Collaborate with other people on your projects. You could do some of the initial work, and then hand it off to others to do the marketing and follow-up. You don’t have to do everything yourself.
I conditioned myself to fail
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: I conditioned myself to fail
#42I tend to believe that whatever a person ends up doing is what they actually "want" to do at some inner emotional level (which they may not consciously be aware of). So this person wants to build, but after releasing things to lukewarm feedback, wants to not work on them anymore. Why would they want that? Well, that is a pretty normal behavior I think. But I would speculate... I wonder if this person is like me? Beca…
Ultimately it's all a product of training data, mixed in with a few chemical global variables and some gate-level performance variation. The human brain is literally a thing that craves the input of new information, so feeling bad because that's what your brain is doing is a bit strange imho.
Re: I conditioned myself to fail
#43Well, zero criticism IS a form of criticism so I don't blame the author for not being motivated after the fact. I'd even say its the worst kind of criticism because it leaves you with nothing to build next. But I think they are highlighting an important thing here that most of us struggle with...building is fun, progress is discrete and clear, the feedback loop is very tight. Selling and marketing to people sucks, it…
Agreed, building something is just the first step.
One of the marketing struggles I've had is just getting people to care. I did have a bit of an "If you build it, they will come" attitude because I had confidence in the quality of the work...but even that seems to be irrelevant if you can't get people interested.
As an introvert by nature (extrovert by necessity), I wonder what I'm missing that others seems to grasp innately, because the consequences are fatal for an entrepreneur if you can't convince others to at least try the thing you're offering.
Re: I conditioned myself to fail
#44I’ve found that I like the thrill of designing a project as I get older. But not building. By design I don’t mean UI - which I suck at. I have experience up and down the stack from requirements analysis and pre-sales, enough project management to get by, back end development, database, cloud architecture and “DevOps” [sic] and creating deployment pipelines. I’m not bragging, I’m just old (50). I would have to hire so…
> wouldn’t be good at anyway is marketing and sales
Shift perspective: Consider these things to be an optimization problem. People buying your thing is the output from some undefined function. You get to supply inputs to that function. Now sales and marketing is revealed as being about modeling that undefined function such that you can pick more optimal inputs thereby improving the output. Now traverse the gradient.
Re: I conditioned myself to fail
#45I’m starting to feel like yeah, dopamine and information overload have their effects, but I also feel like there is a certain point in life where people age out of “the extrinsic motivation force field” that insulates and propels young people toward adulthood and then leaves them once resources are reallocated to the next crop of kids who are primed to enter the labor market.
Fortunately software people will constantly keep inventing new things, new names for old things, things that don't do anything useful but nobody realizes, and on and on. It's hard to get to the end of the knowledge curve because it's not a bounded space.
Re: I conditioned myself to fail
#46I'm not a mental health professional, and I don't know the author. Please be assured that I don't mean any disrespect whatsoever: consider getting tested for ADHD by a mental health professional. I was diagnosed very late, since my ADHD was of the "inattentive" kind. I would not be troublesome at home or at school, like an hyperactive child would. A lot of people like this go undiagnosed. One of the traits of ADHD is…
As someone with ADHD that definitely gets dopamine from novelty, is there actually anything that can be done? Adderral and vyvanse work for a couple days and then I build a tolerance. The only indefinite solution is to completely remove all distractions from my area (internet, games, food) but that’s never been sustainable for me. Moderation, rewards on completion, and other mental tricks don’t work for me. Crisis is a good motivator, such as overwhelming student loans, but I’m back to being unfocused now that those are under control.
At this point I’ve mostly accepted my success is severely limited by ADHD.
Re: I conditioned myself to fail
#47I’ve found that I like the thrill of designing a project as I get older. But not building. By design I don’t mean UI - which I suck at. I have experience up and down the stack from requirements analysis and pre-sales, enough project management to get by, back end development, database, cloud architecture and “DevOps” [sic] and creating deployment pipelines. I’m not bragging, I’m just old (50). I would have to hire so…
> wouldn’t be good at anyway is marketing and sales Shift perspective: Consider these things to be an optimization problem. People buying your thing is the output from some undefined function. You get to supply inputs to that function. Now sales and marketing is revealed as being about modeling that undefined function such that you can pick more optimal inputs thereby improving the output. Now traverse the gradient.
While I’m not interested in marketing, my focus over the next year will be to get better at sales. One of my best friends is in technical sales and he gave me a few books to read.
I consider marketing, broad based brand awareness and “sales” to be more one on one. Of course I’m talking B2B.
Context: I’m a “staff” cloud consultant at a 3rd party consulting firm and was previously a mid level cloud consultant (L5) working directly ar AWS (ProServe). I just got into consulting four years ago from hands on keyboard development + cloud architecture at smallish product companies. I’m really new to this.
Currently, when I come into a project, I already know from a thousand foot view what the customer wants - the business problem they are trying to solve or the opportunity they are going after since sales has already spoken to them and I’ve spoken to sales.
My job is to get them there (well now to lead a team) and to convince them that the solution I present to them is the right one. But my job is still just to convince the decision makers. Sales handles talking to the people who control the purse strings.
My next goal is to convince clients they need something that they didn’t know they needed instead of convincing them that we are the people that can help them execute on an initiative they already know they want.
Hopefully moving closer to the customer will provide some protection against software development getting commoditized to cheaper places (more likely) or AI (less likely)
Re: I conditioned myself to fail
#48How is "I condition myself to fail" the conclusion from the description of what happened?
If there is little or no interest from the audience, then there is no action available other than changing the project and trying again.
Re: I conditioned myself to fail
#49The trend towards the glorification of failure is annoying. Failure sucks for many reasons: wasted time and other resources, disappointment, worsening mental health, and so on.
Re: I conditioned myself to fail
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think a lot of people just don't have a good baseline for what's normal. True, but that works both ways. "Surely everyone else gets distracted this much".
Disagree. I think adults with ADHD are well aware that they are not "normal" with respect to many of the symptoms, even if they don't know it's due to ADHD. At least that's my personal experience. Few examples off the top of my head: - being unable to pay bills/fines on time even with plenty of money in the bank. - being physically unable to keep sitting in a chair after a while in meetings. It's easy to see that mos…
Yes, but adults who have ADHD, but neither know it nor suspect they may have it, will look for alternative explanations to make sense of their consistent failures at things other people seem to handle fine. A common one they arrive at is character flaws. They'll see themselves as lazy or childish, and as they try and fail to correct it, they'll internalize guilt and shame.
"Surely everyone else gets distracted this much" is exactly the kind of belief that creates and reinforces feelings of guilt.