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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

by 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.
- Given_47 3y ago
  Entirely agree. I’ve had trouble distilling this attribute or whatever into a specific quality. Maybe probabilistic thinking? But the bar for acknowledging when u don’t kno something should be pretty low. > we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything. Yea this is a real problem. I wish stats and probability were more emphasized in high school. And it really doesn’t matter if people understand the math, the primary goal should be to get students at least familiar, and hopefully comfortable, with the concepts of chance and randomness. And having students internalize the concept of a confidence interval could help form a mental model of how to go about making assertions and the danger of overstating things. The overstating things part is definitely ingrained in the American culture at least but I feel that this could really chip away at that
thumbuddy 3y ago
Screw them If they are there to watch you burn it's because they fear failing so bad they want to reinforce their world view or control their surroundings such that no one around them attempts anything they can fail at. Unironically they are failing at those things because they don't work. Now get this, if you go off and do something right... They have failed again. 99% of people want you to suffer and fail at everything you do. The trick is realizing they don't matter whatsoever no matter who they are.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > 99% of people want you to That seems detached from reality and a dangerous, more than productive, idea. They are more probably uninterested or superficial (which is in a way the same). You do not need to feign enemies to get detached. Or, you should find a better environment.
  - thumbuddy 3y ago
    Uh, pretty much every job I've worked at has been like that. There's a surprisingly common psychological fallacy that, if someone loses something another person gains something. It's an incredibly common fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking. Of course there have been a few decent people along the way but I'd say the majority of people would walk past someone dying on a side walk. Millions of stories like that over the past few years...
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      I can tell you that there exist environments which are not cut-throat and that are cooperative. Rational individuals understand immediately that cooperation gives more return than its opposite. If you show to be an asset, you are everybody's asset. Sure, there is an epidemic of irrationality - but it did not hit every environment, and there exist cultures which had that idea of cooperation permeated societally. (Especially as the whole point of "society" is cooperation.)
davidscolgan 3y ago
I feel this. I have been burned over and over again as well. I desire to trust deeply and build real intimacy with friends and colleagues and lovers, and for many years I was very naive. I trusted anyone who told me they were trustworthy. For me personally, it turned out I have autism (which I didn't realize until age 33), and understanding this helped me understand perhaps why I was being deceived so often. Generally, I appreciated this article by Malcolm Ocean about his idea of a "Non-Naive Trust Dance". https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-the-name/ https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-t... He suggests that the optimal strategy for trust building is a slow building over time that acknowledges the distrust inherent to both parties rather than naively accepting people at face value.

by 38 3y ago

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.
Given_47 3y ago
Entirely agree. I’ve had trouble distilling this attribute or whatever into a specific quality. Maybe probabilistic thinking? But the bar for acknowledging when u don’t kno something should be pretty low. > we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything. Yea this is a real problem. I wish stats and probability were more emphasized in high school. And it really doesn’t matter if people understand the math, the primary goal should be to get students at least familiar, and hopefully comfortable, with the concepts of chance and randomness. And having students internalize the concept of a confidence interval could help form a mental model of how to go about making assertions and the danger of overstating things. The overstating things part is definitely ingrained in the American culture at least but I feel that this could really chip away at that

thumbuddy 3y ago

Screw them If they are there to watch you burn it's because they fear failing so bad they want to reinforce their world view or control their surroundings such that no one around them attempts anything they can fail at. Unironically they are failing at those things because they don't work. Now get this, if you go off and do something right... They have failed again. 99% of people want you to suffer and fail at everything you do. The trick is realizing they don't matter whatsoever no matter who they are.

mdp2021 3y ago
> 99% of people want you to That seems detached from reality and a dangerous, more than productive, idea. They are more probably uninterested or superficial (which is in a way the same). You do not need to feign enemies to get detached. Or, you should find a better environment.
- thumbuddy 3y ago
  Uh, pretty much every job I've worked at has been like that. There's a surprisingly common psychological fallacy that, if someone loses something another person gains something. It's an incredibly common fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking. Of course there have been a few decent people along the way but I'd say the majority of people would walk past someone dying on a side walk. Millions of stories like that over the past few years...
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    I can tell you that there exist environments which are not cut-throat and that are cooperative. Rational individuals understand immediately that cooperation gives more return than its opposite. If you show to be an asset, you are everybody's asset. Sure, there is an epidemic of irrationality - but it did not hit every environment, and there exist cultures which had that idea of cooperation permeated societally. (Especially as the whole point of "society" is cooperation.)

davidscolgan 3y ago

I feel this. I have been burned over and over again as well. I desire to trust deeply and build real intimacy with friends and colleagues and lovers, and for many years I was very naive. I trusted anyone who told me they were trustworthy. For me personally, it turned out I have autism (which I didn't realize until age 33), and understanding this helped me understand perhaps why I was being deceived so often. Generally, I appreciated this article by Malcolm Ocean about his idea of a "Non-Naive Trust Dance". https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-the-name/ https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-t... He suggests that the optimal strategy for trust building is a slow building over time that acknowledges the distrust inherent to both parties rather than naively accepting people at face value.