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This line in the article resonated with me: > First, it sets the stage for what was to come, and second, while it was unquestionably a success, it was not my s

This line in the article resonated with me: > First, it sets the stage for what was to come, and second, while it was unquestionably a success, it was not my success. I used to think that success was being successful the way I wanted and I was often frustrated because things were working but not because of the way I wanted them to. Turns out, it's doubly difficult to make things not only work but also work the way I want. I've since tried to be more open-minded and see wins that perhaps I didn't expect or want still as wins and it's made me feel a lot more successful. One might scoff and say I should hold myself to a higher standard, but at the end of the day, success is only an intrinsic feeling anyways. It's not a measurable metric so I might as well feel better about the progress I'm making. In the context of the article, the author could see these all as failures, but it sounds like some of these were pretty successful. In fact, the author concludes as much, finding happiness in the "failures". It's all an arbitrary label anyways.

hinkley 2y ago
I’ve had a lot of coffee breaks with highly placed peers who expressed concern because our boss was sure our success came down to one or two attributes and seemed completely blind to all the ways we saved him from himself. If apathy ever took over the team, we would burst into flames because of all of these details. There’s a great old aphorism that sounds like sarcasm if you don’t understand this: “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.” Any halfway sane team is dominated by people who are all too happy to jump on the Big Things. But for want of a nail, the kingdom can be lost. And if you cannot see his importance, and fire the farrier to hire more knights, then everybody loses.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- numpy-thagoras 2y ago
  When you see a successful boss, look around for his successful reports. They're always the ones cleaning up the boss' messes. The truth is that we all need to be saved from ourselves at some point (sometimes as education, other times as hard lessons), but tech culture certainly pushes that far with the "gifted visionary" mythos. A gifted visionary's much vaunted "Ideas > Details" only works when the detail people are there to make it work.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    >> When you see a successful boss, look around for his successful reports. With a good boss you don't have to look; they hold these people out and highlight their work, those people recursively do the same thing. In true success there's so much to go around.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
Yeah, the "success definition" trap is real. For me I was having coffee with a former co-worker who was now a VC because they had been at one of the same companies I had been but had joined "pre-IPO" and so probably had a net worth of 20 - 30 million. They asked what I was looking for and I said "To be successful like you!" and they said, quite seriously, they would prefer to be successful like me. And at that point we talked about the parent's point of how do you define success? This person had money but had lost their their spouse to divorce over 'working too hard' and were now alone. Meanwhile my third kid was on the way and I was doing okay but certainly not "FU money" okay. And yet from their perspective, that was more successful than they felt. That really threw me for a loop.
- mostertoaster 2y ago
  Totally feel this. I think all people should desire to be wealthy and to keep from being impoverished, but we should not define wealth and poverty simply in terms of our monetary wealth, or lack thereof. People who have the love of family and friends, a clear conscience, health, their physical needs met, and thankful hearts, are far wealthier than a majority of people in this world who have a large number in their bank account. Yet in our consumer world, people are continually thinking of their worth simply in terms of the money they have or the money they make. I’ve known many married working moms, who decided to leave the workforce and be homemakers, who constantly felt like their worth diminished because of the decrease in their wealth, not recognizing that the bond they had with their children, was growing stronger and greater, and didn’t recognize how incredibly valuable that truly was. Note: I’m not saying working moms can’t have strong bonds with their children, I’m talking about specific situations where for them it was hindering their relationships, and their relationships improved but was at the cost of less money.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    The social pressure to play the game, even when you don't need to, is so strong. It is way easier to be happy when you have money than when you don't, and it may be something close to necessary (I guess there's happy poor people) but not anywhere near sufficient. A lot of smart, driven people seem to lose sight of this.
morgante 2y ago
Also interesting that it seems like his relatively minor 1 year stint at pre-IPO Google was successful enough to pay for many other endeavors. It's a great example of the power laws in startups: it's much more lucrative to have a minor role in a major success than a major role in anything minor.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I would go even further, it would have been much better statistically to work at any of the BigTech companies even in the past 10 years than take a chance at a startup. Seeing the outcome of the startups he listed, it would have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank, insurance company, etc
  - morgante 2y ago
    > Seeing tts outcome of the startups he listed, it would have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank, insurance company, etc Enterprise CRUD developers don't make that much. I'm confident OP made more over his career than them.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      How much do you think he made at his failed startups that didn’t exit and didn’t make enough to draw a significant salary? The average CRUD developer working in the US in most major cities can make $130K to $165K within 5 years with aggressive job hopping.
      - morgante 2y ago
        OP would have to speak to his experience, but between a Google IPO and the $10M Virgin acquisition I would be surprised if he didn't average >$200k lifetime. Throughout this thread, it's clear you have an ax to grind. Startups are obviously not for you, but many enjoy them and benefit.
jebarker 2y ago
Ugh, I know this feeling too well. I've been pretty successful in life so far by societal standards but have always felt inferior and like I'm failing. Always. I think partly that's responsible for the drive that enabled earlier success, but it gets old. My first defense when those feelings bubble up is to remember we're all playing a game we can't win!
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  I'm very grateful to have the luxury of not having to play the game (very much). It puts me at odds with the majority of the world. Maybe if I was a success on the scale of our modern day oligarchs my circles would be filled with similar people, but being a salary employee who doesn't work primarily for the pay cheque and could quit for higher morals or values (without risking their family's welfare) is a weird situation. I feel like I'm often on the edge of the bubble and must be missing something.
  - mylastattempt 2y ago
    You may be missing the feeling of being a human being with atonomy over the course of your life. Missing in the sence of absence, definately not in a sense of sadness or regret - be happy to not have to worry about the most existential things in life and being dependent on the whims of a boss / company / ecomomy for them. tl;dr I'm happy for you to not be in the rat race, it's completely not glorious (to be in it).
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    > I'm very grateful to have the luxury of not having to play the game I don't get it. Did you inherit a bunch of money, or win the IPO lottery? Real question: Comparing your social life before and after having money, what changed the most? Or do you hide it, so your friends have no idea?
    - ska 2y ago
      Not having to play the game isn’t as expensive as you suggest. Lots of tech employees, if they don’t let lifestyle inflation take over, hit a point where they could retire early but may not want to. At that point t walking away from a job is much easier.
robomartin 2y ago
Sometimes wins are not necessarily measured with financial success. A company can utterly fail and still represent a win. I had one of those. I started a self-funded tech company around 1998. This was hard tech, hardware and software. And I was the sole engineer doing all the work. This meant 18 hour days, 7 days per week to get the plane off the runway. Two years later, after booking lots of sales, we finally moved out of the garage and I started to hire people. Yes, I ran this beast entirely on my own for two years. A few years later a large well-known company expressed interest in acquiring the technology. The number being floated was in excess of $30MM. What happened? Well, 2008 happened. The economic implosion caused this company to second-guess entry into the market we had pursued --which they intended to do by acquiring us. The deal went from being a couple of meetings away from an acquisition to evaporating in front of my very eyes. The bad news was that the economic downturn truly hurt us over the next couple of years. I had to shut it down in 2010 and lick my wounds. This thing went from pouring all of our savings and an incredible amount of very hard work into a crazy idea, executing well enough to get a $30MM+ offer to closing the doors and nearly losing it all in the process. At the time this felt like an abject failure and a waste of ten years of my life. It took me months to get my head back on straight. Today, looking back, I see it as a success. I took an idea from nothing to close to a massive life-changing exit and did so mostly on my own through hard work, grit and determination. That's a success story nobody can take away from me. I learned a lot along the way and most of those lessons were part of success in future endeavors. Life can be funny and cruel sometimes. You might think you are going through your darkest hours when, in reality, you are growing a solid backbone that will support the rest of your life. Entrepreneurship is hard. Very hard.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Honestly, that feels like copium. It’s like anecdotes you hear from religious people during a disaster. “I lost five of my kids. But I’m so thankful that God looked out for me and saved one”
  - liontwist 2y ago
    Interpreting a difficult event in terms that allow you to move on is not “copium”. we all do it all the time to explain our mistakes and weakness regardless of religion. I don’t think any of these people are saying “I’m so glad my kids are dead” they are saying they are able to see these unfortunate events in a bigger picture. What you may be looking for is “sour grapes” - something that was previously desired is now not viewed as highly after failing to obtain it.
ErigmolCt 2y ago
It’s liberating when you realize that the "arbitrary label" of success or failure is often just a narrative we construct around events
slashdev 2y ago
I remember an old Steve Jobs biography titled “the journey is the reward”. Overtime, I’ve come to appreciate that statement more and more. I think it is an incredibly profound insight about life.

hinkley 2y ago

I’ve had a lot of coffee breaks with highly placed peers who expressed concern because our boss was sure our success came down to one or two attributes and seemed completely blind to all the ways we saved him from himself. If apathy ever took over the team, we would burst into flames because of all of these details. There’s a great old aphorism that sounds like sarcasm if you don’t understand this: “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.” Any halfway sane team is dominated by people who are all too happy to jump on the Big Things. But for want of a nail, the kingdom can be lost. And if you cannot see his importance, and fire the farrier to hire more knights, then everybody loses.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
numpy-thagoras 2y ago
When you see a successful boss, look around for his successful reports. They're always the ones cleaning up the boss' messes. The truth is that we all need to be saved from ourselves at some point (sometimes as education, other times as hard lessons), but tech culture certainly pushes that far with the "gifted visionary" mythos. A gifted visionary's much vaunted "Ideas > Details" only works when the detail people are there to make it work.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  >> When you see a successful boss, look around for his successful reports. With a good boss you don't have to look; they hold these people out and highlight their work, those people recursively do the same thing. In true success there's so much to go around.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

Yeah, the "success definition" trap is real. For me I was having coffee with a former co-worker who was now a VC because they had been at one of the same companies I had been but had joined "pre-IPO" and so probably had a net worth of 20 - 30 million. They asked what I was looking for and I said "To be successful like you!" and they said, quite seriously, they would prefer to be successful like me. And at that point we talked about the parent's point of how do you define success? This person had money but had lost their their spouse to divorce over 'working too hard' and were now alone. Meanwhile my third kid was on the way and I was doing okay but certainly not "FU money" okay. And yet from their perspective, that was more successful than they felt. That really threw me for a loop.

mostertoaster 2y ago
Totally feel this. I think all people should desire to be wealthy and to keep from being impoverished, but we should not define wealth and poverty simply in terms of our monetary wealth, or lack thereof. People who have the love of family and friends, a clear conscience, health, their physical needs met, and thankful hearts, are far wealthier than a majority of people in this world who have a large number in their bank account. Yet in our consumer world, people are continually thinking of their worth simply in terms of the money they have or the money they make. I’ve known many married working moms, who decided to leave the workforce and be homemakers, who constantly felt like their worth diminished because of the decrease in their wealth, not recognizing that the bond they had with their children, was growing stronger and greater, and didn’t recognize how incredibly valuable that truly was. Note: I’m not saying working moms can’t have strong bonds with their children, I’m talking about specific situations where for them it was hindering their relationships, and their relationships improved but was at the cost of less money.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  The social pressure to play the game, even when you don't need to, is so strong. It is way easier to be happy when you have money than when you don't, and it may be something close to necessary (I guess there's happy poor people) but not anywhere near sufficient. A lot of smart, driven people seem to lose sight of this.

morgante 2y ago

Also interesting that it seems like his relatively minor 1 year stint at pre-IPO Google was successful enough to pay for many other endeavors. It's a great example of the power laws in startups: it's much more lucrative to have a minor role in a major success than a major role in anything minor.

scarface_74 2y ago
I would go even further, it would have been much better statistically to work at any of the BigTech companies even in the past 10 years than take a chance at a startup. Seeing the outcome of the startups he listed, it would have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank, insurance company, etc
- morgante 2y ago
  > Seeing tts outcome of the startups he listed, it would have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank, insurance company, etc Enterprise CRUD developers don't make that much. I'm confident OP made more over his career than them.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    How much do you think he made at his failed startups that didn’t exit and didn’t make enough to draw a significant salary? The average CRUD developer working in the US in most major cities can make $130K to $165K within 5 years with aggressive job hopping.
    - morgante 2y ago
      OP would have to speak to his experience, but between a Google IPO and the $10M Virgin acquisition I would be surprised if he didn't average >$200k lifetime. Throughout this thread, it's clear you have an ax to grind. Startups are obviously not for you, but many enjoy them and benefit.

jebarker 2y ago

Ugh, I know this feeling too well. I've been pretty successful in life so far by societal standards but have always felt inferior and like I'm failing. Always. I think partly that's responsible for the drive that enabled earlier success, but it gets old. My first defense when those feelings bubble up is to remember we're all playing a game we can't win!

dowager_dan99 2y ago
I'm very grateful to have the luxury of not having to play the game (very much). It puts me at odds with the majority of the world. Maybe if I was a success on the scale of our modern day oligarchs my circles would be filled with similar people, but being a salary employee who doesn't work primarily for the pay cheque and could quit for higher morals or values (without risking their family's welfare) is a weird situation. I feel like I'm often on the edge of the bubble and must be missing something.
- mylastattempt 2y ago
  You may be missing the feeling of being a human being with atonomy over the course of your life. Missing in the sence of absence, definately not in a sense of sadness or regret - be happy to not have to worry about the most existential things in life and being dependent on the whims of a boss / company / ecomomy for them. tl;dr I'm happy for you to not be in the rat race, it's completely not glorious (to be in it).
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > I'm very grateful to have the luxury of not having to play the game I don't get it. Did you inherit a bunch of money, or win the IPO lottery? Real question: Comparing your social life before and after having money, what changed the most? Or do you hide it, so your friends have no idea?
  - ska 2y ago
    Not having to play the game isn’t as expensive as you suggest. Lots of tech employees, if they don’t let lifestyle inflation take over, hit a point where they could retire early but may not want to. At that point t walking away from a job is much easier.

robomartin 2y ago

Sometimes wins are not necessarily measured with financial success. A company can utterly fail and still represent a win. I had one of those. I started a self-funded tech company around 1998. This was hard tech, hardware and software. And I was the sole engineer doing all the work. This meant 18 hour days, 7 days per week to get the plane off the runway. Two years later, after booking lots of sales, we finally moved out of the garage and I started to hire people. Yes, I ran this beast entirely on my own for two years. A few years later a large well-known company expressed interest in acquiring the technology. The number being floated was in excess of $30MM. What happened? Well, 2008 happened. The economic implosion caused this company to second-guess entry into the market we had pursued --which they intended to do by acquiring us. The deal went from being a couple of meetings away from an acquisition to evaporating in front of my very eyes. The bad news was that the economic downturn truly hurt us over the next couple of years. I had to shut it down in 2010 and lick my wounds. This thing went from pouring all of our savings and an incredible amount of very hard work into a crazy idea, executing well enough to get a $30MM+ offer to closing the doors and nearly losing it all in the process. At the time this felt like an abject failure and a waste of ten years of my life. It took me months to get my head back on straight. Today, looking back, I see it as a success. I took an idea from nothing to close to a massive life-changing exit and did so mostly on my own through hard work, grit and determination. That's a success story nobody can take away from me. I learned a lot along the way and most of those lessons were part of success in future endeavors. Life can be funny and cruel sometimes. You might think you are going through your darkest hours when, in reality, you are growing a solid backbone that will support the rest of your life. Entrepreneurship is hard. Very hard.

scarface_74 2y ago
Honestly, that feels like copium. It’s like anecdotes you hear from religious people during a disaster. “I lost five of my kids. But I’m so thankful that God looked out for me and saved one”
- liontwist 2y ago
  Interpreting a difficult event in terms that allow you to move on is not “copium”. we all do it all the time to explain our mistakes and weakness regardless of religion. I don’t think any of these people are saying “I’m so glad my kids are dead” they are saying they are able to see these unfortunate events in a bigger picture. What you may be looking for is “sour grapes” - something that was previously desired is now not viewed as highly after failing to obtain it.

ErigmolCt 2y ago

It’s liberating when you realize that the "arbitrary label" of success or failure is often just a narrative we construct around events

slashdev 2y ago

I remember an old Steve Jobs biography titled “the journey is the reward”. Overtime, I’ve come to appreciate that statement more and more. I think it is an incredibly profound insight about life.