Hacker News Reader

If I get the essence of it right YC offers personal counseling to overcome the fear of failure

YC offers product and company advice, not "personal counseling". So no, you don't have the essence of it right.

> Y Combinator transforms this force from a weight on your shoulders that keeps you down, to a powerful rocket that propels you to the sky.

Your point escapes me. All the OP is saying is that getting into YC made it easier to override his initial fear of failure, after which the process took on a life of its own. The subject of the sentence you quoted is not "The YC partners personally" but "The experience of YC" (cf. the title of the post).

I think we are at the edge of my language skills here.

To me it sounds like someone that has just had some kind of epiphany.

If a dutch person would say:

"Y combinator verandert deze kracht van een gewicht op je schouders dat je naar beneden haalt tot een krachtige raket die je de lucht in schiet"

We'd think they might need help. Or at a minimum that they should stop smoking that stuff ;)

It never occurred to me that this might be a language problem, but I do find it somehow hilarious to imagine a Dutch person saying that (assuming you've translated the sentence literally). This makes me wonder how, shall we say, zany we must generally appear to the Dutch. It also makes me wonder how many other such misunderstandings are lurking under the surface with continental Europeans who appear (damn you) to have native-speaker-level command of English.

I do my best, but there isn't a week that I don't put my foot in my mouth in some form or other.

For instance the 'zany' in the text above I had to look up, and even after looking up it doesn't make much sense to me.

1) a subordinate clown or acrobat in old comedies who mimics ludicrously the tricks of the principal

2) a slavish follower

3) one who acts the buffoon to amuse others

None of the three are a preferred candidate when I do a simple substitution.

gruseom was using "zany" as an adjective, rather than as a noun. If I am the person in definition #3, then I am acting like a buffoon and I am very "zany".

Zany just means wacky. It's an older word (deriving, I just learned, from commedia dell'arte). I was looking (jokingly) for a euphemism to approximate your implicit category of this-person-is-either-crazy-or-smoking-something.

Ok, thanks!

YC isn't in the business of offering personal counseling :) It's much simpler than that. When you get into YC, it's very easy to tell everyone you're "all in". After that, you can't weasel your way out of failure. You can't go back and say "yeah, I sort of wanted to try this thing, I never really wanted to anyway". Any failure will be absolutely apparent. So you'll fight like hell not to fail. That's all there's to it. I'm still a coward, I still can't bear going back and saying I failed, and that's why I work so hard. YC just helps you say "I'm all in" to the world.

Where to begin?

Why so insecure ?

Surely you know the level of your skills ?

It's like the prettiest woman walking up to you and admitting her insecurities about her looks.

Trust me, every entrepreneur has these fears. And the ones that tell you they don't are lying through their teeth.

We're all up here working our asses off to prove that we can do better. We're all cowards in one form or another. Afraid that our next venture will be a failure. Afraid that we're past our prime. Afraid that someone will outdo us. And so on.

But we've overlaid that fear with concrete and self-discipline (except of course, for procrastinating).

It's fine if YC gives you the power to overcome your fears, but make no mistake, you had that power all along, you are the one doing the work.

The fact that someone watches you seems to make a huge difference to you, and it is great that they can provide you with that assistance but on the whole I figure that is but a small part of your accomplishment. And I doubt anybody at YC would disagree with that.

The real fight is with yourself. To judge your competence accurately and your failings ditto. No need to go overboard and to think that you could not have made it any other way.

I'm 100% convinced that you would have. It might have taken longer, you might have followed a different path.

"It's fine if YC gives you the power to overcome your fears, but make no mistake, you had that power all along, you are the one doing the work."

That was exactly my point. YC is a shortcut, but ultimately it's all you. If you're determined enough, you don't need YC to succeed. But it sure helps.

Did you read the text?

You don't overcome your fear, you transform it.

Instead of paralyzing you, it makes you run faster.

Yes I read the text. Why the assumption that I had not ?

Transforming, overcoming, it's just a game of words here.

If you start out your career as an entrepreneur fearing failure then by acting you will accumulate experience which will over time give you the ability to deal with this fear and make it work for you.

Whether you want to call that transforming or overcoming is nitpicking.

If a marathon runner is afraid of losing and because of that finds the energy in himself to go a little bit faster thereby winning the race you could say that he has 'transformed his fear'.

But that's just wordplay.

There is a great deal of stuff written in ways that use words like 'transforming' to indicate something magical takes place.

In the end it is all just gruntwork and applied smarts.

If your fears push you to strive a little harder and maybe even make you succeed then you've just turned your basic insecurity (transformed if you wish) in to an asset. Others would simply say you've overcome your fears.

I believe that is a pretty normal process for any entrepreneur to go through, the ones that do not master their fears end up working for big corp. Or they try again in a couple of years.

Transforming vs overcoming is NOT just a game of words. When you overcome fear you do something despite your fear. Transformation can make you do something because of your fear.

In this case the act of having told people the course he was on transformed his fear from being a barrier pushing for giving up right away to a motivation to work hard and succeed. Instead of being something that saps motivation, it provides more motivation. And this switch tends to be quite rapid.

For a contrasting case of overcoming fear, a firefighter rushing into a burning building has to overcome fear of the danger from the fire. Even after the firefighter is in the building the fear still pushes for leaving the building. The lessons of experience may help with managing the fear rationally, but the fear will always push the firefighter to leave.