Confronting failure as a core life skill
buildinghealthier.substack.com
buildinghealthier.substack.com
If you start businesses, you will fail. Fact of life. Happened to me many times. You know what investors like to back? Second and third time founders - “serial entrepreneurs”. Backing a 20 year old college dropout with a few million bucks is a down payment on the future because they will inevitably fuck it up, but 10 years from now if they are still in the game and failed a couple times they will take your check and the odds of failure have gone down significantly.
With the market the way it is right now, many entrepreneurs (and their employees) reading are likely staring down the barrel of failure. Bite the bullet and move on because no one wants your zombie company with a too-high valuation that’s going to putter along for 2 more years and collapse anyway or get acquihired. Just restart with a clean cap table and a more cost efficient idea.
We had some negative customer feedback come in last night and a contract was canceled because of it. I wish this customer had responded to my emails asking for feedback over the last three months but they didn't. Now it's over and done with and some of the most damning feedback we've ever received.
It breaks my heart, I'm in a low place today. But as you say, business is hard. Being a passive consumer-critic is easy. I will say that once you start a business and get your hands dirty, I think you can never go back. You see how hard it is to make the sausage and you gain a lot of respect for the process, even as you have random anons telling you to commit suicide on Twitter, how the men making a quarter million dollars at Google in SF are so oppressed because their rent is high, etc.
Are you taking the occasion to reconsider strategy of approach, to get feedback?
Sorry, just an aside. Nonetheless, on the known line to translate "failures" into "lessons".
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Update: I must leave the console now, but I hope the sniper passing by posts some argument. Hopefully different from "Insensitive", here where the exact point is (1) treating events as something preventable given some wisdom, to be built, and (2) treating events as something to be analyzed, instead of borne - to neutralize them.
I remember at a prior company we had our biggest customer drop us. Similar situation, we worked with them for months to get usage up, but they ignored/blocked our efforts. Then one day, no renewal. It hurt, it was scary, but the way business works. It also led to a pivot and later acquisition.
What were they upset about
Can it be rectifyied?
Here to help
In the meantime, remember there's more to life than work, and you have more to offer the world than just the products you produce.
Take the opportunity to learn, when the time is right to revisit things.
Take some time away if you can. Try not to linger on it. It gets easier with each day.
Oh, and get the hell away from Twitter :)
What's the actual source quote here? Your paraphrase is excellent in and of itself.
You should just watch the live set, but I can’t seem to find this specific set on YouTube for a link. It seems to have hardcore copyright from Netflix and they ban any videos from it https://www.netflix.com/title/907090
You can search on the linked page for “The only thing about it, I don’t like to hear when white people would be saying, he dumb, ain’t he?” regarding the boxer Leon Spinks. Much funnier in the live set.
I have lost my wife, my child, my parents, my grandparents, my friends, my house burned down with all of my possessions. I lost my ability to code due to burnout and had to spend several years doing nothing.
During my burnout experience I was basically forced to confront the roaring void of existence. I spent time at a monastery and contemplated the futility of it all.
And yet at the end of all of this, I considered what else is there to do with life but to begin anew? And now that I have lost everything, I am no longer naive. I know what is possible to have, and what is possible to lose, and I can act with understanding from past experience. I feel far more capable of success now that I know what it is to fail in the hardest ways I can imagine.
I studied Buddhism under a mentor and realized that many of the principles applied regardless of your beliefs about cosmology. The idea that all problems humans face can be summarized as "greed, ignorance, and aversion" was a useful frame. These helped me triangulate the ultimate source of my burnout to unmet family expectations that I had for many years tried to live up to but could not. Confronting my family about these expectations and taking responsibility for my own life was absolutely key in my healing.
These days I don't exactly have a set practice but I still live with my mentors. They started a syncretic monastery that welcomes all traditions, and observing the similarities and differences between worldviews has been quite eye opening. The most valuable practice I take from all this is a honed awareness of the root causes of suffering, and I've found that once the root cause is identified, it becomes possible to release it.
I would also recommend the work by some of Daniel Ingram's influences such as Mahasi Sayadaw's 'Progress of Insight' or 'Manual of Insight'.
thank you for sharing
I ended up leaving that job because politically at that company I had no voice, and people above me lacked basic leadership skills and continually failed to recognize it. Additionally whenever I would call out issues, it always would somehow manifest into a problem with me. So I ended up leaving, and not on great terms.
Once I took a long break, I started looking for jobs again. The title I carried on my resume was bullshit, and trying to interview for Senior Engineering positions proved difficult. When I made the interview I made it clear what I did at that company. I told them that the title didn't represent my duties. I feel like some saw this as a blight. I finally accepted a job as a Software Engineer and now am slowly fixing my career.
The lesson I learned was to never accept a worthless title. Somehow people still misunderstand my directness about this job in my history. It carries a strange weight, but hopefully with time I can correct it.
The article is saying don’t hide from or pad your failures. Your failure was not a wrong title.
I don't think that the stigma is only associated with failure, but also with lacking talent/gift. Founders, developers, etc. simply want to look pristine, flawless, gifted. The mythical unicorn who "everything who touches turns to success" and any setback or effort is downplayed.
In the company I previously worked for as a junior developer I had 2 colleagues. Let's call them Tom and Bob. I once made the mistake of asking for feedback on how to improve from Tom. And the mistake I made was thinking that his feedback would focus on maximizing constructiveness aka. inform me with ways that would be actionable for me. When I asked him how to "become as good as you are" what he instead gave me as an answer was "my brain simply works differently".
We can argue over whether I asked the right or wrong question and I will agree with you that perhaps if the question was posed differently the answer may have been more constructive. However, I don't think that this detracts anything from my original point: When communicating, especially in career/business contexts, we have multiple goals in mind. And one of the goals that we have is to ensure that we don't show to others how hard we had to work, or how many times we failed until we understood a concept.
And this need will never ever go away, because impressions and perceptions are important. It's also the reason why companies will insist on keeping in their job openings "call for talents", "seeking talented developers", etc. I've even seen Linkedin job posts with 200+ applicants and at first was impressed, but then found out that some companies just reopen the same job ad to avoid resetting the counter because apparently having "200+ applicants" is giving the impression that lots of developers out there who would do anything to join them.
You'll always have people or/and companies that prettify or up-sell something they did because (especially in career contexts) perception and impression is important, and it's not just about being constructive/educational to other founders/developers etc. but to also look great while doing it.
I had a brilliant professor once, aware of the fact that he didn't really actually need to try, he was just incredibly gifted as a mathematician and for him undergrad was a walk in the park. He knew that he could teach us, but dealing with "the struggle" wasn't something he could empathise with.
People often ask me how I had the motivation/discipline or drive to achieve certain long term goals and my honest answer is that they just didn't seem optional to me, like how one might brush their teeth without thinking. I couldn't give actionable advice to someone who, for example, "wants to get in shape" beyond what are essentially tautologies like just eat less and exercise more.
but that doesn't even sound right. there are a million life hacks (real, good-natured ones like "start small", "make healthy things convenient" etc) you could share to help or to encourage someone facing that wall other than "just be like me" or "obey the laws of physics". If you cared enough about helping them, I guess.
This is an almost insulting question. What are you expecting, some magic trick? Go spend years studying, working hard, and focusing on improving yourself.
And you are posting precisely in a place where we share.
Substantially the same. You want to learn something, go ask those who can teach you something.
Or, you can work on your own, build up competence without insights, and collect those insights all out of your experience in the span of decades.
> as a source
It's good sense, not authority.
The correct answer to this issue was given over 2,200 years ago, when King Ptolemy I is said to have asked Euclid if there was not a shorter road to geometry than through Euclid's Elements, to which Euclid replied that "there is no royal road to geometry."
> You want to learn something, go ask those who can teach you something
This is not about whether you accept instruction from experts. It was specifically a response to the question "how to become as good as you are." That's a meta-question that has an obvious answer, which is to study and gain experience in the subjects you want to become good at.
The problem with that question is that its implication is that there's some special trick that will allow the questioner to shortcut the years of work and study that allowed expertise to be achieved.
In fact, exactly, the answer to King Ptolemy is about the "royal path to geometry", not to "being a geometer". (Already Plato made a notable distinction.)
> they have something useful to say
And in fact "they" do. They (the right ones) can teach metaskills to people who are missing them. (And can people miss them: just yesterday I was treated as a divine helper for having given a relatively trivial advice to strangers passing by.) And said "they" have collected patterns correlated with better professionalism, for sharing: thank you for that, mates.
Sure, "they" may show a high level of genericity: some people sell, some people lead, some people manage, some people assess, some people develop, some people build - nails, chips, fingernail enamel - the advice tends to be universal. But I mentioned Brian Tracy because he openly states as a premise of all his doing that he once was a poor performer in his specific job, he went to the best peer in the firm and asked "how do you do that (of being ten times better than us)", and there were job specific non-trivial attitudinal tricks that the peer shared - enabling him to results.
So, people may have something to teach, and they are frequently open for sharing, and without their input easily some things may stale, and some of them may be critical. (Otherwise, why do you read, if not for refinement? And texts are refined wisdom for transmission.)
> instruction from experts
Not exactly «instruction» but practical or subtle information.
> the question "how to become as good as you are." That's a meta-question that has an obvious answer, which is to study and gain experience in the subjects you want to become good at
No, that is not even valid for a pure theoretician - which in facts studies other theoreticians to squeeze out the teachings. And some of them are written, some are transmitted in presence. This is why we have "schools" instead of just "bibliographies and labs". Your own hard work is just one side, necessary and central - but you do not do it in a jar. You could, but it would take you a lifetime to go there where for the properly guided ones is "past the early stages".
> The problem with that question is that its implication is that there's some special ... shortcut [to] the years of work and study
You have read that implication. It is not necessary. There is no shortcut to the laureate degree. There are shortcuts against reiterating what you always did and was uninformed unwise and inefficient: the others.
That team was no better/worse at failure than anyone else, but apparently non-engineers can’t be bothered with the truth of humans: we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
Sometimes it can help to continually plan and provide gentle interventions that expose the team to individual examples of what you are looking for. As long as that doesn't too severely overlap with what amounts to activities or embarrassing admissions that could torpedo a team member's career later on when you're gone. A very hard ask overall.
Probably the hardest part: If you can do it yourself, as an individual, congrats you get to feel like you could inspire people. But that's you as an individual. The group-organism experiences growth prompts as stress just like individuals do, but with far worse tools for coping. And one of the worst counter-pressures is the ever-present possibility of faking it for a bit and then just changing jobs to escape the awkward stuff, maybe getting a raise in the process.
> we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
Yea this is a real problem. I wish stats and probability were more emphasized in high school. And it really doesn’t matter if people understand the math, the primary goal should be to get students at least familiar, and hopefully comfortable, with the concepts of chance and randomness. And having students internalize the concept of a confidence interval could help form a mental model of how to go about making assertions and the danger of overstating things.
The overstating things part is definitely ingrained in the American culture at least but I feel that this could really chip away at that
If they are there to watch you burn it's because they fear failing so bad they want to reinforce their world view or control their surroundings such that no one around them attempts anything they can fail at.
Unironically they are failing at those things because they don't work. Now get this, if you go off and do something right... They have failed again.
99% of people want you to suffer and fail at everything you do. The trick is realizing they don't matter whatsoever no matter who they are.
That seems detached from reality and a dangerous, more than productive, idea. They are more probably uninterested or superficial (which is in a way the same). You do not need to feign enemies to get detached.
Or, you should find a better environment.
Rational individuals understand immediately that cooperation gives more return than its opposite. If you show to be an asset, you are everybody's asset. Sure, there is an epidemic of irrationality - but it did not hit every environment, and there exist cultures which had that idea of cooperation permeated societally. (Especially as the whole point of "society" is cooperation.)
For me personally, it turned out I have autism (which I didn't realize until age 33), and understanding this helped me understand perhaps why I was being deceived so often.
Generally, I appreciated this article by Malcolm Ocean about his idea of a "Non-Naive Trust Dance". https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-t... He suggests that the optimal strategy for trust building is a slow building over time that acknowledges the distrust inherent to both parties rather than naively accepting people at face value.
One thing I'm learning is that it's not advisable to share these failures with potential /partners
I highly, highly recommend this book. I have no connection to Mark but I did find his book through a comment of his on HN.
The company that acquired my company then went through internal struggles and the result was that I left after a few years, unable to add value any more.
It feels like a failure, but equally it feels like a good lesson, but a painful one.
It's 2 years after I left and I still think about it.
If I could say something to my past self, I would say that "You're about to learn a hard life lesson" and not change anything.
I'm careful now to try and shine a balanced light on my work there, it wasn't awesome, and it wasn't horrid.
There are more people out there with similar life stories of hard lessons learnt than you might expect, and it's good for both of you to connect with them.
Also, as a solo founder, I found what you did comendable instead of a 'failure'
I’m going to be equally honest. How does it make sense on a base-of-system level? What were 130 people doing? What could the technology possibly have been to enable therapy for autistic children? What mistakes could you have made in such a situation, with what possible consequences? For who, the children or the technology?
You should be proud of yourself for just having tried to do it.
This is probably just a sign of the (post-)Covid era, but I do find it interesting when compared to the broader SAAS world that obsesses about “improving [professional’s] ability to do [job]” at increasingly granular levels.
> Surprisingly, my new friends don’t focus on our failures. They are simply curious about the details of the adventure.
That's too bad.
Here's as an actual core life skill when it comes to failure: you want to stack as many failures into as few attempts as you possibly can. Save yourself the trouble and the time. Even if someone tells you about how they failed, and you listen, you are still at high risk of making the same failures, because you truly don't know any better.
I'm sure there is lots he learned in the four years but this post doesn't really talk about that, so I'm not sure if he quite confronted it yet, nor developed it as a core life skill.
My old business was a pretty good way to spent 16 years. No investors, no goals, good pay, a perfect environment to stew in and sideline more personal failings.
That's what I want to read about - how am I going to fuck up the next business or relationship for the exact same reasons? Can I still do anything about that?
(失败乃成功之母)
I am no expert, I was curious myself and went down an internet-sleuthing rabbit-hole. Apparently this is a common phrase, but I am not fluent in Mandarin, so cum grano salis.
OK, those things can be upsetting, and create some unexpected chaos in your life. But if that's the worst you ever have to deal with, you aren't really doing too bad.
"It could be worse" can sound like small comfort, but really, it could be worse.
Then, constructive perspective there where there is space for action; just stopping wasting energies on it where there is no space for action.
if things aren't going your way, and you are ruminating and poisoning your blood fruitfullessly remembering the bad events, replace those thoughts with the acceptance that the events are there - stop agonizing uselessly, take the novelties as just a matter of fact. Get out of the thought, get out of the emotion - they can be replaced by a label, "Past. There. What is done is done. Next".
Then, if you can do something about it (to fix the situation), enter the constructive mood of the entrepreneur exploiting the useful fact of being alive to engineer reality. Otherwise, if you cannot do anything about it, bear the consequences but do not let the damage increase through an inadvisable behaviour of possibly letting events impact your mental, emotional states - that would be wasted energy, wasted health, wasted time.
What is defined as failure for one, is success for another. Failure detection is skewed by "the loudest voice" and "the strongest arm." Morals, ethics, scientific standards, and social hierarchy all fighting for a chance to define and redefine failure. What one person can happily do without question could be the kryptonite for another. Not to mention gender roles.
The weird part, at least for me, is that people are not consistent. What is a failure in one aspect is a success in another; it's not objective. There's almost always a spin. Probably autism a bit but, at least be consistent and honest.