Hacker News Reader

Comment by Uhhrrr | Hacker News Reader

The airplane bullets story actually shows how success stories can be valuable. If you take them in aggregate and look at what's not there, there are some common themes:

- No one ever says they gave up

- No one ever says they wasted time on petty distractions

- No one ever says they saw a great opportunity and passed on it

etc.

View on HN

That says more about the framing of success stories than anything else. When your third company sells for seven figures, you get to say your first and second were learning experiences rather than things you had to give up because they weren't going to succeed. When you're a unicorn, you get to build side projects or embark upon codebase rewrites involving more people than most companies ever hire, and people will praise both your desire to explore new ideas decisiveness when you fire them and shut them down rather than dismissing it as a petty distraction (and something you gave up on). And the most successful startups get to say all the many investment and acquisition offers and commercial deals they passed on weren't great opportunities, and have reason to even believe it.

If we're doing airplane bullet stories, it's like trying to figure out how to fix airframes by looking at the aircraft that didn't get hit at all...

No one ever says they saw a great opportunity and passed on it

I had the opportunity to buy Bitcoin in 2010 and didn't. I was simultaneously correct (about the moral value and nature of the thing) and utterly, utterly wrong (about what it would do between then and zero, and thus from a personal financial standpoint).

I had too much faith in humanity to invest in Bitcoin. Whoops. Turned out degenerate nihilism was the winning bet.

IIRC Churchill said about the US, hoping for entry into WWII: 'They always do the right thing, after exhausting all other possibilities.'

The famous: "markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com