But when you started your business, was it: - With a goal of supporting your health and personal needs - An exercise of your own judgement, where your decisio

But when you started your business, was it: - With a goal of supporting your health and personal needs - An exercise of your own judgement, where your decisions were based on your own huristics for evaluating reality? When you looked at something and thought "this is, based on my genuine judgement, impossible" did you decide to do something else? Or did you say "I have strong evidence that this cannot possibly work, and I'm really sleep-deprived... but sleep is for the weak and impossible is nothing." and plow onwards relentlessly? If the former: great! If the latter: Thats the problem that I think DayDollar is talking about. It is a pattern that I fell into at MIT -- I took on more commitments than was possible to grow into with the skills I knew how to gain because "impossible is nothing". I was constantly drunk-with-fatigue. I looked for help learning how to write first drafts and got told "just do it!" so I spent hours digging my nails into my skin in front of a blank page. I didn't know how to "do it" but the answer was too obvious for anyone to believe me. I asked for help learning how to manage my time and manage writing. Instead, I got encouragement. The problem with giving advice like "you can do it!" or "start before you think you're ready!" is not that it is wrong. The problem is that it does not assess the situation. Bad advice is a zero-argument function. Good advice recognizes that you are the source of observations about your situation and gives you a tool to do that better. Good advice offers heuristics: fallible methods of solving a problem which rely on human judgement. The author of this piece quotes author David McCullough: > There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. Good advice would be a question to ask to guide someone to realize when they've hit that point. -------- The comment below me by /u/throwaway35784 tells you to do a whole bunch of things and the only thing it asks you to observe about your current situation is "Find a problem you have." Everything else that he says is advice that is often a good idea but depends on the situation.