Inspire HN: Persistent determination
First, ask yourself a question: if you failed, then how do you know if you failed because it’s impossible or because you just wasn’t determined enough?
Well, really, how do you know that? Every real life case falls into two possible categories: either someone succedeed or not. If he or she falied then there is always a lot of obvious reasons for that, because it’s easy to judge when you’re looking into the past. From formal, scientific point of view one can’t prove something is impossible just because someone who tried failed. I challenge you with the hypothesis that the only reason you can fail is insufficient determination.
The great Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov discovered evolutionary epistemology principle. It says that humans only tend to search the most simple solutions. And the best solutions (those can’t be achieved by incremental development of the existing solutions) are unattainable even for the most keen intuition.
When you are in the situation when you don’t have all the information you need, or you need to come up with something new and undiscovered (sounds pretty much like a startup, doesn’t it?), it’s like trying to get out of swamp: you’re trying to make test steps in different directions. The majority of people has just two behaviour strategies in this situation: 1) if (failed) goto 0; //return to the initial position 2) if (failed) { make_one_more_step(); goto 0; } //make just one more step and return
And if you get this far, I hope you don’t think I wrote this essay just to practice my English skills, do you? The most interesting question here: is this the infinite loop or not? while (failed) make_one_more_step();
A tiny percentage of people (and entrepreneurs) follows this strategy (including Groupon’s founder and the guys behind Angry Birds to name a few).
You may think these are stupid questions. But I think, when what's happening in your world doesn't make sense...when it doesn't conform with your beliefs about how things should work, then it's time to ask hard questions. Question everything...
When I started my construction company 3 years ago, I thought that would be easy money. Far from it. I managed to face virtually every problem out there: the highly commoditized matured market, huge margins pressure, global economic crysis, the lack of education (I have 2 degrees, but in CS, not construction), lack of communication skills and leadership, betrayal of my cofounder, huge accounts receivable - just to name a few. I can write a huge book on how we were trying to achieve product/market fit. We looked like an illustration to Paul Graham’s “How Not To Die” essay.
Many, many, many times I felt like I can’t take it anymore. But I got up again and again. Can you imagine what is it like running a business for 3 years 16 hours day, 7 days a week while having little to no income?
But I learned a lot. We discovered product/market fit, learned how to make money in comoditized market, eventually I hacked supply chain and the construction ecosystem and achieved 40% profit margins while it’s still chaper for our customers than the avg. market price. But I still face obstacles every day. But now I know that it’s up to you if they can stop you.
So I encourage you to discover your own limits of the possible and then hack’em! You are hackers, remember?