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Attitude really does determine your subjective success. Because if you have a good attitude you can find optimism and success in almost anything. Trained for a

Attitude really does determine your subjective success. Because if you have a good attitude you can find optimism and success in almost anything. Trained for a half-marathon, only to get sick and miss / fail it? On the surface that looks like a failure, but it's really not. The real success is the training, the weight you lost and fitness you gained. Or even if you didn't lose weight, the muscle and habits you gained which will make it easier to lose weight later. Or maybe you don't even need to lose weight anyways, especially since you probably lost fat. The big race is only a demonstration of your training results. Spent 6 months working on an app but never released it? That it can actually be a big "success" if you learned a lot from development. I can vouch that I've become a much better developer by making apps which were never released, and learned concepts from functional programming which I probably wouldn't have learned otherwise, because I wouldn't have seen the point. Built a company only for it to go bankrupt? Same as above, you get experience so that you'll do better next time. Idk how much attitude affects your objective success. Attitude won't help if your goal is flat-out unachievable or you don't have the luck / skill. I think the real reason attitude determines success is that, if you have a good attitude, you can basically change anything into a success.

lazide 5y ago
There is also the reality that looking at things in that positive light tends to surface opportunities, more than looking at things negatively. If you’re feeling like you’re doing well (despite the occasional hiccup) and will be successful, it’s easier to be open to a new advisor, or a new employee, or a new investor. If you’re constantly obsessed with how it is going wrong, you’re constantly going to be focused on how these too could be a disaster. As with many things in life, it’s a balance. If you never recognize a risk, or recognize bad decisions as what they are and the factors behind them, then you’ll get scammed a lot or constantly be blundering around repeating mistakes (potentially). If you hyper focus on them, you’ll cut off all your opportunity and be constantly trying to guard an ever shrinking pie.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
"When you fail... pretend you had... a different goal... all along." Okay, got it.
- xkeysc0re 5y ago
  When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
- tenfourwookie 5y ago
  The Pivot Doctrine.
- 8note 5y ago
  Turns out, the original goal sucked, and I shouldn't have set it
Barrin92 5y ago
I'm not really sure what the point of living in this permanent copium state of mind is. If you can change anything into a success then success is meaningless because it cannot be lost, it has no value. It's a sort of cowardice or unwillingness to accept genuine failure upfront. You don't need a good attitude, you need a respect for truth. Built an app and turns out you wasted a year of your life? At least accept that fact because there's more honesty in it than trying to rationalize it away.
- ornornor 5y ago
  That’s a struggle I have at my current employment. I work in a county where failure is not accepted at all so we all have to pretend every project is well planned, has ample time to complete all features before the deadline, and be optimistic about it all. These things are never true but no one wants to say the emperor has no clothes. So instead we go full steam ahead towards the wall and whoever brings that up gets lynched. The result is always the same: we deliver a subpar software product, that barely works the way it was expected to, after a few weeks or months of crunch, it is very hard and costly to maintain, the customer is pissed, and we’re all told by our managers that we suck. How can you cope then? I’d think it’s healthier to see the monumental failure for what it is (and thus, not sound optimistic, especially when you’ve seen this happen in other projects before). Or should you hide your head in the sand and keep pretending like everything is peachy and this time it’s different, the project won’t fail like the dozens before it?

lazide 5y ago

There is also the reality that looking at things in that positive light tends to surface opportunities, more than looking at things negatively. If you’re feeling like you’re doing well (despite the occasional hiccup) and will be successful, it’s easier to be open to a new advisor, or a new employee, or a new investor. If you’re constantly obsessed with how it is going wrong, you’re constantly going to be focused on how these too could be a disaster. As with many things in life, it’s a balance. If you never recognize a risk, or recognize bad decisions as what they are and the factors behind them, then you’ll get scammed a lot or constantly be blundering around repeating mistakes (potentially). If you hyper focus on them, you’ll cut off all your opportunity and be constantly trying to guard an ever shrinking pie.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

"When you fail... pretend you had... a different goal... all along." Okay, got it.

xkeysc0re 5y ago
When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
tenfourwookie 5y ago
The Pivot Doctrine.
8note 5y ago
Turns out, the original goal sucked, and I shouldn't have set it

Barrin92 5y ago

I'm not really sure what the point of living in this permanent copium state of mind is. If you can change anything into a success then success is meaningless because it cannot be lost, it has no value. It's a sort of cowardice or unwillingness to accept genuine failure upfront. You don't need a good attitude, you need a respect for truth. Built an app and turns out you wasted a year of your life? At least accept that fact because there's more honesty in it than trying to rationalize it away.

ornornor 5y ago
That’s a struggle I have at my current employment. I work in a county where failure is not accepted at all so we all have to pretend every project is well planned, has ample time to complete all features before the deadline, and be optimistic about it all. These things are never true but no one wants to say the emperor has no clothes. So instead we go full steam ahead towards the wall and whoever brings that up gets lynched. The result is always the same: we deliver a subpar software product, that barely works the way it was expected to, after a few weeks or months of crunch, it is very hard and costly to maintain, the customer is pissed, and we’re all told by our managers that we suck. How can you cope then? I’d think it’s healthier to see the monumental failure for what it is (and thus, not sound optimistic, especially when you’ve seen this happen in other projects before). Or should you hide your head in the sand and keep pretending like everything is peachy and this time it’s different, the project won’t fail like the dozens before it?