Failing sucks, but it doesn't kill you

Not only is this particular piece of advice beaten to death by nouveau motivational speakers, it ignores the rational reasoning behind avoiding the most “scary” project ideas.

An example? Any project that’s basically infeasible for one person to undertake given their skillset or simple “physics,” and by that I mean the physics of time and money.

For example, I feel like there should be a good alternative to iCloud and Google photos with agnostic storage and native apps for all platforms and extremely simple self-hosting.

Now should I go out and start this project because it’s the one I’m most afraid to start? Hell no. I know that these are products built by teams of dozens over decades. I also don’t even know how to write a hello world mobile app. So I could waste years of my life doing this, and all I’d get out of it would be an alternative to a product that costs me $4 a month.

Or maybe instead of an open source project I could try to start a company to do this. I could raise funding and build a team to do this - congratulations, I now have a high-churn consumer facing product that at most makes $10 per customer per month with high support costs.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, fear is only one factor involved in decision-making, and other logical pieces or information can feed into fear. Sometimes, many times, fear is based off of a project idea being legitimately a bad idea.