these things in mind, whether it is for a restaurant or a tech startup.

He makes a lot of mistakes that are just inexcusable though. For example, just when fights through the painful start, he shuts the restaurant down to give everyone a week off. A week! I've never run a restaurant, but my guess is that it's difficult to make money while being closed.

He doesn't do simple math to figure out how much money he'll need, what runway he has, or what he should be charging for his food. He pays three grand to incorporate a business, when a Google search tells him it could be done for far less. When he gets the opportunity to work for a few months in a restaurant, he squanders it.

Sure, hindsight is twenty twenty, but a lot of these obstacles aren't hard to see coming. If you're going to gamble with your life savings, your friend's money, and your family's financial future, you should do the research and put the thought in to make sure you aren't throwing it all away.

You know the story of the FedEx guy right? He could afford to pay the staff or put fuel in the planes; riveting speech; gambled the money in vegas and kept the company going.

This guy is praised, but he was a fucking pyscho (literally). He didn't give a damn about his own staff and risked everything. He got lucky, made it big.

If this guy had made it, we'd see him as a "The Hundred Foot Journey" style success story.

Maybe the only lesson is that he wasn't ruthless enough?

The thing about the FedEx guy and his story is that, at least as the story goes, he had a 100% chance of failure if he did nothing, and a possible chance of huge success if he gambled. Betting his last funds was all upside for him, so he made a cold-blooded decision to maximise his expected outcomes, and it paid off.

The restaurant guy...not so much. He took significant assets (his pension, home equity, health, his relationship with his wife), and gambled them all on high downsides and very limited upsides.

> Maybe the only lesson is that he wasn't ruthless enough?

Ruthlessness is not a substitute for making very bad decisions.

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