There are a lot of things you can do for your mental health. Good habits for diet and exercise go a long way. Learn how to manage your stress. If entrepreneurship is taking a toll on you, then by all means do something else, you may come back to it one day in a better state to try again.
I am done. I give up
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: I am done. I give up
#342[dead]
Re: I am done. I give up
#343A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. Luck of finding the right idea, the right market, the right timing, the right connections, the right customers, the right employees, the right financing. The basic fact is that most startups and most entrepreneurial dreams fail or get consumed by another for their talent/clients. And as an entrepreneur you fight against all odds. Most will fail…
Everything in life is luck, including your comment being top voted. If everything is luck, then it probably isn’t worth saying.
It definitely is. Just because success mostly boils down to luck, doesn’t mean that people realize or acknowledge it, which leads to unhealthy obsession with “being successful” that permeates the society.
Re: I am done. I give up
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Norway, not Finland. >The people you rob (the ones paying the bulk of taxes) have a lower incentive to produce. Sure, the thought of being worth only 150 billion dollars rather than 300 would stop Bezos from starting Amazon.
Bezos would not have kept Amazon in the US if it adopted Nordic welfare levels of taxation. The fact of the matter is that the EU has a staggeringly low output when it comes to tech innovation compared to the US. Their policies and regulations shape this.
Your taxes shouldn’t be based on where your HQ is but rather where your customers are.
Re: I am done. I give up
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the underappreciated benefits of the Nordic-style welfare state: everybody can afford to fail. Unfortunately it's rarely discussed in society as such. The political parties that built these welfare states have traditionally been associated with worker unions, and entrepreneurship isn't high on their agenda. The Nordic right-wing parties got ideologically married to Thatcher-style neoliberalism and pref…
The issue is who pays for the welfare state. Finland got a lot of its wealth through off sea oil I think. Not easy to replicate in almost every part of the world. If you make the population pay for the welfare state, you are essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul. The people you rob (the ones paying the bulk of taxes) have a lower incentive to produce. This is one reason the energy Windfall taxes being proposed everyw…
> The people you rob (the ones paying the bulk of taxes) have a lower incentive to produce.
And yet when the top tax rate was 96%, Americans still produced.
When I was 12, I was impressed by Atlas Shrugged, but by the time I was 17 I realized it was ludicrous.
Re: I am done. I give up
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US is prized because of its large market… not because it’s a tax dodge. The US dan cut off access to any company unwilling to pay local taxes just like how China forces any foreign company wanting to tap into its large market to give majority control to a local entity.
The EU is a large market too but startup founders aren't going there.
EU has a market on legislative base, however in language, culture, ... it is split. It is very hard to build a company serving larger parts of Europe.
Re: I am done. I give up
#347For what it’s worth, it seems like you put all of your eggs in one basket. You need to have clear indications of success AND failure. There’s always a point where you say, “it’s X months so far, none to minimal revenue, burn chart indicates this project will go under” and actually kill/shelf the project.
It sucks that you got the idea that it was ever “easy” and your mental health suffered as a result. I fucking hate those people. These are probably the same people that say “programming is for everybody. Anybody can write code”. In reality, it’s just not.
Re: I am done. I give up
#348My current advice, which seems to be working well so far, is to do small tasks for huge government corporations and organizations for FREE, no questions asked. Don't know how well this could work in the American context, but this has worked for 3 places I've lived in (UK, UAE, India). You don't earn cash but you will earn an INSANE amount of goodwill and connections. The next time, they need a tech solution, they'll…
I am interested in why it is the Firebase problem, or what that means?
Firebase has a ton of users, but most of the users seem to be independent devs and hobbyists, with a small number of large clients. It's possible Firebase tends to attract non-hardcore users because of its superb UI/UX, which makes it extremely accessible for beginner devs and hobbyist programmers. But apart from a few features (which don't generate revenue, like Auth and Cloud Functions), Firebase has a hard time getting established companies to use them because at the end of the day, they're built on GCP, which has the lowest trust factor among the Big 3 - no serious company is going to trust the longevity of Google Products.
Re: I am done. I give up
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment distorts what is happening by using the word "robbing". Why not "supporting"? Perhaps Peter has earned his cash by working really hard. But perhaps not, perhaps he just exploited other people to hustle his way up some corporate food chain.
This type of thinking is pure toxin because it essentially reinforces exactly what you don't want. If Peter did in fact work hard and now he's stripped of the results of his labor while being told that probably he only managed to accumulate capital because he was just exploiting others, what incentive landscape does that create. Is a lot of profit a function of factors much less commendable than creating value for ot…
Nobody, at least in the US system, gets very wealthy just by working hard.
At the very least, you have to start out with wealth or a strong support system (which is down to luck in your input conditions), or get fantastically lucky in your first(-ish) attempt at starting something.
Then, if you want to make the kind of money that, say, Bezos or Musk makes, you have to make the kinds of decisions that many of us simply would never make, because they're morally reprehensible. I wrote another comment about this [0] on an article about a week ago, but basically, in the very best case scenario, once you're past the point where more money would make no material difference in a healthy lifestyle (which is going to happen, at the very latest, somewhere in the millions), if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil.
Re: I am done. I give up
#350[dead]