13 ms·

Confronting failure as a core life skill

206 points by blh75 3y ago

blh75 3y ago
About how grappling with and learning from failure starts with the language we use around it.
- klabb3 3y ago
  I agree. The SF cut-throat vibe shines through the post. I did like the post though, most people don't seem to be able to make it that far. And I don't think their intent is to be judgmental. There's a lot of work to reintegrate into humanity after being deep in that culture. Accepting "failure" is definitely a first step. Not seeing the world in terms of a single-axis success vs failure might be the next one. And Vietnam sounds like a good choice for escapism, as long as you're not too surrounded by others who are there for the same reason.
- scrum-treats 3y ago
  Agree with this. Failure is a contested concept. What is defined as failure for one, is success for another. Failure detection is skewed by "the loudest voice" and "the strongest arm." Morals, ethics, scientific standards, and social hierarchy all fighting for a chance to define and redefine failure. What one person can happily do without question could be the kryptonite for another. Not to mention gender roles. The weird part, at least for me, is that people are not consistent. What is a failure in one aspect is a success in another; it's not objective. There's almost always a spin. Probably autism a bit but, at least be consistent and honest.
hyperhello 3y ago
“We were a tech-enabled therapy platform for children with autism. I recently decided to stop working on it, we sold part of the company, and I shut the rest down. It was a wild ride: we were sued, we raised millions of dollars, hired over 130 people, and I made tons of mistakes.” I’m going to be equally honest. How does it make sense on a base-of-system level? What were 130 people doing? What could the technology possibly have been to enable therapy for autistic children? What mistakes could you have made in such a situation, with what possible consequences? For who, the children or the technology?
- julianeon 3y ago
  My wife works in special ed and it's pretty straightforward for me to imagine how this could be beneficial. Briefly, there's a lot of time, effort, resources and people involved in treating this. The money is certainly there, being spent all the time - by parents, schools, etc. Not just in treating, but also testing (which seems computer friendly). So the question would be tapping into that, and making it useful. Of course I don't know the details of this particular story, but in a general sense, it's easy to understand why you might build such a business.
- ArnoVW 3y ago
  Don't know the product, but anything that acts as a force multiplier for education / healthcare without that value being 100% captured by already rich people, or quality being reduced, is a miracle. You should be proud of yourself for just having tried to do it.
  - germinalphrase 3y ago
    A glance at recent ycombinator edtech investments seem to put a lot of emphasis on classroom-replacement/supplementation rather than tools for improving instruction. This is probably just a sign of the (post-)Covid era, but I do find it interesting when compared to the broader SAAS world that obsesses about “improving [professional’s] ability to do [job]” at increasingly granular levels.
    - DropInIn 3y ago
      Iirc it was the same precovid...
38 3y ago
I wish I could be more honest with my failures, but people have abused my trust so many times I have lost count. at some point you just have to cut your losses and keep it to yourself, or to a few select few.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  At work or in personal relationships? One thing I'm learning is that it's not advisable to share these failures with potential /partners
- jagged-chisel 3y ago
  Right here with you. At my last company, I tried to get the team comfortable “I don’t know,” “that didn’t pan out,” etc. I couldn’t get the lead on the other team to catch on. He’d bullshit an answer over a few minutes in a meeting, and Product and Management would eat that shit up. That team was no better/worse at failure than anyone else, but apparently non-engineers can’t be bothered with the truth of humans: we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
  - sdwr 3y ago
    What changed since then? Asking for a friend ;)
    - simultsop 3y ago
      Nothing changes much, you start looking for inner peace initially, get away from noise. The experience now lives with you as far as you are alive. A huge mark on your brain which you revisit each time you are about to make a new decision. If you become sick from rushing to create some value, you slow down, get more consistent, move slow and safe. Otherwise you keep same speed until you hit a wall, then the damage will be much higher compare to the previous ones.
  - themodelplumber 3y ago
    Any typical group of humans is still a young grub of an organism compared to the individual in those ways. So what you described can be a very hard ask for basically all of humanity, as seen through a team lens, at this point in history. Sometimes it can help to continually plan and provide gentle interventions that expose the team to individual examples of what you are looking for. As long as that doesn't too severely overlap with what amounts to activities or embarrassing admissions that could torpedo a team member's career later on when you're gone. A very hard ask overall. Probably the hardest part: If you can do it yourself, as an individual, congrats you get to feel like you could inspire people. But that's you as an individual. The group-organism experiences growth prompts as stress just like individuals do, but with far worse tools for coping. And one of the worst counter-pressures is the ever-present possibility of faking it for a bit and then just changing jobs to escape the awkward stuff, maybe getting a raise in the process.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
unsubstantiated 3y ago
A bit short on meat to be honest. > Surprisingly, my new friends don’t focus on our failures. They are simply curious about the details of the adventure. That's too bad. Here's as an actual core life skill when it comes to failure: you want to stack as many failures into as few attempts as you possibly can. Save yourself the trouble and the time. Even if someone tells you about how they failed, and you listen, you are still at high risk of making the same failures, because you truly don't know any better. I'm sure there is lots he learned in the four years but this post doesn't really talk about that, so I'm not sure if he quite confronted it yet, nor developed it as a core life skill.
monero-xmr 3y ago
To paraphrase Richard Pryor, I support anyone trying to do anything at anytime. It’s so, so easy to be a passive consumer, a critic. It is so much more dangerous and vulnerable to put yourself out there and make something - anything - beyond simply doing what you are told. Whether it’s making art or making businesses. If you start businesses, you will fail. Fact of life. Happened to me many times. You know what investors like to back? Second and third time founders - “serial entrepreneurs”. Backing a 20 year old college dropout with a few million bucks is a down payment on the future because they will inevitably fuck it up, but 10 years from now if they are still in the game and failed a couple times they will take your check and the odds of failure have gone down significantly. With the market the way it is right now, many entrepreneurs (and their employees) reading are likely staring down the barrel of failure. Bite the bullet and move on because no one wants your zombie company with a too-high valuation that’s going to putter along for 2 more years and collapse anyway or get acquihired. Just restart with a clean cap table and a more cost efficient idea.
- safety1st 3y ago
  I really needed this right now. Thank you. We had some negative customer feedback come in last night and a contract was canceled because of it. I wish this customer had responded to my emails asking for feedback over the last three months but they didn't. Now it's over and done with and some of the most damning feedback we've ever received. It breaks my heart, I'm in a low place today. But as you say, business is hard. Being a passive consumer-critic is easy. I will say that once you start a business and get your hands dirty, I think you can never go back. You see how hard it is to make the sausage and you gain a lot of respect for the process, even as you have random anons telling you to commit suicide on Twitter, how the men making a quarter million dollars at Google in SF are so oppressed because their rent is high, etc.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    > I wish this customer had responded to Are you taking the occasion to reconsider strategy of approach, to get feedback? Sorry, just an aside. Nonetheless, on the known line to translate "failures" into "lessons". -- Update: I must leave the console now, but I hope the sniper passing by posts some argument. Hopefully different from "Insensitive", here where the exact point is (1) treating events as something preventable given some wisdom, to be built, and (2) treating events as something to be analyzed, instead of borne - to neutralize them.
Lamad123 3y ago
I was enjoying the 1 minute I could read of this until something popped up asking to do something and I just clicked away!!!
- simultsop 3y ago
  It is really annoying how substack hides or blends the Continue reading link when authors ask for readers to convert into subscribers. At least clicking outside modal should be considered "continue reading". I find this as aggressive subscriber hunting.
  - tchock23 3y ago
    I understand the desire for subscribers, but I just wish it was further down the page. They make it so early into the reading experience that it feels very aggressive.
- jubalj 3y ago
  There was a option to skip sign in and read on!
senkora 3y ago
The best writing I’ve found on the experience of failure and how painful it can be, is “Eating Glass” by Mark D Jacobsen. A lot of sample chapters can be read here: https://markdjacobsen.com/eating-glass/ https://markdjacobsen.com/eating-glass/ I highly, highly recommend this book. I have no connection to Mark but I did find his book through a comment of his on HN.
- blh75 3y ago
  This sounds like a great book - thanks for the rec!
calrain 3y ago
Wow, this aligns with my experiences starting a solo tech start up and then getting acquired as I ran out of cash. The company that acquired my company then went through internal struggles and the result was that I left after a few years, unable to add value any more. It feels like a failure, but equally it feels like a good lesson, but a painful one. It's 2 years after I left and I still think about it. If I could say something to my past self, I would say that "You're about to learn a hard life lesson" and not change anything. I'm careful now to try and shine a balanced light on my work there, it wasn't awesome, and it wasn't horrid. There are more people out there with similar life stories of hard lessons learnt than you might expect, and it's good for both of you to connect with them.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  You did the impossible and sold Also, as a solo founder, I found what you did comendable instead of a 'failure'
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pier25 3y ago
Learning to deal with frustration is probably one of the most important skills one can acquire.
- Niksko 3y ago
  Any tips?
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    Acceptance of facts (of situations) and removal of their internal impact - more structurally, replacement of their impact with their acceptance. Then, constructive perspective there where there is space for action; just stopping wasting energies on it where there is no space for action.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      Translation: if things aren't going your way get on with workarounds and damage control / recovery instead of butting your head against a wall.
      - mdp2021 3y ago
        I'll take your track and reformulate my original: if things aren't going your way, and you are ruminating and poisoning your blood fruitfullessly remembering the bad events, replace those thoughts with the acceptance that the events are there - stop agonizing uselessly, take the novelties as just a matter of fact. Get out of the thought, get out of the emotion - they can be replaced by a label, "Past. There. What is done is done. Next". Then, if you can do something about it (to fix the situation), enter the constructive mood of the entrepreneur exploiting the useful fact of being alive to engineer reality. Otherwise, if you cannot do anything about it, bear the consequences but do not let the damage increase through an inadvisable behaviour of possibly letting events impact your mental, emotional states - that would be wasted energy, wasted health, wasted time.
  - matwood 3y ago
kxrm 3y ago
I am pretty open about my past failures with others but I definitely understand why people aren't. There is a stigma associated with failure that society still hasn't accepted. My last job I held the title of VP of Engineering. It was a small company and during my time there I recognized that the title was outsized for what I actually did. I was actually more of an Engineering Manager. All of my direct reports were ICs not other managers. I ended up leaving that job because politically at that company I had no voice, and people above me lacked basic leadership skills and continually failed to recognize it. Additionally whenever I would call out issues, it always would somehow manifest into a problem with me. So I ended up leaving, and not on great terms. Once I took a long break, I started looking for jobs again. The title I carried on my resume was bullshit, and trying to interview for Senior Engineering positions proved difficult. When I made the interview I made it clear what I did at that company. I told them that the title didn't represent my duties. I feel like some saw this as a blight. I finally accepted a job as a Software Engineer and now am slowly fixing my career. The lesson I learned was to never accept a worthless title. Somehow people still misunderstand my directness about this job in my history. It carries a strange weight, but hopefully with time I can correct it.
- dwrodri 3y ago
  Was there a strong reason why you never just… changed the title on your résumé? I would assume the position you ended up in is a function of many different things, but if people embellish their accomplishments on their résumés by making them seem “bigger”, i see no reason why it’s not worth changing it to seem smaller.
  - kxrm 3y ago
    I did, but doesn't this basically go against what this article is saying? Plus if they ever called to confirm my position at the prior company, how would the old company react?
    - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
      > but doesn't this basically go against what this article is saying? The article is saying don’t hide from or pad your failures. Your failure was not a wrong title.
productizeme024 3y ago
Failure is a complex issue for many of us (me def included). While I do think it's really important for us to be able to openly talk about failure, I think it's just as important (if not more) to frame failure as not just part of the process but as a good thing. Mistakes is how many of us learn and even if we can learn other ways, making mistakes can be a fantastic teacher. I've found that learning from them dulls the pain some and turns it more into an opportunity instead of a regret.
- simultsop 3y ago
  It would not be healthy to frame failure (which involves pain, bad feelings) a good thing. Considering mistakes a teacher would also be a mistake. Nice that it worked for you but considering humans as complex as they are the same prescription would not apply to all.
SoftTalker 3y ago
> How do you talk about your failures? The big ones like shutting down your company, going unemployed for months, or getting fired. OK, those things can be upsetting, and create some unexpected chaos in your life. But if that's the worst you ever have to deal with, you aren't really doing too bad. "It could be worse" can sound like small comfort, but really, it could be worse.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  He's taking about failure, not misfortune.
sfpotter 3y ago
Squandering wealth through sheer incompetence and lack of qualifications isn’t the kind of story people want to believe about themselves. Better to spin it as a positive step on the road to self-realization, ideally with a pit stop in paradise with time to “reflect”.
mattbee 3y ago
This is about a single business, that didn't get its investors a profitable outcome? A lot of people would consider getting paid for years to work on something you're passionate about a pretty good way to spend 4 years, let alone with enough saved to go travelling and blow off steam. My old business was a pretty good way to spent 16 years. No investors, no goals, good pay, a perfect environment to stew in and sideline more personal failings. That's what I want to read about - how am I going to fuck up the next business or relationship for the exact same reasons? Can I still do anything about that?
davidscolgan 3y ago
It feels like I have failed in every way that is possible. I have lost my wife, my child, my parents, my grandparents, my friends, my house burned down with all of my possessions. I lost my ability to code due to burnout and had to spend several years doing nothing. During my burnout experience I was basically forced to confront the roaring void of existence. I spent time at a monastery and contemplated the futility of it all. And yet at the end of all of this, I considered what else is there to do with life but to begin anew? And now that I have lost everything, I am no longer naive. I know what is possible to have, and what is possible to lose, and I can act with understanding from past experience. I feel far more capable of success now that I know what it is to fail in the hardest ways I can imagine.
- asdf6677 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - davidscolgan 3y ago
    I am not saying this to complain. I have no regrets or complaints. I am free from suffering as a result of going through this experience. I live at the monastery full time now.
  - shreyshnaccount 3y ago
    Incredibly bad take if you don't know this person's life and experience
  - dom_hutton 3y ago
    Your reply is dismissive of the OPs grievances they shared with us all. Suffering, and life, is a relative experience.
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      I think the poster wanted to be encouraging. "We all know it could be considered as something, but, that given, let us just turn perspective and say: it's nothing".
jxramos 3y ago
There was this Chinese proverb from this kung fu manual this old martial arts school printed that I used to go to. I had this saying "invest in loss". I immediately fell in love with that saying but every time I go to cross reference it online I never hit anything. Is anyone familiar with that Chinese proverb?
- Raro 3y ago
  Could it be something like "failure is the mother of success"? (失败乃成功之母) I am no expert, I was curious myself and went down an internet-sleuthing rabbit-hole. Apparently this is a common phrase, but I am not fluent in Mandarin, so cum grano salis.
  - jxramos 3y ago
    That sounds like a close cousin for sure. It’s hard to tell because it was in English but maybe the Chinese was in small script below. I don’t know if I still have that manual either, it may have been destroyed in one of these boxes that got left out in the rain. I’ll try to look for it next time I’m digging around the attic.

206 points by blh75 3y ago

blh75 3y ago

About how grappling with and learning from failure starts with the language we use around it.

klabb3 3y ago
I agree. The SF cut-throat vibe shines through the post. I did like the post though, most people don't seem to be able to make it that far. And I don't think their intent is to be judgmental. There's a lot of work to reintegrate into humanity after being deep in that culture. Accepting "failure" is definitely a first step. Not seeing the world in terms of a single-axis success vs failure might be the next one. And Vietnam sounds like a good choice for escapism, as long as you're not too surrounded by others who are there for the same reason.
scrum-treats 3y ago
Agree with this. Failure is a contested concept. What is defined as failure for one, is success for another. Failure detection is skewed by "the loudest voice" and "the strongest arm." Morals, ethics, scientific standards, and social hierarchy all fighting for a chance to define and redefine failure. What one person can happily do without question could be the kryptonite for another. Not to mention gender roles. The weird part, at least for me, is that people are not consistent. What is a failure in one aspect is a success in another; it's not objective. There's almost always a spin. Probably autism a bit but, at least be consistent and honest.

hyperhello 3y ago

“We were a tech-enabled therapy platform for children with autism. I recently decided to stop working on it, we sold part of the company, and I shut the rest down. It was a wild ride: we were sued, we raised millions of dollars, hired over 130 people, and I made tons of mistakes.” I’m going to be equally honest. How does it make sense on a base-of-system level? What were 130 people doing? What could the technology possibly have been to enable therapy for autistic children? What mistakes could you have made in such a situation, with what possible consequences? For who, the children or the technology?

julianeon 3y ago
My wife works in special ed and it's pretty straightforward for me to imagine how this could be beneficial. Briefly, there's a lot of time, effort, resources and people involved in treating this. The money is certainly there, being spent all the time - by parents, schools, etc. Not just in treating, but also testing (which seems computer friendly). So the question would be tapping into that, and making it useful. Of course I don't know the details of this particular story, but in a general sense, it's easy to understand why you might build such a business.
ArnoVW 3y ago
Don't know the product, but anything that acts as a force multiplier for education / healthcare without that value being 100% captured by already rich people, or quality being reduced, is a miracle. You should be proud of yourself for just having tried to do it.
- germinalphrase 3y ago
  A glance at recent ycombinator edtech investments seem to put a lot of emphasis on classroom-replacement/supplementation rather than tools for improving instruction. This is probably just a sign of the (post-)Covid era, but I do find it interesting when compared to the broader SAAS world that obsesses about “improving [professional’s] ability to do [job]” at increasingly granular levels.
  - DropInIn 3y ago
    Iirc it was the same precovid...

38 3y ago

I wish I could be more honest with my failures, but people have abused my trust so many times I have lost count. at some point you just have to cut your losses and keep it to yourself, or to a few select few.

moneywoes 3y ago
At work or in personal relationships? One thing I'm learning is that it's not advisable to share these failures with potential /partners
jagged-chisel 3y ago
Right here with you. At my last company, I tried to get the team comfortable “I don’t know,” “that didn’t pan out,” etc. I couldn’t get the lead on the other team to catch on. He’d bullshit an answer over a few minutes in a meeting, and Product and Management would eat that shit up. That team was no better/worse at failure than anyone else, but apparently non-engineers can’t be bothered with the truth of humans: we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
- sdwr 3y ago
  What changed since then? Asking for a friend ;)
  - simultsop 3y ago
    Nothing changes much, you start looking for inner peace initially, get away from noise. The experience now lives with you as far as you are alive. A huge mark on your brain which you revisit each time you are about to make a new decision. If you become sick from rushing to create some value, you slow down, get more consistent, move slow and safe. Otherwise you keep same speed until you hit a wall, then the damage will be much higher compare to the previous ones.
- themodelplumber 3y ago
  Any typical group of humans is still a young grub of an organism compared to the individual in those ways. So what you described can be a very hard ask for basically all of humanity, as seen through a team lens, at this point in history. Sometimes it can help to continually plan and provide gentle interventions that expose the team to individual examples of what you are looking for. As long as that doesn't too severely overlap with what amounts to activities or embarrassing admissions that could torpedo a team member's career later on when you're gone. A very hard ask overall. Probably the hardest part: If you can do it yourself, as an individual, congrats you get to feel like you could inspire people. But that's you as an individual. The group-organism experiences growth prompts as stress just like individuals do, but with far worse tools for coping. And one of the worst counter-pressures is the ever-present possibility of faking it for a bit and then just changing jobs to escape the awkward stuff, maybe getting a raise in the process.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

unsubstantiated 3y ago

A bit short on meat to be honest. > Surprisingly, my new friends don’t focus on our failures. They are simply curious about the details of the adventure. That's too bad. Here's as an actual core life skill when it comes to failure: you want to stack as many failures into as few attempts as you possibly can. Save yourself the trouble and the time. Even if someone tells you about how they failed, and you listen, you are still at high risk of making the same failures, because you truly don't know any better. I'm sure there is lots he learned in the four years but this post doesn't really talk about that, so I'm not sure if he quite confronted it yet, nor developed it as a core life skill.

monero-xmr 3y ago

To paraphrase Richard Pryor, I support anyone trying to do anything at anytime. It’s so, so easy to be a passive consumer, a critic. It is so much more dangerous and vulnerable to put yourself out there and make something - anything - beyond simply doing what you are told. Whether it’s making art or making businesses. If you start businesses, you will fail. Fact of life. Happened to me many times. You know what investors like to back? Second and third time founders - “serial entrepreneurs”. Backing a 20 year old college dropout with a few million bucks is a down payment on the future because they will inevitably fuck it up, but 10 years from now if they are still in the game and failed a couple times they will take your check and the odds of failure have gone down significantly. With the market the way it is right now, many entrepreneurs (and their employees) reading are likely staring down the barrel of failure. Bite the bullet and move on because no one wants your zombie company with a too-high valuation that’s going to putter along for 2 more years and collapse anyway or get acquihired. Just restart with a clean cap table and a more cost efficient idea.

safety1st 3y ago
I really needed this right now. Thank you. We had some negative customer feedback come in last night and a contract was canceled because of it. I wish this customer had responded to my emails asking for feedback over the last three months but they didn't. Now it's over and done with and some of the most damning feedback we've ever received. It breaks my heart, I'm in a low place today. But as you say, business is hard. Being a passive consumer-critic is easy. I will say that once you start a business and get your hands dirty, I think you can never go back. You see how hard it is to make the sausage and you gain a lot of respect for the process, even as you have random anons telling you to commit suicide on Twitter, how the men making a quarter million dollars at Google in SF are so oppressed because their rent is high, etc.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > I wish this customer had responded to Are you taking the occasion to reconsider strategy of approach, to get feedback? Sorry, just an aside. Nonetheless, on the known line to translate "failures" into "lessons". -- Update: I must leave the console now, but I hope the sniper passing by posts some argument. Hopefully different from "Insensitive", here where the exact point is (1) treating events as something preventable given some wisdom, to be built, and (2) treating events as something to be analyzed, instead of borne - to neutralize them.

Lamad123 3y ago

I was enjoying the 1 minute I could read of this until something popped up asking to do something and I just clicked away!!!

simultsop 3y ago
It is really annoying how substack hides or blends the Continue reading link when authors ask for readers to convert into subscribers. At least clicking outside modal should be considered "continue reading". I find this as aggressive subscriber hunting.
- tchock23 3y ago
  I understand the desire for subscribers, but I just wish it was further down the page. They make it so early into the reading experience that it feels very aggressive.
jubalj 3y ago
There was a option to skip sign in and read on!

senkora 3y ago

The best writing I’ve found on the experience of failure and how painful it can be, is “Eating Glass” by Mark D Jacobsen. A lot of sample chapters can be read here: https://markdjacobsen.com/eating-glass/ https://markdjacobsen.com/eating-glass/ I highly, highly recommend this book. I have no connection to Mark but I did find his book through a comment of his on HN.

blh75 3y ago
This sounds like a great book - thanks for the rec!

calrain 3y ago

Wow, this aligns with my experiences starting a solo tech start up and then getting acquired as I ran out of cash. The company that acquired my company then went through internal struggles and the result was that I left after a few years, unable to add value any more. It feels like a failure, but equally it feels like a good lesson, but a painful one. It's 2 years after I left and I still think about it. If I could say something to my past self, I would say that "You're about to learn a hard life lesson" and not change anything. I'm careful now to try and shine a balanced light on my work there, it wasn't awesome, and it wasn't horrid. There are more people out there with similar life stories of hard lessons learnt than you might expect, and it's good for both of you to connect with them.

moneywoes 3y ago
You did the impossible and sold Also, as a solo founder, I found what you did comendable instead of a 'failure'
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pier25 3y ago

Learning to deal with frustration is probably one of the most important skills one can acquire.

Niksko 3y ago
Any tips?
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Acceptance of facts (of situations) and removal of their internal impact - more structurally, replacement of their impact with their acceptance. Then, constructive perspective there where there is space for action; just stopping wasting energies on it where there is no space for action.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Translation: if things aren't going your way get on with workarounds and damage control / recovery instead of butting your head against a wall.
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      I'll take your track and reformulate my original: if things aren't going your way, and you are ruminating and poisoning your blood fruitfullessly remembering the bad events, replace those thoughts with the acceptance that the events are there - stop agonizing uselessly, take the novelties as just a matter of fact. Get out of the thought, get out of the emotion - they can be replaced by a label, "Past. There. What is done is done. Next". Then, if you can do something about it (to fix the situation), enter the constructive mood of the entrepreneur exploiting the useful fact of being alive to engineer reality. Otherwise, if you cannot do anything about it, bear the consequences but do not let the damage increase through an inadvisable behaviour of possibly letting events impact your mental, emotional states - that would be wasted energy, wasted health, wasted time.
- matwood 3y ago

kxrm 3y ago

I am pretty open about my past failures with others but I definitely understand why people aren't. There is a stigma associated with failure that society still hasn't accepted. My last job I held the title of VP of Engineering. It was a small company and during my time there I recognized that the title was outsized for what I actually did. I was actually more of an Engineering Manager. All of my direct reports were ICs not other managers. I ended up leaving that job because politically at that company I had no voice, and people above me lacked basic leadership skills and continually failed to recognize it. Additionally whenever I would call out issues, it always would somehow manifest into a problem with me. So I ended up leaving, and not on great terms. Once I took a long break, I started looking for jobs again. The title I carried on my resume was bullshit, and trying to interview for Senior Engineering positions proved difficult. When I made the interview I made it clear what I did at that company. I told them that the title didn't represent my duties. I feel like some saw this as a blight. I finally accepted a job as a Software Engineer and now am slowly fixing my career. The lesson I learned was to never accept a worthless title. Somehow people still misunderstand my directness about this job in my history. It carries a strange weight, but hopefully with time I can correct it.

dwrodri 3y ago
Was there a strong reason why you never just… changed the title on your résumé? I would assume the position you ended up in is a function of many different things, but if people embellish their accomplishments on their résumés by making them seem “bigger”, i see no reason why it’s not worth changing it to seem smaller.
- kxrm 3y ago
  I did, but doesn't this basically go against what this article is saying? Plus if they ever called to confirm my position at the prior company, how would the old company react?
  - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
    > but doesn't this basically go against what this article is saying? The article is saying don’t hide from or pad your failures. Your failure was not a wrong title.

productizeme024 3y ago

Failure is a complex issue for many of us (me def included). While I do think it's really important for us to be able to openly talk about failure, I think it's just as important (if not more) to frame failure as not just part of the process but as a good thing. Mistakes is how many of us learn and even if we can learn other ways, making mistakes can be a fantastic teacher. I've found that learning from them dulls the pain some and turns it more into an opportunity instead of a regret.

simultsop 3y ago
It would not be healthy to frame failure (which involves pain, bad feelings) a good thing. Considering mistakes a teacher would also be a mistake. Nice that it worked for you but considering humans as complex as they are the same prescription would not apply to all.

SoftTalker 3y ago

> How do you talk about your failures? The big ones like shutting down your company, going unemployed for months, or getting fired. OK, those things can be upsetting, and create some unexpected chaos in your life. But if that's the worst you ever have to deal with, you aren't really doing too bad. "It could be worse" can sound like small comfort, but really, it could be worse.

carlosjobim 3y ago
He's taking about failure, not misfortune.

sfpotter 3y ago

Squandering wealth through sheer incompetence and lack of qualifications isn’t the kind of story people want to believe about themselves. Better to spin it as a positive step on the road to self-realization, ideally with a pit stop in paradise with time to “reflect”.

mattbee 3y ago

This is about a single business, that didn't get its investors a profitable outcome? A lot of people would consider getting paid for years to work on something you're passionate about a pretty good way to spend 4 years, let alone with enough saved to go travelling and blow off steam. My old business was a pretty good way to spent 16 years. No investors, no goals, good pay, a perfect environment to stew in and sideline more personal failings. That's what I want to read about - how am I going to fuck up the next business or relationship for the exact same reasons? Can I still do anything about that?

davidscolgan 3y ago

It feels like I have failed in every way that is possible. I have lost my wife, my child, my parents, my grandparents, my friends, my house burned down with all of my possessions. I lost my ability to code due to burnout and had to spend several years doing nothing. During my burnout experience I was basically forced to confront the roaring void of existence. I spent time at a monastery and contemplated the futility of it all. And yet at the end of all of this, I considered what else is there to do with life but to begin anew? And now that I have lost everything, I am no longer naive. I know what is possible to have, and what is possible to lose, and I can act with understanding from past experience. I feel far more capable of success now that I know what it is to fail in the hardest ways I can imagine.

asdf6677 3y ago
[flagged]
- davidscolgan 3y ago
  I am not saying this to complain. I have no regrets or complaints. I am free from suffering as a result of going through this experience. I live at the monastery full time now.
- shreyshnaccount 3y ago
  Incredibly bad take if you don't know this person's life and experience
- dom_hutton 3y ago
  Your reply is dismissive of the OPs grievances they shared with us all. Suffering, and life, is a relative experience.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    I think the poster wanted to be encouraging. "We all know it could be considered as something, but, that given, let us just turn perspective and say: it's nothing".

jxramos 3y ago

There was this Chinese proverb from this kung fu manual this old martial arts school printed that I used to go to. I had this saying "invest in loss". I immediately fell in love with that saying but every time I go to cross reference it online I never hit anything. Is anyone familiar with that Chinese proverb?

Raro 3y ago
Could it be something like "failure is the mother of success"? (失败乃成功之母) I am no expert, I was curious myself and went down an internet-sleuthing rabbit-hole. Apparently this is a common phrase, but I am not fluent in Mandarin, so cum grano salis.
- jxramos 3y ago
  That sounds like a close cousin for sure. It’s hard to tell because it was in English but maybe the Chinese was in small script below. I don’t know if I still have that manual either, it may have been destroyed in one of these boxes that got left out in the rain. I’ll try to look for it next time I’m digging around the attic.