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Comment by jhamburger | Hacker News Reader

I think history tends to be written by the winners when it comes to entrepreneurship. It's a lot harder- and a lot more luck involved- than many would admit.

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I think the problem is not the failure to admit - most entrepreneurs would admit the struggle with honesty. It is more like an availability heuristic - success stories make the news, failures usually do not, and so many people have no idea what the success rate is.

Survivorship bias and narrative fallacy pervade almost everything, it seems.

Not necessarily. Only a very naive entrepreneur would fall for this and they would be sorted out rather quick. People fail or know/realize the huge amount of uncertainty and still choose to do startups. Different people have different levels of risk aversion and there is no common goal/value system.

in the long run, we're all dead - so better we go ahead and die now?

It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure all of his books point out that 9/10 attempts result in failure; the trick being to see the failure early enough to recover and move onto the next attempt before it is too late.

Exactly!

You need to fail fast and keep tweaking your idea until it becomes a success. You also can't be married to one single idea. Many people have a problem with this.

Yes, and he also said that people lose three businesses before they succeed. But people are afraid to fail even once because traditional education teaches students that it's bad, terrible, wrong, etc. to fail.

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