Myths About Failure
greylock.com
greylock.com
That did not go where I was thinking it would go...
Personally, some of the best relationships I have with people are time-limited ones. Especially in our constantly-distracted age, where “time spent together with your family” is really “time spent watching screens together.” Better to have an hour of focused time with no distractions.
And for certain ages of children quantity may be even more important than curated, moment-to-moment quality.
It’s also not remotely the case historically, where men would be gone working for weeks or months in order to provide for their families. Instead, I’d suggest that this obsession with maximizing time is of the same cultural source as ‘helicopter parenting’ and the ‘more = better, always’ mentality of modernity.
Top performers aren't necessarily the ones working crazy hours.
Words like that suck all the humanity out of business.
What's a more human way?
No amount of money is worth giving up these irreplaceable years with your children. You cannot get these moments back. You can't "make it up to them later" when you are filthy rich. If you miss teaching your kid how to ride a bike, it's gone forever. No amount of money can fill that hole.
I'm speaking from experience. I did it. I worked the 80-90 hours a week getting my startup off the ground. Raised millions in VC. And I regret it terribly.
Plenty of people don’t. I wouldn’t do what you did but no one gets to the top of any field working 40 hours a week. The number of people managing even 100 people who work 40 hour weeks is small.
Me? I'm happy to live in what Felix Salmon called a "post-work society".
Plenty of people are quite happy to have relationships with those at the tops of their fields. I don’t feel it’s my place to tell them how to live their lives. Many people are the children of parents who worked a lot all their working lives. Most of them have good relationships with one or both of their parents and are reasonably happy with their lives in general. I don’t feel it’s my place to say they shouldn’t have been born.
Parents’ Nonstandard Work Schedules and Child Well-Being: A Critical Review of the Literature
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jianghong_Li/publicatio...
What is it about our culture (is it mostly a western culture thing?) that is so obsessed with the question of identity?" Am I a success? Am I a failure? Am I a programmer? Am I a mother? Am I a nerd? Am I X? Am I Y? It seems to me that all these things are either descriptions of attributes, feelings, past actions, past results, etc. No such statement is even close to describing a person in totality. And thus, is never, strictly speaking, true.
You may have failed at something. But are you, literally, a failure? No, you're a person who happened to fail at something that one time. I guess, most of the time, this is just semantics -- a convenient shorthand. Perhaps problems only arise when one takes the shorthand "I am X" phrase too much to heart and actually starts to believe it literally? Is this even worth thinking about? Hmm...
The issue now is that we have the delusion that we can choose to be anything which makes us unhappy. Previously you were just told and had to get on with it or you had a handful of options and the best one for you was relatively easy to figure out.
Western people are much more individualistic, we're not defined by our family/clan as much so we seek other markers of belonging.
There are a lot of people now who don't have the traditional anchors that answered these questions for people. Religion has always been a big one - and shows how important group membership or not has always been, with often deadly consequences - but it's less important to many people today than in many times in the past in the west.
Many people also no longer have a lot of the pure "I do these things because they are necessary for mine and others' survival" driving factors in our life. Most jobs, at an individual level, could be given up without much impact on everyone else. Often even the person who quit would still land in a safety net and still survive fairly easily.
And a lot of these changes have a lot of benefits. It's good that you can fail at a job, it's good you can have more free time, it's good you don't have to belong to the same church or stay in the same place as everyone you group with.
But then what do you replace it with, if you seek your own way? You have to answer that question yourself.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons wealthy people succeed more often as entrepreneurs because they can afford to re-play (no, I don’t have a source for that).
In other words, some people can have plenty of lives/"men", and some don't.
Not only are wealthier people, or people from wealthier families, more likely to be able to take the time to start a business, but they are also able to try and fail many times until they succeed.
But I would guess there is a fall off when you get to a certain level of wealth. A very wealthy heir would be less likely to be driven to start a business.
So you need just enough poverty to create desire and urgency, but not so much that you have to stay stuck at a dead end job to make ends meet.
I came from a middle class home and while my parents didn't ever give me much money, they were always there as a safety net. If things didn't work out, I would always have a hot meal and a bed to sleep ok if I needed it.
Not to mention, they were able to co-sign on my first home loan and paid for half of my first car. Generational wealth - whether it is in cash, land, homes, education, or even just good credit, is a powerful thing.
Having witnessed what poverty can do to ruin people, that's a tough statement to agree with.
Perhaps this may serve as a counterpoint, in terms of how to "create desire and urgency" - to encourage people's self-motivation. A person whose base needs (in terms of Maslow's pyramid) are met, who doesn't have to worry about food and shelter - they do not necessarily stop being productive members of society.
I recently started reading a book called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...
The thesis is that the following will result in increased performance and satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
My view is that society is failing the public, especially the poor, in providing an environment where physical, psychological, and social needs are adequetly met. There's too much unnecessary suffering for how rich and abundant life can be for the least among us.
I think this is pretty common. When i did contracting for a while quite a few of the older contractors had failed businesses and tried to pay off their debt.
Can someone expand on this point?
OTOH in my experience people with no operating experience rarely have good advice (but there are significant exceptions to this too, e.g. Michael Moritz).
Most likely to succeed: enough operational experience that you can pattern match accurately and insightfully. A good example of this would be John Johnson at august (maybe he’s retired by now?) who once ran a factory in Hong Kong (making clothing? I can’t remember). Nothing tech, yet an excellent tech investor (Palm, Be, Cygnus, many others) and board member.
> Max, Peter Thiel, and the PayPal team didn’t need to run an experiment to realize that the PalmPilot approach wasn’t going to work, and to switch to a different thesis (email payments) in which they had much greater confidence.
Maybe they didn't need to run the experiment, but they certainly did: https://www.paypalobjects.com/html/pr-121799.html
Of course, I have no idea what actually happened here (other than it certainly seems like PayPal spent a lot of time building the palmpilot app, going so far as to doing a classic corny '90s splashy launch with a nerd-celebrity built entirely around the beaming concept.
The tale told in the paypal wars (https://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-Planet/dp/0...) is essentially that
1) The initial vision of Confinity/PayPal was an alternative currency enabling cross-border/cross-currency low-fee payments (similar to a lot of bitcoin/blockchain rhetoric)
2) The go-to-market strategy was beaming on palm pilots
3) Musk & Co had raised a bunch of money to build a vague "consumer finance" portal called "x.com" (Musks's strange fixation on the letter 'x' goes way back)
4) (not remembering this part for sure as I read the book a long time ago) PayPal/Confinity was running out of money because the beaming product was a flop and no one cared about their alternative currency payments usecase. Musk's company was also a slow-motion trainwreck because there was essentially no product vision and no actual customer pain being solved, but they had more money in the bank so Confinity agreed to sell to them to extend the runway.
5) The email payments thing was built as almost an afterthought to allow graph completion to enable the palmpilot beaming usecase to actually work
6) A random PM noticed that a surprising percentage of their traffic was coming from eBay users.
7) eBay, being the worst-managed incredible first-mover opportunity of the 90s dotcom boom was incapable of building a functioning payments product, despite the massive first party advantages and huge incentives to round out their core offering
8) PayPal was very popular but was burning cash at an insane rate that scaled at least linearly (possibly supralinearly) in engagement. They basically were able to survive due to a fortunate massive fund raising just before the 90s window closed (very similar to stamps.com). They might have been able to get the business to work but instead eBay acquired them so we never found out.
Of course, I read this in a book, and I read the book well over a decade ago, so I'm sure I'm not remembering things right, and I have no idea what particular axe to grind the author had, etc.
But there is evidence online that they at least believed in the beaming thing long enough to build the product and hire Scotty from star trek for a stunt launch. And this might be a minor detail, but if it's true, then Hoffman's point doesn't hold up, and it undermines the whole thesis of the post.
In general, I don't think there's much reason to believe that people who did really hard things are particularly able to explain why they were able to do them. It's great that they were able to do them, and maybe that even predicts that they'll be able to do more of them in the future. I think in Silicon Valley, if you asked a bunch of these guys to flip a coin ten times the guy who got heads ten times in a row would immediately start a Medium account to explain how his unique perspective and grit and determination enabled him to do it.
I mention this because I completely don't understand why these puffy VC content-marketing articles are on the front page of hackernews every day. There is very little evidence that there's any more value in them then say calling the psychic hotline and asking them for startup advice, and they're essentially just ads for VCs and SV thinkfluencers.
I suppose it is if you follow the Dark Journalist's X series on Youtube. Some great mythical modern tales of fantastical (but untrue) possibilities.
I just think it's funny that he went out and bought the x.com domain for a consumer finance startup in the 90s, and then ended up running a company called SpaceX, and then ran an electric car company whose top-of-the-range model is called the "Model X", then he had a baby, and named the baby "X Æ A-12 ", or "X" for short. The dude is crazy for X!
I knew a fellow once who had no middle name. Since the logins at the time were one's 3 initials, he just used 'x'. Eventually, he legally changed his name so his middle name was "x".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth
If they cannot get a basic use of the language correct, and in their three word title no less, I have little interest in examining the article.
The definition you pointed to only vaguely resembles the meaning you hope for in a secondary sub point. No other dictionary provides a definition that even remotely comes close.
Shorter OED:
> Myth (miþ). Also †mythe. 1830 [- mod. L. MYTHUS, late L. mythos - Gr. μῦθος.] 1. A purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical pheononema. Often used vaguely to include any narrative having fictitious elements. 2. A fictitious or imaginary person or object 1849.
>1. It is chronicled in an old Armenian m. that the wise men of the East were none other than the three sons of Noe 1899. 2. Parliamentary control was a m. 1888.
The second example is exactly the usage you're objecting to.
For whatever it's worth, Google's own definition also has it, which is from Oxford: https://www.google.com/search?q=myth+definition
Occitan was once far more popular than English by both royalty and total speakers. It was the language of English king Richard the Lion Heart who couldn’t speak English. Now it’s dead and most people have never heard of it. Not even conquest had anything to do with it.
My name comes from High Norman which was also more popular than English and is also dead. Britain was also more popular than English even after being displaced by Saxon invaders.
Mongol and it’s short lived Phags-pa script were very popular but they lacked influence and never caught on.
Written Arabic has remained stable and largely resisted evolution regardless of growing and contracting popularity over a large geography.
This is even true in programming. Most programmers seem to hate JavaScript and yet it has emerged as the most prolific programming language. Popular ideas about supplanting it or replacing it have proven ineffective or completely imaginary. The only moderately successful attempt to displace JavaScript is TypeScript, a superset that fully embraces JavaScript.
Popularity is an argument ignorant people hide behind when evidence is too inconvenient.