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Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

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Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#41

Post by ojl »

cracrecry wrote: post #30

First thing you need to do is define the term: Success Living in the US of America is already a success compared with most other places in the world. Success for most people is not making a billion dollar company. Success for them is being able to raise a family, work on their own, pursue their interests and be free. In the US you can do that way easier than in the rest of the world. Billionaires are not happier than…

>In other countries the educative system selects early on(ten years old) who is going to be engineer or doctor

In some other countries maybe, but definitely not all. I live in Scandinavia and decided to become an engineer when I was 22 years old. Had to take an extra high school level math course and physics (which was easily done by self studying and then writing an exam), then just applied to university.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#42

Post by suriyaG »

risyachka wrote: post #23
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #3

Absolutely, I've had friends with limited business or tech background pump hard-earned savings into crazy tech startup ideas, precisely because they've read too many of these success stories. I've been guilty of not trying to talk sense to some of them, so much so that there's one particular marriage break-up related to a stupid tech start up blowing a couples life savings that still haunts me. And for the record, he…

Those crazy ideas are crazy only when they fail. And with great execution even the most crazy idea can become a success - there are tons of examples. Ideas have nothing to do with failures, marriage breakups etc. That's bad planning, no backup plan, etc.

Ideas, usually have a strong correlation with failure. Irrespective of the execution. Ideas are the base theory within which the execution revolves around. If the premise itself is wrong then no amount of execution would solve it. Think windows Phone OS, Google+ etc. They were pretty incredibly executed products. But never took off because the base premise that another new OS with new APIs and new everything would get developer attention, killed WPos. There was no space for a facebook clone, irrespective of the integration capabilities and good image quality and that killed G+.

Crazy ideas are crazy because even great execution wouldn't be able to save it. ideas and execution need to be complimentary. Saying ideas don't matter is just as wrong as saying executions don't matter.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#43

Post by whilestanding »

going_ham wrote: post #28

Nobody writes it, but it's okay to have average job, with average life and average family as long as you can enjoy your life! Why burden yourself with idea of success and setting expectations. At this point I am sure life doesn't give anything unless you look for it. And even if you seek, there is no guarantee. So I think it's waste of energy. My experience so far. I am really glad that I learned how stability is nec…

Check out the underachievers manifesto. A short book that's right in line with what you're thinking in this post.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#44

Post by lampe3 »

filipemcg wrote: post #39
lampe3 wrote: post #19

From my personal experience I would say we have this bias not only when it comes to success stories. One person has done something good or bad. Then all people who are in that specific group must be like this. Think of Politicians. One does something bad they are all bad. One bicycle driver is riding like crazy so lets ban all of them. I had some bad Asian food so Asian food in general must be bad. Country X had a sh…

Also European, and would like to point out that the major difference is the investor cash available to startups comparing to places like Silicon Valley.

Its the amount of money, willingness to invest at all and in what to invest.

Sometimes the investors want to be like Silicon Valley investors but yeah its like with the success stories they have read about it but not experienced it.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#46

Post by brabel »

risyachka wrote: post #23
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #3

Absolutely, I've had friends with limited business or tech background pump hard-earned savings into crazy tech startup ideas, precisely because they've read too many of these success stories. I've been guilty of not trying to talk sense to some of them, so much so that there's one particular marriage break-up related to a stupid tech start up blowing a couples life savings that still haunts me. And for the record, he…

Those crazy ideas are crazy only when they fail. And with great execution even the most crazy idea can become a success - there are tons of examples. Ideas have nothing to do with failures, marriage breakups etc. That's bad planning, no backup plan, etc.

> even the most crazy idea can become a success - there are tons of examples.

There are multiple orders of magnitude more examples of crazy ideas simply failing (multipl times, as there's only so many crazy ideas but an infinite amount of people thinking they are the first to come across it) than there are of crazy ideas succeeding.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#47

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

going_ham wrote: post #28

Nobody writes it, but it's okay to have average job, with average life and average family as long as you can enjoy your life! Why burden yourself with idea of success and setting expectations. At this point I am sure life doesn't give anything unless you look for it. And even if you seek, there is no guarantee. So I think it's waste of energy. My experience so far. I am really glad that I learned how stability is nec…

I envy the people who can endure the drudgery and boredom of most jobs, and can therefore have stable longterm careers.

You make it sound as if chasing ideas is the hard part, but for some people the opposite is the hard part.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#48

Post by Maursault »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #36

I always liked the quote "Most advice is people giving you their winning lottery ticket numbers". There is always something to learn from others but you can’t just take their exact circumstance and map it onto yours.

I like this one:

    I have seen something else under the sun:
    The race is not to the swift
        nor the battle to the strong,
    nor does food come to the wise
        or wealth to the brilliant
        or favor to the learned;
    but time and chance happen to them all.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#49

Post by sbilstein »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #3

Absolutely, I've had friends with limited business or tech background pump hard-earned savings into crazy tech startup ideas, precisely because they've read too many of these success stories. I've been guilty of not trying to talk sense to some of them, so much so that there's one particular marriage break-up related to a stupid tech start up blowing a couples life savings that still haunts me. And for the record, he…

Yep....

Bootstrapping is for fools. Virtually no founders out there are pouring their personal savings into their company. The issues with bootstrapping:

1) No one to tell you to give up except your own survival instinct. 2) You've already told yourself to ignore that survival instinct because of the success stories you've heard. 3) Even if your idea is fantastic, there is another group of folks out there who have raised enough money to pay themselves working on the same thing. You are now under-resourced and already losing.

I about 90% regret bootstrapping my first, failed startup. The other 10% I managed to make into a great opportunity to learn a lot and expand my network but I suppose I could have done that much more cheaply.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#50

Post by wruza »

going_ham wrote: post #28

Nobody writes it, but it's okay to have average job, with average life and average family as long as you can enjoy your life! Why burden yourself with idea of success and setting expectations. At this point I am sure life doesn't give anything unless you look for it. And even if you seek, there is no guarantee. So I think it's waste of energy. My experience so far. I am really glad that I learned how stability is nec…

I had a conversation with my colleague recently on this. We quickly got lost in this complex topic, but what we managed to recognize was that a large part of "success" phenomenon (here, locally) is just a replacement for a social stability and respect. Atomized society loses big chunks of what makes people happy and sure about their position. And having this is much better than e.g. owning an expensive car. But when everyone around gets constantly gaslighted by success and the role of Money, including relatives or potential friends/spouses, it's hard to row against this current. We live in a pretty unstable environment and it requires much more than just a stable money to insure yourself from taking part in this nonsense, sort of a paradoxical feedback loop. I wish I were that guy who has his average successless life planned ahead, but I'm not assigned this privilege.
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