[HN Gopher] Let there be more biographies of failures
___________________________________________________________________
Let there be more biographies of failures
Author : commons-tragedy
Score : 220 points
Date : 2021-03-17 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
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| olivertaylor wrote:
| 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
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think the important bit is to pay attention to what the
| successful do differently from common sense advice, not the
| bits that everyone follows. For example, Elon Musk's housing
| choices when traveling, Steve Jobs' higher education, Tesla's
| approaches to thinking.
| beforeolives wrote:
| I don't see how that helps either with survivorship bias or
| with attribution bias.
| bjt wrote:
| 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.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| 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.)
| [deleted]
| mdip wrote:
| > So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet
| followed the same advice.
|
| Both are useful, yes. With no evidence, what-so-ever, my gut is
| that both are a _lot less_ useful than we give them credit for.
| My Dad is a success by most of societies measures (and all of
| my own). A biography of his life couldn 't possibly share
| enough advice to teach someone else to be successful. I could
| do it pretty easily: Work harder than you are capable of, then
| harder than that, and do so without a paycheck (but with a very
| large mortgage) for a few years while still managing to pay
| your employees. You'll be driving over to your office every 2.5
| hours to change paper in your color printer to print paper
| catalogues (at 2:00 AM, 4:30 AM ...) so you won't be sleeping a
| lot the first few years, and you'll do so on the family-room
| floor because getting up and down all night long isn't going to
| work for Mom.
|
| Meanwhile, once a month or so, have some crisis happen that
| threatens to shut the place down. Do this for _several_ years
| until your customers -- all of whom have far less faith in your
| company continuing to exist (in a space where that 's _really_
| important) -- are _finally_ willing to send orders big enough
| your way for you to get _any_ financial benefit from the work
| you 're doing (and give most of it to your tireless staff who
| -- while _paid on time every month_ -- went without raises for
| a _long_ time and barely complained[0]). It was 90% struggle,
| 90% problems, solving one at a time, moving on to the next, and
| never getting overwhelmed. Unsurprisingly, he was also a very
| good small plane pilot (IFR /Weather and a mess of others; he
| flew multiple times/week often cross-country with a breathing
| mask hooked up to a tank due to the altitude and lack of
| pressurization on a Cherokee).
|
| So basically my lesson was that in order to be successful, you
| have to suffer for a long time, work harder than you're capable
| of at the peek of your health, and if you can figure out all of
| the problems while still providing something your customers
| want, you'll be successful. The first two parts are almost
| always "minimum requirements" -- there is the occasional "lazy
| genius" and the more frequent "trust-fund successful", but if
| you're starting at 19 years old, newly married out of high
| school (no kids) doing construction, you're very unlikely to
| become wealthy without a lot of hard work (outside of the
| lottery/similar luck-related ventures that don't serve any
| educational value to the consumer). As irony would have it, the
| story of my Dad's life is one of the (smaller) reasons I chose
| to work for someone rather than run a business[1].
|
| I think most of us watch/read these things more for the
| entertainment value. Perhaps I tell myself it's learning, but
| it's a mix of curiosity and voyeurism. But nobody has to tell
| me watching a biography about a successful person means
| "success is easy" or more common than failure. I've watched,
| participated in, read about or seen on TV nearly every form of
| failure there is. Thankfully the "participated in" category
| isn't as bad as it could be.
|
| [0] It's hard to complain when the owner will _pull crap out of
| a toilet with his bare hands_ before asking an employee to find
| a plunger, can and does do any job on the factory floor and
| seemingly lives at the place. There wasn 't a menial task below
| him and he'd take it if someone could do the more important job
| better ... he was always a humble guy.
|
| [1] I'm not afraid of hard work -- it was mostly about _what_
| he had to work on and knowledge (from a brief stint running my
| own business) that if I had to do that with the majority of my
| time, I 'd be miserable. The products/services my Dad's
| business sold weren't "his life's passion" even though what he
| provided was extremely important to his customers and
| ultimately, anyone who drives a car. Running the business,
| managing the finances, and making "the machine" operate were
| his life's passions, so spending almost all of his time on
| finances/growing the business was what drove him.
| [deleted]
| mjfl wrote:
| the problem with wanting to write biographies of failures is the
| same problem with publishing negative results in science: there
| are too many failures, and too many ways to fail. It's like
| entropy - there are so many ways to do something wrong that it's
| not very efficient to learn how to do something by enumerating
| all the ways you cannot do it. Much rarer is success, which is
| why it's more worth the time to study. Maybe this is a
| controversial opinion.
|
| Maybe adjacent failures are worth study - studies of people who
| very nearly succeeded compared to someone who did, where subtle
| differences ended up being significant. These kinds of things can
| create "what to watch out for" kinds of guides.
|
| In addition - what is failure? Was Nikola Tesla a failure? He
| died broke... but he still invented AC generators...
| pmastela wrote:
| > The real benefit that reluctant young lawyers like Otlet get
| from their career is boredom. Their minds wander.
|
| This reminds me of Einstein's stint as a patent clerk where he
| "hatched the most beautiful ideas [1]". Sometimes a boring job is
| simply a means to an end -- time to let one's mind wander and
| pursue one's raison d'etre.
|
| 1: https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/life-and-
| times/car...
| vuciv1 wrote:
| 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
| IsopropylMalbec wrote:
| 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.
| vuciv1 wrote:
| Damn, I never thought anyone would read it or care. I very
| deeply appreciate your comment, and that you took the time to
| read it.
|
| I really hope I can try again one day in the future with
| actual animators!
| jesselangdon wrote:
| I enjoyed your story too. Good on you for going for it! At
| the very least, you tried!
| vuciv1 wrote:
| Thank you, I really appreciate it :)
| flybrand wrote:
| As someone who has failed as a CEO - I can't write about it,
| because it would have a bad impact on my former team, who is
| still working away.
|
| Not only must you find someone willing to document their failure
| (I am), they have to be free and clear (I am not).
| julienreszka wrote:
| My definition of learning is "Increasing the likelihood of
| success" My definition of success is "Having Expectations met" =>
| learning is increasing the likelihood of having expectations met.
| My definition of failure is "Having expectations not met" People
| don't learn to fly a plane by crashing it but by flying it with
| more control. The aviation industry was the product of people's
| success at improving the control of the plane. People who claim
| they can learn from failure never seem to care to explain how
| they do it, they only rage and scream: IT SHOULD BE THAT WAY.
| That would be nice...But it isn't that way. That's wishful
| thinking.
|
| They only way to learn is to carefully examine how to prevent
| failure, and that's how eventually, people succeed and learn and
| succeed and learn and succeed and so on.
| mdip wrote:
| When I saw the title, I initially rolled my eyes[0], but I have
| to concede a lot of the points the author is making with regard
| to the examples he's chosen. There _is_ value in biographies
| covering failures.
|
| My first thought was "there's no market for it". But yes, there
| definitely is -- at least, I'm part of it. I remember watching a
| documentary on covering an early .com failure that with a few
| tweaks would have been a biography about the failures of the CEO
| and the tragedy of that experience in his life. It was a _very
| unique_ failure and it interested me because it was a failure at
| a level I had not experienced in my life[1].
|
| There is a very similar market in the "failure biography"
| category: True Crime. I feel it's the closest analog. Outside of
| the books that are written simply because the crime is so
| gruesome, many are about particularly clever criminal(s) and the
| errors that led to their capture[2]. While these books often
| focus on the whole process, and might center around an
| investigator's hunt for a criminal, there are plenty where "A
| Biography of Stabby McMurderFace" would be a better title. I'm
| sure there's an abstraction and a way to map the
| successes/failures from a true crime book to adequately apply to
| non-criminal life. Everything I know about software development
| says it must be true. /s
|
| [0] There seems to be a growing trend with hating on people who
| are successful, whether it's entirely dismissing their success as
| "luck" or pointing out the obvious fact that "reading a Biography
| will not teach you how to become a multi-millionaire". Or worse,
| that reading about a successful person's life is a harmful way to
| use your limited entertainment time <rant>(when did it become
| popular to write articles talking to adults like they've not been
| on this planet their whole, adult, life? Do we need to be told
| that wild success is an _outlier_ just because a few adults need
| instructions to operate Shampoo?). </rant>
|
| [1] I won't deny it, I was watching it 80% for the "train-wreck"
| of it all and only 20% for the cautionary tale aspects, but you
| consume both.
|
| [2] There is the third, "unsolved", category and I don't know
| what percentage all of these books represent of the whole, but
| I'd consider only the "failed criminals" which at-a-glance
| appears to be the most common.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I think balancing success biographies with failure biographies
| helps emphasize the HUGE risk inherent in entrepreneurship, and
| for that reason it's worth it.
|
| Failure can often ruin your personal relationships, future,
| etc, just as success can enhance all of those.
| pototo666 wrote:
| I think of this topic this very morning.
|
| I am entering the fourth month of second entrepreneurial attemp.
| It feels harder than my last attemp, which failed. I have no
| funding (yet) and I have a child now. I can't keep 8 hours
| straight sleep.
|
| Will my body cracks? I interviewed my mom this morning, who
| failed her several attempts in business and got lupus
| erythematosus.
|
| She said that she never felt tired at that time. She just worked
| and worked. She used to be called the Never Tired Woman. But her
| businesse just didn't work. Then one day, she felt so tired. It
| turned out that she had this problem called lupus erythematosus.
| Then she gave up her career as entrepreneur. That was fifteen
| years ago, when she was in her fourth year as businesswoman
| rather than clerk.
|
| I heard successful entrepreneurs adviced us to work as hard as
| you can. But what does that acutally mean? Should I work so hard
| as to hurt my health? My mom's story tells me, health is the
| prerequisite for entrepreneurship. As for working hard, there is
| bottom line there.
| prepend wrote:
| Almost Perfect by WE Pete Peterson [0] is the story of
| WordPerfect and how it burned up. I think it was a good example
| of 80s/90s software startups and think the author, CEO I think,
| was frank about what went wrong. And it's free.
|
| [0] http://www.wordplace.com/ap/
| [deleted]
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Failure is depressing, people who advocate this advise have
| succeeded after failure.
|
| I posit that if you wrote your biography of failure while
| failing, it only wastes precious time to correct course.
|
| "Winners" should write fewer lines and attribute it to: genes and
| luck.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Same for education. Let students see how many failures and wrong
| theories occured in the past, even from the smartest brains of
| their days. And stop forcing godspell like knowledge onto brains.
| Make them try, think, sweat, imagine, converge or diverge and
| correct themselves with some guidance to avoid too much
| confusion.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I used to play a particular game of code golf with my co-
| workers. Basically write the most awful code you could. We
| would usually pick some rule for the start of the game that
| week to have a theme. Something like 'write a loop that finds a
| string' or 'make a case statement'. There were no real rules
| other than every language construct and library is on the table
| to do it and it had to fit on the whiteboard with everyone
| else. So for example you may be a C++ shop that avoids throw in
| all cases that you can. In this game you could use them.
|
| It had a really interesting side effect. The code in the office
| that was checked in went up dramatically in quality. As we
| learned first hand what was 'bad code' and why.
|
| We basically forced bad things just to have a bit of fun but
| accidently learned something while doing it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| real data + fun + no pressure often leads to improvement it
| seems
| jplr8922 wrote:
| Thinking that everybody understand life as a pass or fail
| exercice is neurotic mindset projection. We have no idea about
| how Otlet experienced his existence. COVID put brakes on a lot of
| life projects... are these humans all failures?
|
| There is intelectual life outside the Boomer-Brains their
| Corporate-Pax-Americana-Safety-Bubble. Here is a list of loosers
| to ponder about ;
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautama_Buddha
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Maurice_de_Talleyrand-...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton
|
| Obviously I am all in studying the past in order to not repeat
| the same mistakes. But please, do it without the self whipping of
| clasifying humans as 'exceptionals' and 'failures'. Getting a few
| bruises along the way might help to open your mind and help you
| becoming yourself.
| parenthesis wrote:
| Check out The Library of Mistakes:
|
| https://www.libraryofmistakes.com/
| zerealshadowban wrote:
| Henry 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)
| mdip wrote:
| 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
| (Allan McDonald).
|
| I'd argue that all of these have _immense_ value. The Allan
| McDonald story can be seen as both success /failure (failure to
| stop the launch, success for being right and standing firm on
| that belief). And while "pure failure biographies" related to
| engineering failures probably exist, I was able to come up with
| a number of examples while writing this comment for every other
| form of engineering failure that _doesn 't_ qualify, but
| couldn't think of a good example that _does_ which I have seen
| /read. Many on business failures that focus on a CEO (and
| sometimes those CEOs _are_ the engineer, but, again, nothing
| that wouldn 't require reaching out to Google).
|
| Thinking about it -- I'm glad about that. The kinds of
| "excellent essays and books about engineering failures" that
| you mention are the kinds of things _I love to read_. I wish
| there were more of them.
|
| 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 pulled
| up to the diner at 8:00 PM, the paint on the door was clearly
| done in another era; when this small part of (nowhereville) was
| an up-and-coming metropolis, and the place that Bob Thomas grew
| up and learned that hard work and determination can do
| anything. The "O" in the "Open" sign had failed long ago,
| leaving only "pen". It was a sign from the universe as I was
| here to write about the startup-to-empire-to-bankrupcy of ePens
| Custom Pens. Though I was a half-hour early, Bob was waiting
| for me, his hair and beard flowing together not knowing where
| one begins and the other ends. One can't help but being
| reminded of the race condition that would ultimately lead to
| the unraveling of the machine he'd spent his life building".
|
| No thanks. Tell me what went wrong. Tell me what led up to the
| failure -- include technical details _and_ process
| /technical/decision-making that led to the failure. I don't
| _know_ the engineer and my interest is in the idea /technology,
| not the person. And I care even less about the guy writing
| about the person... :)
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Tell me what led up to the failure -- include technical
| details and process/technical/decision-making that led to the
| failure. I don't know the engineer and my interest is in the
| idea/technology, not the person."
|
| I agree with the emphasis on the technical side of things,
| but I would argue that some failures might have indeed
| something to do with the person. Their characteristics and
| habits. Their way of life. Even their taste in music and art.
| That all influences failure or succed of projects. But it is
| surely harder to get meaningful data out of it ..
| zerealshadowban wrote:
| Yes, the populist-biography kind of writing you describe is
| unsatisfactory, to say the least; the reason I point to
| Petroski's work is that he did _not_ write like that.
|
| Another great book to read to examine modes of engineering
| failure is Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People
| Think?" which includes some of his thoughts on the Challenger
| disaster.
| gwerbret wrote:
| > 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. 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.
| animatedb wrote:
| Or a bit of the ego of the writer is getting in and
| becoming the story.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| It's the "long form journalism" style; try to make
| journalism into "art", stretch the length of the content,
| and slap a minimalistic design with a fresh logo on the
| website in an effort to get a certain kind of audience.
| jryle70 wrote:
| Good story sells and can help reach a wider audience.
| Wouldn't that be valuable if you want people to learn from
| these failures?
|
| As an example, the wiki page for Falcon 1 rocket is jam
| packed with information [0] There is a recent book pretty
| much depicting the same period [1]. I already knew the
| details thanks to the wiki page. That doesn't mean I'd want
| to skip the book.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1
|
| [1] - https://www.harpercollins.com/products/liftoff-eric-
| berger?v...
| bumby wrote:
| The engineer in me completely agrees with you, but I have a
| feeling the non-fiction books are geared to be as much
| entertainment as they are enlightening. If you want to forgo
| the former, look for case studies and mishap investigations
| instead. The government oversight agencies have a lot
| available online. They are more dry but leave out the prosaic
| fluff
|
| E.g., https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/CAIB_Vol1.html
| teddyh wrote:
| The almost-autobiography of Scott Adams is literally titled "
| _How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the
| Story of My Life_ "
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway28203 wrote:
| Steve Martin's biography "Born Standing Up" is all about his life
| before he became a sensation. It's not engineering, but it
| details a lot of failures.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I find that whenever I post about my failures, my blog gets more
| comments and readers are just more engaged in general. They can
| relate to it! There's way too much "look what I can do!" out
| there. https://miscdotgeek.com/first-qrp-portable-ops-failure/
| datavirtue wrote:
| "Let there be more biographies of failures, people who were
| ignored by the world, whose ideas came before their time, whose
| great work was left in ruins."
|
| Alan 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.
| teddyh wrote:
| There's the _Museum of Failure_ : https://museumoffailure.com/
| IceHegel wrote:
| 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.
| mdip wrote:
| > but it's a bad fetish
|
| Thanks for that -- I couldn't agree more.
|
| 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".
| [deleted]
| agumonkey wrote:
| A good life is often a fine balance between pleasure risk
| taking, size of risk, and increase of good outcome/experiences.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| 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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > 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.
| mdip wrote:
| 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"
|
| ---
|
| [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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > 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.
| carbonguy wrote:
| 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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| 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.
| prepend wrote:
| 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)
| giantg2 wrote:
| How about biographies of mediocre people? I'm not really
| successful or a failure. Granted my professional and personal
| life is very boring. I don't see people wanting to read it, but
| it would be more accurate of the average experience than either
| end of the bell curve.
| mdip wrote:
| > How about biographies of mediocre people?
|
| I hear this from time to time and my own response to it is
| "that'd work about as well as a reality show based on your
| life".
|
| I think it's the best way to put it: A biography and reality TV
| cherry pick the most interesting parts of a person's life. I
| have had some interesting things happen to me -- some would fit
| well in a Reality TV show, others would fit well in a biography
| of successes (the failures fitting into the Reality TV space).
| We're not interested in biographies about average people --
| yes, average people always have a few stories that are worth
| hearing/sharing, but rarely have a life that is so filled with
| stories as to warrant someone else to want to catalogue them.
| Much like if you put a bunch of cameras in my house and filmed
| for a year you might end up with _minutes_ of Reality TV worthy
| entertainment, if you did a biography of a mediocre person, you
| 'd have no market (itself, mediocre). Heck, I'd be willing to
| bet that the majority of the time spent awake in the most
| interesting peoples' lives ends up being pretty mediocre, so
| it's something _everyone_ has knowledge of /experience with and
| probably not something worthy of "fun time".
|
| Aside from nobody wanting to buy it, it'd be hard to give away.
| Of the various reasons I have for reading and writing, using
| that skill to "do something I experience with the vast majority
| of my existence -- reading mail, preparing food, writing boier-
| plate, fixing various broken thing around the house -- and
| something, at that, which I don't particularly enjoy" is going
| to land very low on a long to-do list :) My house will become
| self-aware before I get to that task.
| schrijver wrote:
| I think a lot of literature is normal people writing about
| their normal lives--except that they happen to be particularly
| good at writing. A Dutch example is the writer J.J. Voskuil who
| wrote 5000 pages about his live as an office employee--and
| quite a few people read it too! But there must be many more
| examples.
| petercooper wrote:
| This post is more historical and highbrow than my usual tastes,
| but one of my favorite such reads in the tech space, at least,
| was _" Boo Hoo: A dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe"_
| about the development and failure of boo.com -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com - a British e-commerce
| business that burnt through $135m of VC money in 18 months. Worth
| a flick through if you get the chance, and it's almost like a
| period drama now given how 1998 was on the Internet compared to
| now.
| [deleted]
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I really enjoyed this story because it introduced me to an
| interesting person I had never heard about.
|
| I did not enjoy the last paragraph where it tried to shoehorn a
| bunch of bizarre lessons learned from this story, some of which
| didn't make sense and at least one seemed contradictory.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, the small treasure here is the story of Paul Otlet's ideas
| and work. The 'lessons learned', not so much.
|
| It's a sound concept to learn lessons from the failures of
| others, even, and perhaps especially those others who otherwise
| excel in their field. However, as this piece shows, it's easy
| to draw the wrong lessons from singular biographies.
|
| A better approach might be how failures are investigated,
| analyzed, and cataloged in various fields such as aviation and
| rock climbing. Those seemingly dry failure reports can make
| surprisingly fascinating reading, and the collections that
| bring them closer to data than anecdotes can provide powerful
| insights.
|
| So, maybe some kind of Institute For The Study of Career
| Disasters? Not entirely joking, it'd be genuinely helpful to,
| for example, go beyond just the "90% of all small businesses
| fail in X years", and provide actual analyzed insight (not just
| more anecdotes) into what makes the difference between success
| and failure, and what failures have good prospects of
| successful restarting (i.e., their death was more likely just
| bad luck /Force Majeure vs pilot error)...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| "Banvard's Folly"[1] is a good read about "people who were
| ignored by the world, whose ideas came before their time, whose
| great work was left in ruins".
|
| [1] https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Banvards-Folly-
| by-...
| [deleted]
| lawwantsin17 wrote:
| It's like saying, let there be less biased news. No one would
| read it. I often thought of storing the world's diaries or
| journals or sketchbooks or even the mundane blogs somewhere but
| no one would look at those bits. If the biographer is a great
| story teller, the subject is secondary to the worth of the
| biography, so even failures require greatness to tell their story
| right.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes. Also in sports journalism, I'm not really interested in the
| stories of people who finished first, second or third. I want to
| read about those who always finish 10th place or lower. Their
| struggle must be much more interesting.
| clairity wrote:
| as a basketball fan, i'm fascinated by the players barely
| hanging on to a roster spot on any given team. the storylines
| vary widely, from veteran there to teach the youngsters, to
| scrappy upstart who barely made the cut, to the sibling of a
| star player.
|
| in the nba, these are guys who are literally better than
| 99.9999% of the planet, and yet, they often seem to be treated
| like hangers-on rather than some of the best.
| duxup wrote:
| I like to think that's part of the appeal of Crash Davis and
| just the lifestyle of a minor league baseball team in Bull
| Durham.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_Durham
| ProAm wrote:
| You might really like this documentary on Netflix called
| "Losers" [1][2]
|
| "Storyline
|
| In a "winning is everything" society, how do we handle failure?
| This series profiles athletes who have turned the agony of
| defeat into human triumph."
|
| [1] https://www.netflix.com/title/80198306
|
| [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9817218/
| Igelau wrote:
| It's out of print, but if you can get your hands on a used
| copy, Rob Trucks' _Cup of Coffee_ might be right up your alley.
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/476455.Cup_of_Coffee
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| The 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.
| prepend wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It just felt so contrived to me, above and beyond what is
| normal for a TV show. These 6ish people are responsible for
| pretty much every revolution and success in the tech sector?
| Yeah fuck that. It felt like tech-bro worship, completely
| ignoring the same folks everyone else always ignores who tend
| to be the ones putting in the uninteresting work that keeps
| those types able to make their successes.
|
| But I watched every second of it with interest so I don't
| know what that says about me.
| as1mov wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| At least with Silicon Valley you get to laugh through the
| tears.
| jrmg wrote:
| 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.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Yeah, that's what's stopped me from continuing with the
| show so far, the characters are all insufferable. At least
| in Silicon Valley they're insufferable and hilarious.
| mikestew wrote:
| I grew up in that era, and maybe that's the problem, but it
| struck me as a poorly-done "Mad Men" for geeks. The nostalgia
| wasn't just tacked on, it was duct-taped and painted bright
| green to make sure you noticed. One scene that stands out in
| my mind was when the older business owner is ordering some US
| Robotics modems. As the scene cuts away from him with a phone
| in his hand: "Of _course_ I want the V.32!!!11! "
|
| I cringed so hard my shoulders ached for two days.
| chris_wot wrote:
| My 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 net with the result
| that we all cut sandwiches and queue in the rain for hours to
| watch him play the guitar without once dropping his plectrum down
| the hole. But this book is not for the likes of him. It is for
| us: we, the less than good, who spend hours shaking the plectrum
| out and impress only our mothers. Here, collected in one
| anthology for the first time, are the great names: Coates,
| Falconer, the abysmal Nuttall, the immortal Carolino, the dire
| Foster-Jenkins and McGonagall. People who were so bad in their
| chosen sphere of endeavour that their names live on as a beacon
| for future generations. _
|
| _I am sure that I am not the only one who cannot do things and
| the slightest investigation reveals that no one else can do
| anything either. This being the case, it seems to me that Mankind
| spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about the things
| he does well, when these few blades of grass are surrounded by
| vast prairies of inadequacy which are much more interesting._
|
| More and more I find myself agreeing with the author.
| lioeters wrote:
| "The funniest book of the year." - Irish Times
|
| 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.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| Reporting failure is not rewarded, unfortunately. Unless the
| incentives change, things won't change.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| 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 prevents people from even
| trying, but there's only so much of that form of self-help a
| person needs before they move on.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| If you read these 13 stories of failed software products that I
| collected you'll see that they have quite a lot in common:
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-f...
|
| Also, hanging out on forums for software entrepreneurs, I see
| people making the same standard mistakes again and again.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| can you tell me some of them?
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Not so many ways to _recover_ from failure and go on, though.
| crowbahr wrote:
| That's usually seen as success though.
|
| I'm fairly confident in saying no success has come without
| recovery from failure
| riebs wrote:
| The lesson is: failure is an indespensable step towards
| success, so we need not to gloss over failure as if it's
| taboo
| hinkley wrote:
| Perhaps your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to
| others.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| You can derive pattern though. You can learn about recuring
| weak links. And you can learn about solutions. Those are nice.
| MathematicalArt wrote:
| Actually, there are only finite ways to fail. It just happens
| to be a large number. Thinking of interactions of the world as
| propagations of signals and considering Kolmogorov-style
| descriptions of entropy would lead one to this conclusion of
| finiteness. See: "Kolmogorov complexity"
|
| Further, there are a finite number of patterns of failure,
| which is of course less than the number of absolute ways things
| could fail.
|
| The biggest detriment is not that things can fail, but that
| people get overwhelmed by believing that such things are
| infinite in scale.
| MathematicalArt wrote:
| As an example, there are only 16 categorical manifestations
| of software exceptions based on the following categories:
|
| - Synchronicity, Scope, Origin
|
| For _Synchronicity_ we have:
|
| - Synchronicity
|
| - Asynchronicity
|
| For _Scope_ we have:
|
| - Process-specific
|
| - Cross-process
|
| For _Origin_ we have:
|
| - Data origin
|
| - Temporal origin
|
| - External origin
|
| - Process origin
|
| Then you combine them such as "Synchronous-CrossProcess-
| Temporal Origin." The total is 16 ways. Even if something
| were somehow to be missing from this categorization scheme,
| it would only add a finite amount of possibilities to the
| permutations. Yet this taxonomy seems quite complete as is.
|
| See: "Error Handling in Process Support Systems" by Casati &
| Cugola.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| 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.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Reminds me of a quote from Tolstoy: "All happy families are
| alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
| staunch wrote:
| Like most proverbs, it only seems insightful and true if you
| _don 't_ think about what it is claiming at all.
| bumby wrote:
| > _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
| 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.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| There are categories of failure though. Those not only tell you
| where to look but give you starting points and substitutions.
|
| Substitute one set of problems for a better known set, and go
| from there. When engineering figures out how to solve the less
| known set, then you can do something "new".
|
| Today you might solve liquefaction by running pillars to
| bedrock and then design for earthquake damage caused by being
| anchored to bedrock.
|
| Some day you might use the Dutch trick of building houses that
| can float instead.
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