Amen! I've found that 9 times out of 10 successful people follow the same advice and believe the same things as unsuccessful people (at least they SAY they do). So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet followed the same advice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Let there be more biographies of failures
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Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#52Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#53The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail. So from a pov of looking to reduce my chances of failure, reading about a failure means there are now Inf - 1 ways I might fail, not too useful. Pragmatically reading about success and seeing if I can repurpose their techniques to my situation is far more useful. Where reading about failure is useful is to help remove the general stigma around failure that…
Do you mean infinite ways in life? I’m trying to reconcile your statement as it would apply to a specific domain rather than something as broad as the scope of ones life.
Reliability engineering would tend to disagree with the above quote. For a specific engineering application there are a certain number of fault modes that can be ideally mitigated and quantified as a reliability risk. Good engineering practice documents these in the form of fault trees, failure mode effects analysis etc. Sure, unknown failure modes still may pop up, but to the point of the article, if they get discussed and documented they can be mitigated in future iterations. While maybe never reaching zero, over time the remaining unknown risks become smaller and smaller probability events.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#54Alan Kay.
Simply because everyone misunderstood OOP and completely missed the point. The idea was too far ahead of it's time to have not been misunderstood.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#55My favourite book ever is "The Book of Heroic Failures". It celebrates failure. In the introduction, Stephen Pile wrote: Success is overrated. Everyone craves it despite daily proof that man's real genius lies in quite the opposite direction. Incompetence is what we are good at: it is the quality that marks us off from animals and we should learn to revere it. Of course, the occasional Segovia does slip through the n…
Pile, Stephen. The Book of Heroic Failures: The Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. 1980.
..I see he has a newer book published too:
Pile, Stephen. The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures. 2011.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you work on things with a 5% chance of success but 1000x potential return, it absolutely makes sense to keep trying if you have the capacity to take on that much risk.
> If you work on things with a 5% chance of success but 1000x potential return Let's say you do this 10 times in a row. There is still a 60% chance you fail every time. You've only got one life to live. And if we're talking startups, because this is HN, I'd ballpark each one as having at most a 1% chance of success, and I consider that incredibly charitable. Series B companies are already derisked and don't count (th…
My Dad knew the statistics about his chances for success, and he had a very realistic picture (which turned out to be true) of what those statistics would look like when the variable being applied was "him".
But the 1000x risk issue applies in some ways. My Dad was and is successful -- wealthy, retired, married to the same woman since his 20s, spent the latter part of his working life working when he didn't have to, financially. But I'm sure he really would have preferred if it came without a new, dream-ruining, potential problem every other day weeks with sleep replaced with work, being away from home more than home at times, and the myriad of other grief involved. Even though he never let on to us kids, I don't doubt that my Dad probably felt like he was failing for a solid decade, much of which he went without a paycheck, part of which he spent in court filing suit against the former owner of his last business venture (and ended up "winning", which cost him more -- financially[0] -- than had he just ignored it, entirely).
The flip side is that if you really do have something that would reduce that 1000x risk (for your niche product/narrow case/whatever it is that you're doing), explore it, test it, try it. This isn't a "you can't win the lottery if you don't play" sort of things, it's a "you're clearly a smart person or you probably wouldn't understand half of the stuff that's written about on this site, so maybe that idea you think is 'unrealistic' could use a little prodding before you 'bin it'"
Maybe the HN crowd has different problems in this area than the world-at-large, but "an unrealistic expectation of success in business" is not common among grown-ups. Most adults suffer from motivation to simply "learn something new" and their experience (personal and through stories shared by others in our lives/24-Hour News) tell them that most people fail most of the time. If the thing they're trying would benefit them "greatly", that's when the real failin' begins!
Some of the world needn't take the 1000x risk to have a total failure -- life throws that at you on its own and while successes come, too, I tend to focus on the failures. Sometimes they prevent me from taking acceptable risks to achieve something greater. I might have failed at that, but the vast majority of the time, the downside to that failure is just "lost time". Usually the thing I want to make is 100x easier/simpler than things I've done countless times. Doesn't matter, no point, it won't work out. My only hope in those cases is that the thing I'm done has some other benefit, like "at least I'll learn something about this technology if it doesn't work", but I find that focusing on the failure modes is probably the strongest demotivating factor to doing anything, for me.
Conversely, focusing on what (realistically) could result "if this is successful" is a very strong motivator to doing that thing. Granted, the things I'm doing require minimal investment and don't carry with them a risk to loss of life/limb/life-savings, so I can't say that focusing on the success side of things would make much of a difference against those odds, but focusing on the loss of life/limb/savings would result in either "not doing it at all" or "losing said life/limb/savings"
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[0] It was an issue of sale of the business. Nobody but this individual wanted to sell and this individual didn't have the ability to make that choice without the others' involvement but he believed they'd be unwilling to sue him knowing the result would be losing more money than they'd hope to get out of a positive outcome. And if the guy had gotten to know my Dad well enough, he'd not have been surprised when my Dad took the attitude of "let's see who goes broke, first". While Mom wasn't too pleased, I think my Dad actually joked that it was "money well spent" at one point. Mind you, he did this while starting his new business, not collecting a paycheck, and having a very large mortgage on a brand new home in his late 40s, so his opponent's bet that he wouldn't sue was probably a good bet; except that my Dad's humility ended at being stolen from.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#57Henry Petroski has written several excellent essays and books about engineering failures, why it is inherent in engineering pursuits that there will be failures, why it is important to learn the right lessons from these failures, and why each new generation will forget past lessons. Start with: "To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" (1985)
My thinking is that many of the kinds of engineering failure stories you refer to are about the failure, itself, or the victims of the failure (Therac-25, for example), but not often primarily about a single individual's life of failure (or even a single individual's sole role in a failure). They might also be about the engineering teams/groups involved (Challenger explosion) and sometimes about a specific engineer (…
I've noticed that many supposedly serious, non-fiction books written in the past two decades begin (and are liberally interspersed) with such "prose"; I personally find it so irritating that I invariably drop the book immediately and read no further. As such writing doesn't seem to be associated with any particular author, publisher or theme, I imagine it represents an effort, across the publishing industry, to make non-fiction books more appealing to the general public.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved that show and think it finished rather than was cancelled. But many of the folks I recommended it to, didn’t like it. Various reasons provided but I remember stuff like “depressing” and “failure” coming up a lot.
I tried watching it, couldn't get past the first season because of the characters. I've dealt with enough asshole Steve Jobs wannabes and the 10x rockstar programmer types in real life that watching them on screen gives me PTSD.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#59Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#60The whole TV show “Halt and Catch Fire” was basically about serial failure by a bunch of technically minded narcissists. I’ve never related more to a television show. Notably, it got ignominiously cancelled. I think failure is bad entertainment.
I loved that show and think it finished rather than was cancelled. But many of the folks I recommended it to, didn’t like it. Various reasons provided but I remember stuff like “depressing” and “failure” coming up a lot.
But I watched every second of it with interest so I don't know what that says about me.