Is it better to fail spectacularly?
danielmangum.com
danielmangum.com
If failure means homelessness, avoid failure.
If failure means you lose your one chance in your life of completing a marathon, be conservative.
If the difference between failing and succeeding is minimal in your life, burn the bridges! This was not his first marathon, and even if he bonked, he'd likely still be able to finish it, albeit slowly.
That's when I realized it was much easier to take those risks when you knew you had a safety net to fall back on and you didn't have to worry about winding up homeless sleeping under an overpass.
If someone bets a million bucks on stock A, but is worth a billion bucks, then that’s not $1m conviction, it’s <1% conviction. And that information is then factored into the size of my bet.
Unfortunately I also learned this the hard way.
43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”
Mostly Folk match expectations, I.e. upsides
Downside fear is a very great motivator
A lack of consequential downsides can make folk sensibly choose to cut their losses and move on.
Sometimes this is invisible as parents bailing you out is not known before and may be a private discussion.
All or nothing downsides can mean folk will work themselves close to death to win ( or just not lose )
It also effects how much someone will gamble to get a unicorn rather than settle for a comfy income
Have the downside discussion early on
I very strongly want to distance myself and my argument from the ones put forward in the video. Furthermore, I also strongly shun the rhetoric in that video that mostly reminds me of a Ben Shapiro "owns" video. I do not find that kind wall building useful or good.
I was specifically countering this assumption. Our human mind doesn't have absolute hierarchy of preferences, they might even be circular (A is preferred to B, B is preferred to C and C is preferred to A). If I asked the mountaineer, would he like to be homeless. He would say no. But his context specific wish is to die on a mountain trying to summit which contradicts his desire to not be homeless.
The author’s analogy was about burning ships, not bridges, but your quote about burning bridges reminds me of related scenario I’m seeing more frequently among young people I’ve mentored: The idea that burning bridges is not a big deal because there are always more opportunities.
I’m in a big Slack where people come to ask for advice on tech careers. An alarming number of questions in recent years are from people who want to leave their jobs with a bang: Quitting without notice, intentionally making things difficult for their successor, unloading their grievances with specific people as they leave, posting big angry messages on the company Slack on their last day, and other ill-advised ideas.
They’re always disappointed when the Slack unanimously tells them it’s a bad idea to intentionally burn bridges like that. I guess it’s not until later in your career that you realize the value of being able to call on old managers and coworkers for referrals or job opportunities. They see leaving a job as the last time they’ll ever see any of those people. We have to remind them every time that networking is important and therefore they don’t want to leave a lasting negative impression on a place where they spent years building a reputation. Just do your two weeks notice and quietly exit.
Tangential, but it comes up enough in these scenarios about taking on new risks that I thought I’d mention it.
I have found that a bad network is often worse than no network in that the type of people that work in a way you hate will lead you to jobs that are not right for you. Going back to the point above, this all depends on your risk capacity. I speak that as someone with a high risk capacity. For someone who has not built up reserves, that is terrible advice.
- What impact does the change have?
- How do you get out of that change, and how long does that take?
- And what is your confidence into the change, and the bail-out plan?
And honestly, if you have a high-confidence, fast bailout plan, you can be downright brazen/#yolo about changes. We've recently had to update a central and critical IDP, but we eventually realized: We have the old docker images, and it has a 200MB sized DB. We can dump + restore that in 2 minutes. So if the upgrade goes wrong, we have high confidence to rollback in like 5 minutes. At such a point.. why not just go with it?
Similar things are developing with Postgres upgrades. Setup 1 leader + 3 replicas, upgrade 2 replicas, failover, see how much explodes and at worst, fall back. If we can test beforehand, alright.
Other teams plan complicated upgrades requiring coordinated actions of 6 other teams. And like 3 know how to possibly take back that change? And like 4 know what to actually do? Ugh, this ended up in a fun weekend.
Strongly disagree here. There are many marathons. Push yourself as hard as you can. Worst case, you miss and can’t attempt again. But you had fun and have plenty of other things you can do with your time and physique.
It can literally mean my cake burned in the oven or my company loses millions of dollars.
Consequences are irrelevant.
The issue is when it's combined with "spectacularly".
As in: "I spectacularly failed at boiling my eggs. I let them boil for 7 minutes instead of 6 minutes 30. What a spectacular fail".
But nobody gives a flying f--k about my failed eggs.
The author had options to either 1) try for right at 3 hours, and either succeed or fail, or 2) push harder, get a much better time, and perhaps succeed but risk putting himself in a state where he did not finish at all. The failure to finish at all due to the extra reach is the spectacular fail referred to.
But maybe eating just carbs led to low minerals, hence the cramping? You could try to bank by eating oysters and a potassium supplement two days before?
Looking at your Strava workouts, your long runs were at a much slower than marathon pace, and very few of those runs were over 16 miles.
If you want to run the full 26.2 mile marathon at, say, 6:45/mile pace, then you should be able to run 22 or 20 miles, averaging 6:45/mile.
You can start at a shorter distance, say 12-16mi at a slower pace, and work up to 20mi+ at or close to race pace.
You can play around with planning a race plan with these race simulation workouts, i.e. all miles at race pace or half distance at race pace+5secs, last half at race pace-5secs, etc.
Also check into marathon training plans for ideas of how to progress and schedule workouts until race day.
Maybe accidentally forgetting you're in a marathon and bootstrapping a billion dollar startup sometime between starting and forgetting to finish?
The author is just trying to inflate his personal goal, to achieve some self set time, big enough so he can turn it into a self serving post that he can post to HN.
I don't really blame the author to be fair, nowadays this is kinda the thing people do, but I do get tired of the constant hyperbole.
This is just "failing a personal goal", sans spectacle.
“So you're in charge of the rejects.”
“They don't like being called that.”
“What do you call them?”
“The rejects.” -- Jackson LambI'm facing a huge moment soon where I will see whether I have made a big mistake that will result in the biggest fail of my life. But I'm still optimistic that it will be the biggest win of my life. My ships are burned!
But since you've gone there... Marathoning... okay... stop looking at the ground in front of you and look at the horizon. This marathon is unimportant, the goal is much further away, think of the next race and the one after that. Where do you plan to go with this?
"Oh wow, the race is done. Fancy that"
Some people seem to be built differently!
You can live every experience while running, that's the beauty of it.
Why do you have to sacrifice anything? The greats are great because they enjoy the activity and would probably be doing it if no one was around or cared that they were. Do it for the fun, not the glory
Also, isn't literally every sacrifice just an opportunity cost? That kinda what makes it a sacrifice. Sacrifice your first born and give up the extra productivity possible. Sacrifice a lucrative but over taxing job and lose out on the money. Sacrifice a meal for someone and you go hungry. Sacrifice is always about the opportunity cost of the thing you're sacrificing. If it doesn't hurt, if it doesn't cost you something, it's not a sacrifice.
e.g. if you overtrain or don’t wait long enough after an injury, you may permanently damage something forever. Speaking from personal experience and knowing a lot of people who have done the same. There’s also some documentaries about athletes doing it and losing it all. Go the extra mile but don’t look back and have regret about that one time.
And since "important" is relative to the person making the sacrifice, it's easy for a person to declare something a sacrifice when what they were giving up was not especially important to them, or on the other hand for someone to dismiss a "real sacrifice" that someone else has made as unimportant.
Not that this matters, really. But I think it's important not to use them synonymously. In the case of an opportunity cost, you are acknowledging that there were things given up. In the case of a sacrifice, you are saying there were things given up _and it hurt_.
Fact is that most failures and sacrifices don't lead to great success. But of course most of them don't result in some humble-brag grind-set blog post either.
So those sacrifices and failures are under-represented, and this leads to people who are not well versed in statistics, to conclude that therefore sacrifices and failures are somehow a necessary step in the way to success.
But that's false. There are loads of people with good ideas and talent who have made plenty of sacrifices but still have never seen success, and there are loads of people who gain success without any meaningful sacrifice at all.
Another point is that I don't think those sacrifices were difficult decisions for those 'greats'. Because another overlooked difference between people is an inherent ability to relentlessly pursue a singular goal. So even though they might have felt bad about giving up on something at the time, they did so because it was standing in the way of what they truly wanted.
I this way, could you really say they have sacrificed anything at all? If you really care about productivity and don't care so much about comfort, is it really a sacrifice to spend the night at the office?
It's the people who don't really care about all that who have to make the hardest sacrifices, in which case maybe better advice is to tell them to not make the sacrifice.
Just living your life without wanting to attain status is a perfectly valid go to try to achieve.
> By that same logic you can conclude that eating food leads to becoming one of the greats, because they all ate food.
No your logic is wrong. The data you have is that "All people who are successful eat food." That does not imply that "If you eat food, you will be successful."
But it does imply "If you do not eat food, you will not be successful." And that's certainly a true fact. Starving to death and being dead is not a viable path to success, or at least not any kind of success you will be around to experience.
If you see that all people in category X have a certain property Y, that's good data that you'll need to have Y before you can be an X. But it does not imply that having Y will make you an X. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
To the original point, it seems that nearly all successful people have to make some difficult sacrifices to get there. So, yes, you probably will also have to make difficult sacrifices to be successful. But even so, that's no guarantee of success. It's just that not making any sacrifices is a guarantee of not being successful.
I'm ignoring, of course, that "success" is highly subjective and individually determined. But certainly when it comes to marathon runners, you won't find any successful ones that didn't have to make real sacrifices to get there. Long distance running is hard.
Dude is aiming for a 3h marathon so he’s already there purely for fun. The greats are pulling 2:01 marathons these days.
And while Phelps was certainly a great, I doubt he would’ve spent 6 hours per day training like a maniac if he was just swimming for fun. That’s a lot of hard work.
That's not true. Enjoyment of the game got them there, but succeeding at anything often requires long periods of bleeding for it every day. Amateurs wait for inspiration, professionals show up to the studio and work.
Furthermore, with running suffering is an inescapable part of it. On some days, it hurts bad, but on other days it hurts really good. It's a blissful spiritual form of suffering but to get it you have to grind through the bad parts.
I enjoy the fuck out of running and don't even compete, but it's still something you think about all the time. What sacrifices do I make and which do I not? I'll give you examples. I wake up between 3 to 4 AM every morning to run. I enjoy it. I'm a natural morning person. This isn't some CEO grindset. But it entails not being to do other things that involve staying up late or going out. That's fine for where I am in my life right now. I doubt I'd have done it in my early 20s when I had more of a night-oriented social life.
I prepare all my own food and weigh and measure everything I eat. I also weigh myself each morning. This allows me to enter everything into a logging app that estimates TDEE and gives you a target. I can't say for sure this is absolutely necessary, but I don't do it universally 100% of the time, and when I'm home I tend to gradually lose a bit of weight because I'm not eating enough. When I'm traveling and eating out, I tend to gradually gain a bit of weight. So it seems that sticking to the strict tracking as often as I can is the best way to go. I enjoy this as well. I have no problem with it. But it means I don't eat out much and prepare everything from raw ingredients so the estimates are actually accurate. That sacrifices convenience.
There are other sports I enjoy. I lift weight. I rock climb. I surf and skateboard. Every minute spent training to run is a minute I could spent training for another sport. In the lifting case, at a high enough volume aerobic training and trying to gain muscle pretty directly conflict with each other. It's not realistic to expect any particularly high volume of leg work in particular. I'm sacrificing squat performance for sure to be better at running.
What am I not sacrificing? Well, I still travel. I still go off script for a few weeks here and there. I don't try to stick to either a diet plan or a training plan when on vacation. I still run and eat reasonably good foods, but I have no doubt I'd perform better if I never let up at all. To me, this isn't worth it. But if I cared badly about qualifying for a world major and was 34 seconds off, maybe I would.
Nobody is saying you need to sacrifice joy or fun. But you have finite hours in the day and your body has a finite capacity for recovery and training adaptation. Every bit of effort you devote to running is a bit that could have been something else.
But it actually doesn't guarantee you entry because for that age group (Male 18 - 30?) there ends up being too many qualified entrants so they have to shave down the actual time required for entry.
When I was running, it was 3:05 for example but you had to run a <3:03 to make it in.
How do these runners get into the race if they needed to go 3:03:00 (or whatever the current number is) to qualify? I'm clearly missing some piece of important information!
If you ran a marathon sufficiently fast to get under the qualifying time, that doesn't mean that you are required to run THAT FAST on race day for the Boston Marathon.
Some runners try and run fast on race day and discover that their body has hit the "wall" and are forced to run slower, walk for much of the remainder of the race, or worst case, drop out.
Qualifying times for the Boston Marathon are different for older age groups. Older runners can get into Boston with a much slower time than someone in their 20s.
Then there are years where it would require super-human effort to get close to a qualifying time (i.e. 2018, year of heavy rain and wind, see https://runningmagazine.ca/sections/runs-races/japans-kawauc... )
But, I also can’t help but wonder if the world would be a better place if we did all our projects like hobby side projects, rolled the dice, and failed spectacularly where it matters. But, what to do about self driving cars?
Project is behind schedule because of mismanagement --> give them a bigger team because that's what they claim they need to get back on track.
Team size (the number of people under you) is a big determiner of compensation.
/s