No post body was provided.
Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
1–10 of 122 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#2If you try as hard as you can, it will breed a good sort of fatalism about being successful. You can't try harder than as hard as you can, and once you're doing everything you can, what's the point of worrying how well you'll do?
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#3If you try as hard as you can, it will breed a good sort of fatalism about being successful. You can't try harder than as hard as you can, and once you're doing everything you can, what's the point of worrying how well you'll do?
You can change what you're doing, apply the same effort, and be more successful. Roughly equivalent to mechanical leverage. Some management types even call it that.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#4The majority of people aren't successful. 9 out of 10 startups fail. On HN you tend to hear from the success stories (survivor bias)
Maybe have some other goals in life that you can achieve and be happy. A family. Painting. Music. Sport.
I'll never bee a pro-kiteboarder, but I still enjoy it.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#5(Edit: I wrote this assuming you were talking about your startup, I may have misread the question. It probably still applies.)
You have to separate yourself and your identity from that of your startup. Yes you live and breathe it but no you are not it. I was my startup and when it fell I fell. It took years to recover, multiple moves, etc. Your startup is just something you're doing. It doesn't matter if it is successful or not because the only thing that matters is that you have finite time on this Earth.
If you aren't capable of doing something without going crazy and losing years and years of your precious life due to panic, then you sure as shit shouldn't have been doing it.
Keep things in perspective. Success is nice, but you will learn a lot from your startup if it fails and you will be better for it. You will have a higher chance of success doing your next startup, and you will have life experience that you can't get any other way.
If you do good work there and it fails, people will still respect what it was and who worked on it.
Stay strong, keep things in perspective, and enjoy what you do. You cannot change the world if you can't stay stable yourself. The only way you can change the world is if you are okay with yourself first.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#6If you try as hard as you can, it will breed a good sort of fatalism about being successful. You can't try harder than as hard as you can, and once you're doing everything you can, what's the point of worrying how well you'll do?
Not sure about it; you might create world-class products, try at your best, it might still not be enough and this sort of thinking after everything-done-right-but-still-failure will kill your motivation forever. Focus rather on making world better, that's an infinite process, and be bold about your focus.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#7[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#8Ketamine. LSD. Significant Other. Money in the bank.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#9If you try as hard as you can, it will breed a good sort of fatalism about being successful. You can't try harder than as hard as you can, and once you're doing everything you can, what's the point of worrying how well you'll do?
There is such thing as trying too hard. For instance, you could break.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#10Redefine "successful" to describe a place you're already in. Realize that successful people still experience failures, and yet remain successful.