Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

"Which leads me to my final point about getting ambitious plans: you have to be immune to rejection. People are going to dismiss you at first. If that's enough to stop you, you're doomed. So you have to learn to ignore it. And that's harder than it sounds—social pressure is so powerful. But everyone who does ambitious things has to learn how to resist it."

Lots of people who learn to do this cause lots of chaos and destruction in their wake. I don't care if you need this attitude to be a founder, it still sucks.

I worked at a startup where the technical founder had this attitude and was, at least with respect to the product at hand, totally incompetent and it was truly catastrophically absurd and stressful and a huge waste of tons of people's time and money.

View on HN

> Lots of people who learn to do this cause lots of chaos and destruction in their wake.

At the same time, lots of people who do this end up being extremely successful.

The difficulty is knowing which rejection and criticism to ignore. Imagine losing out on a multi-billion dollar business because your initial pitch was dismissed by people saying your business is pointless and redundant because rsync already exists[0].

On the flip side, there's a lot of founders who... have more determination than experience, let's say, and when told their idea won't work, instead of using factual data points (or getting an MVP out to collect data points) operate purely on belief until they run out of money.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

"Each time you have to make a decision, make the right one" would be what I would say in a commencement speech. Truly sage advice.

> "Each time you have to make a decision, make the right one" would be what I would say in a commencement speech. Truly sage advice.

It honestly is great advice. Most (useful) business advice I've seen amounts to "how to make better decisions". This includes things like doing market research or a business model canvas (to make better decisions about your customers), releasing MVPs quickly to test the market (to make better decisions around product and pricing), picking which metrics and data points to measure (so that you can evaluate if your decision was actually correct and quickly course correct if not), etc.

Each time you have to make a decision, measure.

I don't have a college degree. I made a deal with the head of the college math department that he'd sign me in to (senior level) Numerical Analysis (this was the early 1980s) if I taught myself calculus first; which I did. He had misgivings about this self-guided selection of study, and summed it up thus:

    How do you know what's important?

Now of course ML is all the rage, but that question has stuck with me. I still ask myself that question, and I don't always know the answer.

> end up being extremely successful

At making money, likely true. Leaving a trail of destruction in your wake is just not my idea of success.

It's truly a challenge to know which is which — the foolish and the prescient both look like people with similarly bad ideas when they first start out.

"Immune to rejection" and "consider all criticism" are both useful but much, much harder than doing one or the other reliably. Lots of assholes are immune to rejection and a lot of doormats consider all criticism. Doing both means you keep your ears open but are resolute (and maybe delusional) about a few core ideals. And maybe even those change with criticism.

There is a reason you see lots of asshole business owners and not many doormats, though - you need to filter criticism or it will always screw you up in the end. Accepting criticism can help you course-correct and produce better/happier, but isn't a requirement for success.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com