An experiment: Can desperation drive success?
vutran.me
vutran.me
Sure, there are plenty of stories about people who were desperate and became successes. You never hear about the hundreds of thousands of people who were desperate and became abject failures. There are also people who are successful who were born with silver spoons in their mouths. So I would not make any type of correlation between some extreme emotional state and being successful. If anything, it might make you squirrely and detract from your obligations at your startup.
If it cuts into my ability to work at my startup, I'll stop immediately as that's my #1 priority. You'll be surprised though that even putting in 60 hrs a week into a startup, exercising and having a significant other, if you work efficiently you still have time left. (168 hrs in a week - 60 - 8 hrs a day for sleep = 62 free hrs left. 1 hr a day for exercising and 2 hrs a day for an SO leaves 41 hrs left. )
But really though, I don't know. This might turn into a lesson about how distracting side projects can be while running a startup. Or how to optimize your time more efficiently. Or even how to run a bad experiment. If this turns out to be a really bad idea, I'll learn from it, share it with you guys and move on.
Thanks for watching out for me though. I appreciate your concern.
man.. we're such geeks
Should make your desperation (& success) even better.
In any case, your post is really focused on 'good ideas', which is all well and good if you have one -- but had you taken that stats class in college, I think you'd find a preponderance of evidence to support the notion that successful execution of the the idea is a more important factor than having the idea. Neither Pinterest nor AirBnB are unique or exciting ideas - and where the rubber meets the road, it's also extremely unlikely that either are worth anywhere near 1B. Have you seen the Facebook/Zynga/etc. stock prices lately?
It doesn't seem like you can produce these behaviors in yourself with a few self-imposed "ground rules". Heck, "self-imposed rules" and "desperate" are almost mutually exclusive.
Desperation doesn't mean being unable to hang out with friends and share beers. It means paying for gas to return home with pocket change - because you have no money and no credit anymore. And considering selling said car - which wouldn't even be enough to offset the debts. And not being sure if you will even have food in a month without having to borrow money from friends.
And even after the money starts flowing again, you don't hang out with friends until the debt is paid for.
However, this is a partial experiment and might provide the necessary incentive to launch something. But it is an experiment, not the real thing. Might be useful as a vocational exercise.
(FWIW, I've done an experiment on myself similar to this but more extreme: I forbid myself from having a social or romantic life while working on my startup, so that I was doing basically nothing except working and reading startup blogs. My results were that I made myself hella insecure, nearly drove myself crazy, and my startup failed anyway. But I did learn a lot about myself and what I wanted, did some cool side projects, and improved my programming chops enough to get into Google, so it wasn't a total loss.
Even that I wouldn't really equate with being "desperate", which I usually equate with not knowing whether you'll have food or a roof over your head at the end of the week.)
So there appears to be a correlation between losing a parent at an early age and extreme success. (That doesn't mean that your expected value is higher-it's more that the variance is greater.)
[1]: http://dheart.tumblr.com/post/305580832/orphans-rule-the-wor... (excerpt) or check The Talent Code chapter 5
It will also turn your life upside down based on the actions you will take after you read this. (This is not necessarily a good thing :)
What drives success is generally concerted effort over a long period of time. Startups can take on massive risk because they are minimally capitalized. Taking a chance of some Obama-Os is a smart play because the risk is minimal (some photoshop time) and the pay off decent ($25K). Obama-Os aren't desperation, it's smart business. If they printed $10K of boxes before testing the market then it would just be stupid.
What the OP is doing is what every business book does, take a bunch of winners, find somethings in common and attribute those things to success.
To me it sounds like the OP has decided to go down the MVP path by eating what he kills. It's not desperation, it's a good way to get on track to making money because you have to abandon VC fundable ideas early.
Caesar feared the hungry man, not the desperate man.
Desperation changes the entire game theory. Yes, in many cases people will give the desperate a wide berth. Sometimes, that is just the opening they need.
During John Elway's heyday, I saw the Denver Broncos reach the Super Bowl three times. He was an unbelievable talent. I saw "the drive" of NFL lore from my living room and I saw the Broncos lose in the Super Bowl to larger city teams all three times. And then, years later when both he and the team had been in decline, I saw the most desperate thing.
After his career should have been over, when he was pushing 40, Elway and the Broncos made it back to the Super Bowl. He played the game of his life. And I'll be damned if there wasn't a steely look of desperation in him. At long last, they won. And the next year, they did it again. In his final game, with the clock of not only the game, but of his life ticking down, he did something insane. As a comparatively fragile quarterback hellbent on securing his legacy, he ran it in for a touchdown against heavily muscled men who had a 100 pounds in him. And it was just desperate enough that they didn't see it coming until it was too late to stop him.
That's something that younger, less desperate quarterbacks just wouldn't do. In many cases, the result is ruin. But sometimes desperate actions prevail. It's called a Hail Mary.
maybe he should open an auction on equity in the unknown project. that could be fun too.
That is IMHO - at least what I gathered from years of introspection on what works and doesn't.
Though I think if you put yourself in desperation mode for a while and you observe the pain and suffering that happens to others in life then you will most likely stop feeling sorry for yourself.
But you're right - creating an environment is only 50% of the problem (maybe less). Changing one's own internal structure is the crux of the problem.
So it was succeed, or go back to something that I didn't want to do.
That drove me onwards for a good nine months. I wrote a book which freed up time to focus on long term projects rather than short term cashflow.
Looking back, it's the most boring thing I've ever done. I constantly thank my past self for letting me live a more relaxed life now, doing things I want to do.
I don't think I could have done it without my poor alternate options. But purposefully forcing yourself into desperate circumstances is risky.
There's a nice benefit to it besides personal happiness; every side-project we've worked on so far has ended up getting worked back into our product in some way.
We actually try to encourage each other to try new things. It keeps us sharp. We usually end up open sourcing it and integrating it into TapIn.tv anyways. I'll probably end up learning a lot about efficient time management, managing customer relationship, and machine learning I can bring back to my team through this experiment.
Who knows, maybe if this works out, we'll try to be more desperate at TapIn.
Also, it's really entertaining watching each other try to make things. I can't wait to see what happens when Vu doesn't get his company-paid lunch this weekend, and he has no money.
Always being honest with yourself and developing continuous and methodical discipline that leads toward your goal is the best approach I can think of.
No. Desperation implies stress and stress inhibits good decision making.
"When business and life is anything
but usual, we do not rise to the
occasion. We sink to the level of
our preparation." Adam O’Donnell [0]
Is it working? Well it's complicated.
The main problem I faced the first 4 weeks was to break out of the inertia of being given a task to perform. The second problem I faced was the daily work routine. Took 4 weeks to get that right.
Last 4 weeks have been really productive though.
Did I have a plan of what to do from the start? Yes. Written down in an excel sheet.
Did I follow the plan? No. I don't why. Just woke up every morning to find myself staring at the plan, scribbling notes and writing random code snippets. On the other hand, it also gave me a lot of extra knowledge base about the problem I am solving. Too early to say whether it was good or bad.
Did I tell anyone about my plan? No. I guess that was my mistake. Some kind of external/peer monitoring would have helped.
So what changed? How did I finally get productive? Desperation. Spent 2 months without anything solid to show for it. One nice morning, I had this ache in my heart to get something done and things just started working out.
So does desperation drive success? I don't know about success but desperation does improve productivity. But desperation also gives you a tunnel vision and you might miss important things that actually make you successful. That is also my greatest fear.
Takeaway: Do what this guy is doing. Get peer monitoring before you start. Send that excel sheet to someone who can spare a few minutes a day/week to keep you in line.
Ben Silbermann kept working on Pinterest because he didn't want to admit to failing. His parents are both specialist doctors who could certainly afford to pass him $50k/year to make sure he was "okay". There was no desperation, just the fact that he kept perpetuating the lie that everything was okay with his business, thus by telling this lie, quitting would make him feel like a dishonest person (I have told the same lie as well. Thank god it worked out.).
The AirBnB founders sold cereal because they are hustlers, not because they were desperate. I'd be willing to be it was more of a drunken idea backed by "fuck it, let's do it", more than desperation.
If there is startup lesson to be learned from these two examples, it is that never giving up, and "fuck it, why not" are beneficial. Desperation may be helpful, but I think the author needs to find better examples.
Well put. In terms of never giving up, I think its necessary to explain that it does not mean sticking to one idea per se. But to the goal of growing one succesful business (whatever it may end up being). One can iterate over many ideas, failure after failure, and not need to give up in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it is a bit demoralizing, but some of us manage to get back on the horse and keep going.
The fuck it let's do it attitude is very important. Nothing happens until you make it happen. Nobody is going to serve you your startup on a silver platter. Nobody.
Desperation may be helpful, but I think the author needs to find better examples.
Desperation is helpful, but in my experience it is not a good driving force. It clouds judgement and is usually aimed at short term success.
There are obviously counterexamples where it can be used as the fuel to do something and that works out, and those can be inspiring. But if you want to do something great you actually want to do something great, there's your fuel. So then cutting away anything that takes you away from your goal helps enormously.
Your reasoning of good ideas and their implementations are wrong like most people.
If something is a good idea, it DOES NOT mean "everyone would be doing it".
You see, there is a thing called "barrier of entry" to ideas.
If someone has an idea for, say an app, there are a million things to do to proceed with that idea.
They need to learn how to
* design apps
* code apps
* market apps
Or if they want to hire people to do all that, they need to
* have experience hiring people
* have a lot of money, or a lot of experience getting funding (crowdfunding won't work if they have no experience)
* actually, forget this list - if you don't know anything you will die.
There are years of knowledge required to execute an idea, so you really limit yourself to only a handful of people who have the ability to, and thought of the same idea as you. And most of those people will probably not follow through either, so to execute an idea you really need to believe in it.
Now for your challenge, I would suggest you do something a little bit different. Instead of coming up with an idea and going the whole 9 yards with it, you can just leverage other peoples idea, and just make money marketing it. This is known as affiliate marketing.
There are networks (called CPA [Cost Per Action] Networks) where startups or companies plug in their various sales pages for things they offer, and you as an affiliate get people to complete those offers. The most common way to do this is buying ads to those offers.
By doing this, you eliminate all but the marketing work of running a startup. Marketing is almost always what determines if a startup fails or succeeds. You gain experience in marketing, and you can do a lot with the inventions you code.
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-venn-diagram-shows-why-s...
Thanks for the suggestion on affiliate marketing. Funny thing is the idea I'm going to pursue is sort of like affiliate marketing. (I've also worked at an affiliate marketing SaaS in the past)
Just to give people a strong, striking example of this, before they try to argue the concept away wholesale:
Banks. Starting a bank is a good idea. Everyone would be doing it... if they knew how, and had the connections, and the starting capital, and etc. etc. for a huge list of qualifications.
Two founders fight each other in battle. One has side project. The other does not. Founder without side project wins.
What you are embarking on is a distraction. I believe that you are hurting your ability to raise funding in the future. I would not want to fund a founder with this mindset.
Best advice. Recant this post. Do the right thing by your co-founders, and funders.
Also, this is a very first world definition of "desperation".
Coding to destress, I can understand that. So code something that's related, but non-core, to the business and that's not tied to what you're doing during the day.
Or maybe I'm totally wrong. In my experience any amount of split focus is to the detriment of both projects/startups - and you need all the help you can get.
Would be curious to see what PG thinks.
For what it is worth, the deep end of laziness does draw out a certain kind of contemplative, mellow desperation - an existential dilemma of sorts - which I often find helpful for doing my best creative work.
But from reading your post I sense that you don't really want to do this (who wants to be desperate? nobody): "The experiment starts once I do a Show HN."
For me, building something that you can show should be included in the experiment. So you should start right now!
Now, compare the use of words.
I don't know, but I'll find out soon!