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Let there be more biographies of failures

commonreader.substack.com

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Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#61

Post by jrmg »

as1mov wrote: post #29
prepend wrote: post #27

Earlier 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.

Part of the joy of that show is seeing how the characters evolve personally throughout the seasons. It’s often not predictable - but I would say it is believable.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#62

Post by animatedb »

gwerbret wrote: post #57
mdip wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

> What I hate when I'm reading these things is the colorful, biography-like nonsense that major publications (and self-important "journalists") like to toss into stories 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.…

Or a bit of the ego of the writer is getting in and becoming the story.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#63

Post by Judgmentality »

mdip wrote: post #56
Judgmentality wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure; but nobody who takes the 1000x risk does so believing they don't hold something that reduces that 1000x risk, either, whether deluded in that thinking or not. 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.…

> 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.

Have you never met someone who opened a restaurant? Peter Thiel actually uses this as a talking point. The surest way to lose money is to open a restaurant, and yet there are always people lining up to do so.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#64

Post by russellbeattie »

I've thought of this before. I think a Studs Terkel style oral history from some otherwise successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs where they recount times they failed horribly would actually be pretty amusing, if not cathartic if done correctly.

I did a startup of my own in the 2000s... I decided to change the domain/company name to something shorter. I assumed I'd just redirect requests and all would be fine. I totally didn't think about the effect that the change would have on my Google SEO. Things were fine, then suddenly the traffic dropped to almost nothing. The new domain wasn't being indexed and the old domain disappeared because of whatever stupid HTTP header I put on it. Cut from this event to three months later having my car repossessed and it's a "fun" story.

I would definitely enjoy a book of fuckups like this from others.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#66

Post by IsopropylMalbec »

vuciv1 wrote: post #33

Haha, well you can read about my failure to make a cartoon episode. It was very depressing, a lot of love went into it, and it crashed and burned after hundreds of hours. https://jerseyfonseca.com/blogs/failingkiwi

That's honestly a heart wrenching story. Your bravery to write it as straight as you have is testament to you. You obviously cared a lot about the film and the people you worked with. That will go with you.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#67

Post by SkyMarshal »

blacktriangle wrote: post #32

The 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…

You also need to read about failure to account for survivorship bias.

Eg, did some entity fail even though they were doing the same things as the successful entities?

If you detect that, then it's evidence that the techniques of the successful entities are no guarantee of success. That some other technique or factor or luck was the actual differentiator.

That's useful information when you're trying to decide what techniques of successful entities may be worth repurposing to your situation or not.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#68

Post by hellbannedguy »

bjt wrote: post #51
olivertaylor wrote: post #12

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

On top of the survivorship bias I would add the fundamental attribution error, or a close cousin to it. Our stories about successful people tend to attribute their success to inherent qualities and under-emphasize the role of their environment, especially just getting lucky.

Yes—the wealthy sympathetic parent. This is always left out of the speeches.

It’s not a hard equation. The wealthy can afford to take risks. They want their kids to succeed. Can take care of that marginal DUI. I could fill up a page of entitlements?

They know important people, or have the money, to influence important people. They can get their kids out of trouble. Can pay for schooling. Can risk money on multiple business/career ideas.

I grew up with Gavin Newsom. Went to the same high school. He was voted “Most Fashionable”. If this guy didn’t have that powerful, wealthy family, there is no way he would be where he is now. His younger year screwups, and learning difficulties, would have hobbled most of us for life. (I like Gavin. I think he’s a good guy. I’m just using him as an example. Marin County has many fine examples of wealthy kids getting ahead, but figured most of you wouldn’t know them.)

I grew up in a wealthy enclave, and pretty much every successful kid had a wealthy encouraging parent. A few middle class kids came out as good financially as dad if they went into his line of business, and didn’t work at screwing it up when “finding themself” in their 20-30’s.

A few low income kids succeeded if they finished college, and got a professional degree.

(I don’t equate success with money, or career. Some of the worst people I know are considered successful.)

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#70

Post by blacktriangle »

bumby wrote: post #53
blacktriangle wrote: post #32

The 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…

> The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail 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 qu…

I was thinking of it more in ways businesses fails given we're on HN and that's a bit more narrow than the "in life" version of the article so that it's more useful.

However that's a really great point that in the context of a specific engineering application failure can be enumerated to the point where such study of failure is incredibly powerful. Thanks for pointing that out.

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