Ask HN: How many failures it took you to be successful? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many failures it took you to be successful?

Success is relative. For some, it's money & for some, it's work-life balance. For some it's $100k/year job & for some, it's $1m in side business & for the outliers, it's billions.

I'm curious how many failures it took you to crack the success nut?

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I'll go on a tangent and then converge and hope this will be useful.

The first book I have read after college was "How to Study in College" by Walter Pauk. After a bad experience, I wondered how I could have done it better and I wondered if there was a meta resource that would have helped me learn better.

I asked wondered if I could think about my own cognition, and if there was a discipline like that, something meta. I was amused when I finally discovered there was such a field named "metacognition". It was humbling. Duh! How could I not put it together as I literally described it with its name.

Some concepts I got into were long-term potentiation, memory, etc.

I have then read Cal Newport's book "How to be a Straight A" student. A bit late, but useful for the future.

I wanted to be able to think and solve problems better as I have noticed that even though I have the necessary skills, putting them together requires something more, a bigger picture. I found a book by Belikov called "General Methods for Sovling Physics Problems" which was really nice. Reading a formulation of what a physics problem was, what the general physics principles were, what it means to solve a problem, have helped me. One additional way to think of things is in term of feedback systems, control theory and instrumentation, which is my training in college. These help me see interactions between systems.

I then found John R. Hayes' "The Complete Problem Solver", which was a more general book. The concepts and definitions of that book are useful.

I have recently found another book "Cracked It!" which I haven't read yet, but from the authors' interviews, it does a good job of describing what I do at my job and how I help clients to increase success likelihood in projects. I'll get to reading it at some point because it seems interesting.

These are things I use to think about and solve problems. Success would be a consequence.

Interesting tangential answer. So you're basically focusing on systems & letting goals take care of itself. That's nice. It's the main point of the book Atomic Habits. Check it out if you haven't yet.

Wow, this is a question that is impossible to answer directly! But failure is a very good topic for discussion. Here are my thoughts: Failure is a precursor to learning. So generally speaking, the more you know, the more you have failed. Success is defined by goal achievement. Success is not directly dependent on knowledge, but it helps. Given this logic, success is only partially a function of failure, and therefore not directly related to the number of failures.

Haha that's why I asked.

> Failure is a precursor to learning.

That's definitely a good point. When I asked the question, I thought about how many times you've tried to achieve a goal rather than learning something & failing while learning.

I'm employed, but it's average money (for this profession, not in SV) and I don't see any career progression.

So I'd say I'm still waiting to be truly successful.

We'll get there eventually :)

Nah, I'll just trudge through life being average at best and never truly successful.

I taught myself software development at age of 12 and got a high paid job coming from a poor background at 18, so I consider myself successful since then. Although I had as many failures as I can count, I consider myself successful since the beginning.

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