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Comment by porter | Hacker News Reader

Hey Patrick, thanks so much for your honesty in all of this. It's never easy talking about things that embarrass us. Not to mention in public. You'll probably get some haters, but just know that I look forward to your annual updates and they have encouraged me to quit my job and start my own software business too. This has been one of the best decisions of my life. I'm sure there are many more here who can say the same thing. So, to you good sir, thank you.

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I'm also very impressed with Patrick's ability to disassociate business success and failure from his personal success and failure. What I mean: if something I worked on "fell off a cliff" I'd be a lot more panicky and less likely to step back and say "that's ok" as he did in his post. I'd probably take it as a personal failure rather than rationalizing it as a matter of time investment trade offs.

Lesson to learn: it's okay to let some things decay so that attention and focus can be paid to the right things.

Yeah, I've let projects die off in this fashion, but I still feel a pang of regret when I think about them and all the time I sank into them. It always feels like maybe I should have sold them off/given them away so that someone else could have helped them reach their potential.

Then again, BCC seems to have reached much higher heights than I would have thought its potential was, so maybe it's more of a "Mission Accomplished" there.

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