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It's said that growing up is watching your heroes become human. I'll admit pg was (and still is) one of my heroes and the prime reason I moved across the count

It's said that growing up is watching your heroes become human. I'll admit pg was (and still is) one of my heroes and the prime reason I moved across the country to join a startup. While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for that move. Yes, the scales dropped from my eyes as I realized just how unglamorous startup life can be and the unfailable pg started to, well, fail. On the other hand, there's something about the following sidenote that is profoundly human but works quite the opposite of the painful shock implied in my first sentence: > I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!" This is almost universally true. It is incredibly reassuring to know that even the greats struggle with this and antagonists pursue us through all walks of life. I'll admit, I've held back from publishing articles that all of my reviewers liked because I worried about the inevitable negative backlash that comes with standing for anything on the internet. Maybe one day I will publish. If so, this essay helped a great deal in getting me there.

oskarth 11y ago
> While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for it. This is tangential to your point, but beware of sour grapes. It's an easy trap to fall into.
- RKoutnik 11y ago
  Oh, I fell for those sour grapes hard (and might I say, you're absolutely right). It's trivially easy to find "think"pieces supporting any opinion under the sun, making my insistence on declaring grapes sour even easier. It was used against me at one point, someone invented a personal connection to pg that just so happened to hit all of the right nerves. He was trying to get me to quit my job to work for him. Almost worked, save for a stroke of luck (pg mentioning this guy had ~5% of the credentials he claimed). It's unbelievable just how many bullets I've dodged over the years...
unclebucknasty 11y ago
Hear, hear and well said. That inevitable backlash is there indeed and can stymie you out of the gate. The thing is, those who have bold ideas and/or stand for something tend to also be more sensitive to this negativity. I suppose we know that, at the end of the day, our ideas are nothing in a vacuum. As much as we'd like to blaze the trail, we need people to follow or join, not attack and tear down. Yet, we'd like to think of ourselves as less sensitive, perhaps because we implicitly compare ourselves to the "greats" (if only in belieiving they must have what it takes to achieve what we want to achieve). But, we somehow mythologize that they are above it all, which leads to the mistaken idea that perhaps we don't have what it takes after all. This was timely for me. A reminder to get my head back in the game, let myself off the hook for feeling the negativity, but to keep pressing forward. Feeling it is not evidence that we are too weak or soft. On the contrary, it means that we care enough about our mission. It should then be worth the inevitable bruises we'll have to take from those who find comfort in the status quo we seek to challenge or who revel in simply demeaning others.

oskarth 11y ago

> While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for it. This is tangential to your point, but beware of sour grapes. It's an easy trap to fall into.

RKoutnik 11y ago
Oh, I fell for those sour grapes hard (and might I say, you're absolutely right). It's trivially easy to find "think"pieces supporting any opinion under the sun, making my insistence on declaring grapes sour even easier. It was used against me at one point, someone invented a personal connection to pg that just so happened to hit all of the right nerves. He was trying to get me to quit my job to work for him. Almost worked, save for a stroke of luck (pg mentioning this guy had ~5% of the credentials he claimed). It's unbelievable just how many bullets I've dodged over the years...

unclebucknasty 11y ago

Hear, hear and well said. That inevitable backlash is there indeed and can stymie you out of the gate. The thing is, those who have bold ideas and/or stand for something tend to also be more sensitive to this negativity. I suppose we know that, at the end of the day, our ideas are nothing in a vacuum. As much as we'd like to blaze the trail, we need people to follow or join, not attack and tear down. Yet, we'd like to think of ourselves as less sensitive, perhaps because we implicitly compare ourselves to the "greats" (if only in belieiving they must have what it takes to achieve what we want to achieve). But, we somehow mythologize that they are above it all, which leads to the mistaken idea that perhaps we don't have what it takes after all. This was timely for me. A reminder to get my head back in the game, let myself off the hook for feeling the negativity, but to keep pressing forward. Feeling it is not evidence that we are too weak or soft. On the contrary, it means that we care enough about our mission. It should then be worth the inevitable bruises we'll have to take from those who find comfort in the status quo we seek to challenge or who revel in simply demeaning others.