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I am done. I give up

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Re: I am done. I give up

#741

Post by joshwolff »

annyeonghada wrote: post #447
joshwolff wrote: post #279

Hate to say it, but you sound like you're victimizing yourself. You're not a victim. And victimhood mentality likely played a large role in your failure. Try to change your mindset and try again when you feel you're ready.

>victimhood mentality Does this kind of pseudo-self-help-tough-love help anyone? Whenever I read something like that I do not feel motivated but enraged. Sometimes people are really victims. Mainly of chance.

"Whenever I read something like that I do not feel motivated but enraged. Sometimes people are really victims. Mainly of chance."

Did I make a generalization? I am specifically talking about the OP.

This person is not a victim of chance, obviously. They tried hard [hopefully] and it didn't work, and then blamed everyone else.

What did they try to do? Get rich via a startup.

No one on the planet is entitled to millions of dollars. Very likely they can get a job for $100k+ - better than most Americans.

Yet even then - they blamed everyone else. You don't win by blaming others. If you can't admit your own faults, you're doomed as a startup founder.

It doesn't matter if this was chance or not, but I assure you this circumstance had nothing to do with luck.

Re: I am done. I give up

#742

Post by pupperino »

mnky9800n wrote: post #562
arghwhat wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"High trust" seems entirely contradictory to Danish society. Universal skepticism and a universal dislike for every other human in existence are the core ideologies here. Maybe a tendency to not interfere with tasks assigned to others to avoid having to deal with people is being misinterpreted as trust?

No. My Norwegian colleagues trust that they will receive healthcare. They trust that their representatives in the government are acting more or less in good faith. They trust that money in the government is going towards protections and services and infrastructure. And if you look around in Norway, you can generally get the feeling that the government is taking care of things. Go to America and it seems like the coun…

Americans really think their schools don't provide solid education, it's so weird. Look at your PISA scores, they're reasonable. Could be a lot better, sure, but so could almost everything. Especially if you take into account how most countries with better education systems have less than a 1/3 of the population, are mostly developed monocultural nation-states, so a lot more capable of standardizing public services nationwide.

Re: I am done. I give up

#743

Post by ChanningAllen »

kypro wrote: post #125

Indie hackers had a great post a couple of years ago looking at how many projects posted there were actually successfully. I don't remember the details now, but I remember it being a depressingly small number that made me realise how statistically stupid it was to attempt to create a tech startup. I think the conclusion was that you probably had something like a low single digit percentage chance of building somethin…

> Tech is weird in that you're competing against a lot of very smart people, the barriers to building a tech product are very low, and the competition is global. In contrast if you open a used car lot you'll typically be competing with few average business men in the area who had the capital to start the company. Your chances of success are astronomically higher even if it's capped.

This is exactly what I tell some of my non-techie friends who are interested in entrepreneurship. Problem is, it turns out most people care just as much about the journey as they do about the destination and turn their noses up at the prospect of being another guy/gal running a drab retail store down the street.

Re: I am done. I give up

#744

Post by simple-thoughts »

jacquesm wrote: post #94
simple-thoughts wrote: post #84

First of all, you are not alone. Most people who try to become entrepreneurs do not succeed. Thankfully, you are self aware and willing to face the facts of your reality. A lot of people will say that success in entrepreneurship is primarily driven by luck. But what they leave out is that it’s input luck, not output luck. Inputs like a “small” $10k gift from a family member. Clean water and high nutrition during chil…

> But what they leave out is that it’s input luck, not output luck. Inputs like a “small” $10k gift from a family member. Clean water and high nutrition during childhood that lead to above average intelligence. Literacy, citizenship, family wealth, and more. Hm, no, even if all of those things are equal the expected outcome is still failure. Your comparison works on the world stage but say within the population of a…

If you have the right input luck, there’s a huge number of small $1-10m annual revenue businesses that can be built. Personally, I can’t do all of them for time constraints so have to focus. I would agree with output luck to some degree with some of the biggest outliers (Facebook, Google) but for some entrepreneurs they have made giant wins not once but repeatedly. Bezos, Buffet, and Musk come to mind - and the fact that in all three of those cases you have abnormally healthy people able to handle stress and work load levels that most of us (including me) can’t take.

Re: I am done. I give up

#746

Post by kyleyeats »

Archipelagia wrote: post #323

This might sound a bit assholish, but I'm writing this to hopefully help others spot a crucial mistake: Did you have anyone on your team with actual skill in sales or marketing? Because from your post it seems you tried the same channels that everyone else does (writing blog, engaging on Twitter, setting up ProductHunt launch) without any specific strategy for how to succeed. And this stuff is hard! There's a reason…

I think it's hard way before that. YC phrases it as "Build something people want" but all the words in that sentence are way harder to understand than it first seems.

Re: I am done. I give up

#747

Post by johnohara »

botswana99 wrote: post #720

I am so sorry you feel bad. Want some advice from an older engineer turned entrepreneur? Be proud of what you have done. Not many people take risks in life. You did. Being the 'man in the arena' is enough. I read this quote from Teddy Roosevelt often: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to…

To yours I add this from Teddy Roosevelt:

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

Re: I am done. I give up

#748

Post by joshwolff »

KaiserPro wrote: post #414
joshwolff wrote: post #279

Hate to say it, but you sound like you're victimizing yourself. You're not a victim. And victimhood mentality likely played a large role in your failure. Try to change your mindset and try again when you feel you're ready.

I don't thinks this reply is helpful. Its basically saying "its your fault you failed, moreover you are going to fail again because of your attitude" turning this question around to you: have you ever managed to "change your mindset"? assuming you have changed your mindset, did it materially change your circumstances? Because if you're still in a hole, "being mindful" isn't going to affect that.

Do you even know how to read? Did I say "being mindful"?

The entitled OP claims they deserve millions of dollars (via a successful startup) - all they had to do was try.

They then blamed everyone else for their failure except themselves. You will NEVER succeed in a startup if you cannot accept fault and be a leader. Actually, my reply is the ONLY reply they need. They don't need to be babied.

Reread their post:

"I tried everything [I was supposed to]" "But no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get anywhere." "It was as if the world was against me" "no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make any progress" "It was like I didn't even exist in the world of entrepreneurship." "please don't be fooled by the false promises"

Re: I am done. I give up

#749

Post by noufalibrahim »

jurmous wrote: post #10

A 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…

For all the talk of being "data driven", a somewhat solid but underappreciated data point is the super low success rates of startups.

Re: I am done. I give up

#750

Post by joshwolff »

joshwolff wrote: post #748
KaiserPro wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't thinks this reply is helpful. Its basically saying "its your fault you failed, moreover you are going to fail again because of your attitude" turning this question around to you: have you ever managed to "change your mindset"? assuming you have changed your mindset, did it materially change your circumstances? Because if you're still in a hole, "being mindful" isn't going to affect that.

Do you even know how to read? Did I say "being mindful"? The entitled OP claims they deserve millions of dollars (via a successful startup) - all they had to do was try. They then blamed everyone else for their failure except themselves. You will NEVER succeed in a startup if you cannot accept fault and be a leader. Actually, my reply is the ONLY reply they need. They don't need to be babied. Reread their post: "I tr…

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All of the advice in the other comments do NOT matter at all if the OP cannot look in the mirror and self-reflect on what THEY did wrong --- NOT what others did wrong.

This is fundamental. They clearly don't do this currently. Before doing this, nothing else matters, none of the other advice will work, and they CERTAINLY will fail again if they do not fix this first.

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