No More Entrepreneurial “Struggle Porn”

I don't really feel like adding more than that.

This is definitely the highlight of the post for me.

I've seen way too many people pontificate: "things are hard but if you keep pushing then everything will work out" which is exactly as generic and non-helpful as it sounds.

Some pursuits are worth it. Many are not. We have to learn to drop the failed projects early.

"If you don't like the results, change the game" -- or something like that. Heard it in a movie long ago and liked the quote.

Testing to see what walls can move is part of the hard work. I think most people miss that fact that they have to experience less frictional paths to find success.

Plenty of people that I know have not really struggled at all, yet when you ask them how they did it, there's always a nod to the struggling meme.

It's particularly annoying if you know someone who's made their money in a shady way, because then not only are they hiding the real way they did it, they are also pretending to have persevered by the rules.

There's a few ways this humblebrag comes about:

- One guy had all the pieces of a business ready, owned very similar profitable businesses in other countries, had invested most of his wealth before moving abroad. So he leads with "I came here with no money to my name".

- Another guy was blatantly doing illegal things on the side of another business in the same field. So of course it's not like he's starving while waiting for the business to pick up, and for the lawyers to set up some things for him. But the story is again "we had such a hard time until things picked up".

I've been watching a lot of his stuff lately - my bullshit detector is pretty sensitive. He's not full of bullshit. He's got a LOT of great advice and ideas. Maybe his "ego" is a turn-off for some, but he's doing a lot more good than harm.

You don't get anywhere by talking smack on others, and this post is little more than a bitch that Gary is successful, has a large and engaged audience, and has a message that resonates with people. All things I'm sure the author would LOVE to have.

What worthwhile thing has the author said or done that runs counter to what Gary is about?

Christian martyrs made suffering the goal, because there was a reward for this suffering after life.

With startups doing whatever nobody has done before is going to involve suffering. No doubt about this, just study the lives of Eintein or Newton, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk and you see constant fighting and suffering.

In fact, if for creating value you must clearly suffer, odds are that less competence to do it than in areas that people identify with pleasure like singing, dancing, fishing or playing footbal. This lack of competence can make your life happier than most people in the middle and long term.

But it is easy to confuse the part with the whole and believe that just because we are suffering, we are creating something of value.

So, I have a lot of expertise in such things. And one of the things you see with really bright or talented people is they often don't have the patience and similar character traits of the average person. If it doesn't come easily, they throw in the towel. They tend to not think "Maybe I need to try harder or work at this."

I tutored math when I was a member of Mu Alpha Theta in 11th grade. One of my students was a 10th grader who was mentally slow who somehow managed to get into algebra. This person worked harder for their Cs and Ds than I ever worked for As and Bs. And she never got all mad and frustrated like the "smart" kids did when they couldn't understand something.

As an adult, someone I was tutoring in math actually threw their pencil across the room after I told them to put in a number to resolve the algebraic equation, use 10 because it's easy to work with and found that I was right and they were wrong. I told them "Yeah, I'm not the reason you are frustrated. You can behave or find another tutor."

So I think there are people in the world who legitimately need to hear that some things involve struggle. Not everything will come easily.

Having said that, he's right that fetishising it is a bad thing and this is a poor metric. When I struggle, I don't use the struggle per se as a metric. I always am measuring it by something else and concluding it is worth continuing in spite of how miserable I am.

I began making money online while very ill and homeless. I absolutely couldn't work a regular job. Making money at all was a kind of success. "Just go get a full time job" was simply not a viable option.

So I continued to work at it, though I didn't make much. Over time, my income gradually improved.

I'm still struggling to make ends meet. I still have to sit down and spell out the metrics that actually matter and that make this seemingly failed path actually make sense. This is largely rooted in "I have an incurable medical condition. I am getting well when the entire world says that simply cannot be done. (and I am routinely called crazy for talking about that at all)" So I am looking at vastly improved health and moderately, painfully slowly improving finances.

But the medical stuff is supposed to cost millions over the course of my life. If I am simply not running up millions in health care costs, I'm doing a helluva lot better than I am supposed to be doing in all metrics, never mind what a shitty life I have.

There can be reasons people are pursuing something entrepreneurial that they aren't spelling out. Maybe they don't think they need to talk about those elements. Or maybe they know the rest of the world won't understand and will give them a hard time about it, so they keep it to themselves.

The vast majority of what is going on in a person's life is not their business. If they think it is, then they have good health, energy and lots of other personal assets they are taking for granted. Some folks are working at moving other issues out of their way. This can take years to sort out. Taking years isn't necessarily evidence they aren't doing all in their power and making things happen as fast as possible.

So while I agree that you shouldn't be using struggle as a metric to prove you are successful, I think there are some things the author is missing that have real value here.

Also, bullshit metrics like "I'm working so hard" as bragging points for social situations are generally a lot safer than talking about something substantive, like just how much money you are really making. That can make you vulnerable to predation, it can make your supposed friends hate you, etc. Complaint-brags are often the best way to make small talk and not alienate your acquaintances.