You shouldn’t be afraid of failure, but it’s a bad fetish. If failure can help future endeavors great, but there’s nothing inherently interesting about failing a lot.
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 (there's unlikely to be more upside than going to FAANG anyway), I'm talking companies trying to get seed funding.
Taking risks is fine, but don't assume it'll work out just because you want it to.
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. 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.
> 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.
> Have you never met someone who opened a restaurant?
Yes, two actually. Restaurants are incredibly difficult businesses to succeed in. But, to answer your question: my brother-in-law ran a pizza/sub restaurant in a small town, and a friend of mine ran a fancy restaurant in a resort town.
Both of them are tricky situations. My brother-in-law sold his business after being moderately successful (he did it full time and made a living for himself, but it was a lot of work for what he took home). He sold to form a new business with his wife, which is very successful. My brother-in-law, though, had no loans and started the business while living with mom/dad so had it failed, he'd have been out his "life savings (at 22) with no paycheck coming in". He ended up with a business that could sustain itself and him, and did so for a few years, but just barely.
My friend's fancy restaurant completely failed. His restaurant was one of the best places I've ever eaten[0], located in a lake-house town where my family has a vacation house. He lived upstairs with his family, and the place was packed during the summer, but he couldn't charge what he needed to charge to re-coupe the cost of the quality of food he served. His business failed, he moved out of town and went back to teaching but I believe he's opened up a new place out of state, recently.
Did they both expect to be successful? Yes. And since I didn't know Andy (fancy place) prior to his restaurant, I can't say for sure what his thinking was going into it, but the first year he was open he admitted that he knew he was taking a huge risk -- there is literally no business between October and May, and previous fancy places like this have failed regularly in that city. It's a bummer -- this place was amazing.
[0] It was a place you could go on the weekend and were bound to run into a local celebrity/basketball/football/baseball player; it busy/reservation only but small. He was only open Thu-Sun, everything locally sourced and the menu that day based on the best of what he could find (usually bought that morning).
Are you making the argument that "people who think it's a good idea to start restaurants" are representative of "grown-ups?"
I think you're right insofar as you point out that opening a restaurant is a fraught enterprise, but I don't really think that refutes the comment you're responding to - the overwhelming majority of adults don't open restaurants, even though there are always plenty of dreamers who think it's a good idea.
> "people who think it's a good idea to start restaurants" are representative of "grown-ups?"
I laughed at this one, but there's a lot to that statement. My theory on why restaurants fail at such a disproportionate amount compared to other, similar, businesses is that the average American, observing a restaurant hundreds of times in their life, feels they have a pretty good idea of what it takes to make one work. Looking at the difference between what the consumer pays for food versus what they pay for it at a restaurant gives the impression that there's a large margin, as well. Everyone, in one way or another, knows how to cook but few know how to cook well, at scale.
All that to say, for some people, it probably is a really good idea to open a restaurant. There are examples of extremely successful restaurants all over the country and restaurateurs who are capable of taking a pile of cash, picking a location/staff and turning the pile into profits. It's easy to under-estimate the skills required to do this when a quick walk/drive leads you to a row of successful (struggling) restaurants, all packed to the gills[0] charging 10 times grocery prices for food/liquor and think "I can do that".
And I'd agree with you -- that's not really representative of a "grown-up"[1]
[0] Because you showed up there on Saturday just like everyone else.
[1] I used that term over "adult" as it implies emotional maturity but wasn't sure it'd be clear. :)
My point was many adults do have unrealistic expectations of success. Sure, most people don't start restaurants, but an irrational amount of people do it thinking they'll make it. This is hardly unique to restaurants, this was just an obvious counterexample to poke holes in his argument. I live in San Francisco and see people start companies for the stupidest fucking shit all the time, convinced of their assured success because of their Ivy league degrees. I also watch as almost all of them fail (some just haven't had enough time to fail yet, but obviously one might surprise me some day).
Questioning his assumptions is not meant to refute his argument, only to question it.
There’s bad failure and good failure. I try to find the “validated learning” in a failure and that helps me distinguish good from bad.
It’s funny when people talking about how great failing is and fetishizing it without getting the point that lots of failures are good because it gets you to success faster.
But big, stupid, so if failures that are repeated over and over should be a bad sign (eg, “I failed because all my co-workers are idiots” x10 is a really bad failure because it probably means I’m the idiot and aren’t getting better)
I read comments talking about how awful it is that there are success biographies and I can't help but feel pity half the time. Like it or not, if you go into something expecting failure, you might as well skip it. For a lot of folks, the "failure fetish" serves only to reinforce an attitude that "the reason they're (insert desire here) and I'm not is luck. The vast majority fail, so I shouldn't bother.". My Dad's attitude, to us kids, was to finish that of with ", but they're not me." But he had many, many failures along the way, he just addressed each problem and landed on the right decisions enough that his company continued to grow/establish itself until the scariest of those problems started to vanish.
Inwardly, my Dad's attitude was less certain, but still landed somewhere at "It's just another problem, I've solved the last several successfully, I can solve this one", but ultimately, he knew the totality of the risk he was taking -- outright bankruptcy, losing a really, really nice house, not to mention the emotional effects such a catastrophic failure to provide for your family would be. He didn't focus on the "worst-case scenario" (partly because every one of his problems had the same worst-case scenario), because your options are rarely that binary -- while it might be "fail to pay the bill and they cut off service" it's often "if I call before the bill is due, I can get another month or a partial payment will cover us" -- another problem created, but an improvement to having the lights shut off. When the engine fails in-flight, the choice is one of many, many bad options, but "an emergency landing at a different, nearby, airport" beats "setting her down in the clearing just after those trees". As much has he flew, there are tens of stories that should have ended with the plane creating a burning crater, but even when the engine cut out over Lake Michigan in the "you're swimming" zone, he managed to problem solve his way to an airport.
It really feels sometimes there's a plague of jealousy-masquerading-as-concern (or worse, Nanny-ism) -- it hasn't gotten terrible here compared to other forums, but it's everywhere these days. It's almost shun-worthy to imply that someone achieved success through hard work[0]. As if saying so implies that people who are unsuccessful don't work hard, or that working hard, alone, will only guarantee you'll be tired, that knowing your market/product and being a really good problem solver are as important and that even then, you're going to put up with a lot of external BS for the privilege of choosing how you want to make money. And if you want the privilege of offering work to someone, there's a whole lot more you're going to enjoy. If you ever make the mistake of implying that the person who worked so hard for said money deserves the money they took such risks/worked so hard for, well, good luck with that (oops).
[0] I even feel the need to bullet-point-out that "obviously that's not the only factor, it's just the only one that's going to work for you since Mom/Dad aren't paying your paycheck".
