Avoiding Burnout

Startups are a perfect example of this. We see serial entrepreneurs fail spectacularly (see Color), we read about entrepreneurs who kill themselves after a string of failures, and we read all of the time about the new guys and girls who tried their hardest yet never managed to take off. People like to write about "why my startup failed", but they are hurting a lot more than they let on.

Entrepreneurs shouldn't be risk adverse. If you want risk adverse, go work at Google. At the same time, we should understand what it means to live in high risk mode, and learn to recognize warning signs (depression, burn out, loneliness, etc.) in ourselves and others so that a high risk lifestyle can be manageable and even healthy.

I do agree that you need some successes at work, though. If you were doing really well in private, but everything at work was going wrong that would cause problems.

And, Feynman had a gift at making these ideas accessible to the layperson. He is very missed.

Wow. Fuck. That is spot-on. Just... fuck! You nailed it.

I feel like I've been badly conditioned over the past few years. I've worked on failed software projects (only one my fault, years ago and I didn't know what I was doing) and in bad managerial environments, and I've never experienced team synergy or symbiotic management-- I know it exists, but it hasn't been my experience. Yet as an almost-succeeded creative writer, I'm really good at kvetching because I can capture peoples' complaints in a way that almost no one else can. I'm terrified of conditioning myself out of tech just by being so much better at kvetching (I can write a top comment on almost any forum).

I don't failure is that bad. I'm old enough to realize that good ideas fail for all kinds of reasons, and that it's pointless to get married to an idea, a project, or even a job. I can hack failure. It comes with the territory. Scrap the old project, start a new one. Most people who achieve great things were much bigger failures than I am, up until a couple years before the "overnight success".

What really drives the nail in is the low social status that comes with failure. Project cancelled? Ok, fine. Is it a transfer or a layoff? Just let me know and be fair about it, and we're cool. Lose a job? That happens. Dealing with humiliation afterward-- applying for subordinate roles for which I'm way overqualified, having to go through 47 goddamn phone screens for each company just to prove I'm not an idiot-- is harder. It doesn't help that we're a tribe (technologists, software engineers) with extremely low social status (especially per IQ point) in comparison to project managers and bike-shedding executives.

I don't know that it's the association of hard work with failure itself that's so devastating, but the association of it with low social status is, I think, what drives so many people out of our industry before age 35. Project failure would be okay if it wasn't so devastating to our social status, especially in an industry where ageism begins at 27. Then, we see people of mediocre talent and work ethic getting ahead (including $200M+ acq-hires) on social polish and it's just more demoralizing.