Confronting failure as a core life skill
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Confronting failure as a core life skill
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Re: Confronting failure as a core life skill
#2About how grappling with and learning from failure starts with the language we use around it.
Re: Confronting failure as a core life skill
#3“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?
Re: Confronting failure as a core life skill
#4I 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.
Re: Confronting failure as a core life skill
#5[deleted]
Re: Confronting failure as a core life skill
#6I 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.
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.
Re: Confronting failure as a core life skill
#7“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 po…
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.
Re: Confronting failure as a core life skill
#8A 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.
Re: Confronting failure as a core life skill
#9About how grappling with and learning from failure starts with the language we use around it.
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.
Re: Confronting failure as a core life skill
#10To 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.