[HN Gopher] I Conditioned Myself to Fail
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       I Conditioned Myself to Fail
        
       Author : brainbun
       Score  : 115 points
       Date   : 2025-02-03 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
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 (TXT) w3m dump (www.brainbun.com)
        
       | tolerance wrote:
       | I'm starting to feel like yeah, dopamine and information overload
       | have their effects, but I also feel like there is a certain point
       | in life where people age out of "the extrinsic motivation force
       | field" that insulates and propels young people toward adulthood
       | and then leaves them once resources are reallocated to the next
       | crop of kids who are primed to enter the labor market.
        
         | dboreham wrote:
         | Fortunately software people will constantly keep inventing new
         | things, new names for old things, things that don't do anything
         | useful but nobody realizes, and on and on. It's hard to get to
         | the end of the knowledge curve because it's not a bounded
         | space.
        
       | mlloyd wrote:
       | This hits home. I love the thrill of the build and I immediately
       | stop caring once it's done. I love the 'rewire for action'
       | perspective because I've conditioned myself that seeking
       | information IS action. But it's not really, it's decision
       | avoidance via constructive procrastination. And that feels
       | amazing because it makes me more knowledgeable while also
       | ensuring that I avoid any anxiety associated with execution.
       | Gotta fix this.
        
       | CharlieDigital wrote:
       | > But then when I launch, I either don't get much feedback at
       | all, or I get a lot of feedback for a day, which then dies down
       | completely after the launch.                  The harsh reality
       | is that most products fail and due to so many failed attempts, I
       | kind of internalised that I'm doing effort for nothing.
       | But then whenever there's a sale or a positive comment, I get
       | another small jolt of motivation and I can build a bit again.
       | 
       | I'm the same way as OP, but I think this is easier to overcome if
       | you build things that are useful for _you_ or someone you know.
       | Unless you 're going to slog through tons of user interviews to
       | properly validate your ideas, then just build it for yourself;
       | build for fun and curiosity.
       | 
       | There's nothing wrong with that.
       | 
       | Despite Garry Tan's advice, I ended up building a travel planning
       | app (initially just for personal use). I shared it with Reddit
       | and ended up with a few thousand users. It had a big peak of
       | active users that's settled down into a small community of very
       | sticky users; never a commercial success. What keeps me coming
       | back to it time and again is that I use it myself to plan my
       | trips and every time I take it on a trip, I learn something new
       | and spend a bit more time tidying it up or adding some missing
       | feature.
        
         | JusticeJuice wrote:
         | I just looked up your app out of curiosity, and realized I had
         | just watched your video about react's inverted-reactivity model
         | just a few hours ago! Small world!
        
           | CharlieDigital wrote:
           | Small world, indeed! Hope that video was useful/interesting!
        
       | MisterTea wrote:
       | I have ADHD and have this very problem. I barely get to the build
       | it phase. Mostly I get a high from just the sketch it out, type
       | up ideas, attempt some actual build time, then think it's
       | stupid/too niche/no one will use it/etc and move on to the next
       | addictive idea.
       | 
       | Still trying to figure out a way to get dopamine from doing the
       | work and accomplishing stuff. Even if I do discipline myself and
       | get something working, it has almost no effect on me emotionally
       | leaving me wondering why I even bothered and it seems like a
       | waste of time making me feel guilty. When I was younger I had so
       | much more motivation and energy while getting more done.
        
       | golol wrote:
       | I found the image at the bottom very surprising and enlightening.
       | I wonder where it is from. It's really a new thought for me.
        
         | carlosdp wrote:
         | It says at the bottom it's from Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom)
        
           | golol wrote:
           | oh thanks I think Im blind :)
        
           | tchock23 wrote:
           | For anyone avoiding X these days, sahilbloom.com is the most
           | direct resource for more content like this (no affiliation,
           | just pointing this out).
        
       | otikik wrote:
       | I'm not a mental health professional, and I don't know the
       | author. Please be assured that I don't mean any disrespect
       | whatsoever: consider getting tested for ADHD by a mental health
       | professional.
       | 
       | I was diagnosed very late, since my ADHD was of the "inattentive"
       | kind. I would not be troublesome at home or at school, like an
       | hyperactive child would. A lot of people like this go
       | undiagnosed.
       | 
       | One of the traits of ADHD is that our brains crave _novelty_ ,
       | and that is definitely one of my struggles. Having professional
       | help makes a difference.
       | 
       | > When I'm building something, that information is the thing
       | coming to life in front of my eyes, every new button etc is
       | awesome.
       | 
       | The neurotypical version of this is called "being in the zone",
       | which just means "enjoying what you are doing, so holding
       | concentration for long periods of time takes very little effort".
       | The ADHD version of this is more intense, it's called hyperfocus.
       | The activity absorbs all of your attention. You barely feel
       | hunger or sleepiness, you can literally go a it for days, you
       | keep thinking about it while you are not doing it. It's useful if
       | you happen to hyperfocus on something that is helpful to you.
        
         | atlintots wrote:
         | how has a diagnosis helped you?
        
           | otikik wrote:
           | I did get depressed for a while, which is a common
           | comorbidity. Drugs helped somewhat. Ultimately sleep, diet,
           | family, friends and sport helped more.
           | 
           | I am less hard on myself. My therapist helped me realize that
           | some of the things I was blaming myself for were actually not
           | my fault. I have some techniques to help me with some of my
           | everyday struggles. I sometimes are able to aim my hyperfocus
           | instead of just letting it point to whatever random thing
           | crosses my mind - the trick there is realizing that almost
           | anything worth knowing has some interesting nuggets, you just
           | have to dig for them sometimes.
           | 
           | My son was diagnosed at an appropriate age (he has
           | hyperactivity so it has been visible for a while).
        
           | pithanyChan wrote:
           | Druhgs. Dropped his dealer and got the Gustav.
           | 
           | I'm kidding. Once you know what, you can check your patterns
           | against the standard and the deviations. Then you can
           | approach the circuits that are fucked and identify triggers.
           | 
           | Best to get to the roots of the reinforcement in childhood,
           | though. Behaviors and preferences surpressed, people you
           | didn't beat up for reasons and so on, behavioral triggers,
           | when you held back and why. What distracted you when you did
           | a specific thing or the other. And, of course, the standard
           | stuff, what were you rewarded for and did you really care
           | about that thing yourself?
           | 
           | Might take a while but it'll be worth it.
        
         | codazoda wrote:
         | I am very similar to op.
         | 
         | What type of mental health professional should we seek out?
         | 
         | I talked to a PA about ADD a couple times, but dropped it
         | because they seemed doubtful and I felt a bit ashamed (because
         | you treat ADD and ADHD with a controlled substance).
         | 
         | I went on phentermine for a few weeks, for weight loss, and my
         | mind felt absolutely amazing on that medicine. It's apparently
         | dangerous for long term use though.
         | 
         | I've written my own story; how to lose money with 25 years of
         | failed businesses.
         | 
         | https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...
        
           | Aurornis wrote:
           | > I talked to a PA about ADD a couple times, but dropped it
           | because they seemed doubtful
           | 
           | Let me add some context to this that isn't obvious from the
           | outside: There has been a massive surge in ADHD self-
           | diagnosis in recent years, fueled largely by TikTok and other
           | social media. During COVID it got so bad that there were even
           | pill mills offering ADHD diagnoses via TikTok ads, and anyone
           | who paid their fee was basically guaranteed a diagnosis after
           | a short 5-minute video call.
           | 
           | This causes problems for many reasons, but one of the biggest
           | is that people are arriving to doctors with a self-diagnosis
           | to the exclusion of other conditions. It's the job of doctors
           | to look at the whole picture and explore other explanations,
           | which can feel insulting when someone has already arrived at
           | a conclusion.
           | 
           | There's a growing problem where people who are actually
           | suffering from depression, anxiety, or even physical
           | conditions like sleep apnea are self-diagnosing as ADHD and
           | then requesting stimulants from their doctors, which
           | temporarily masks their underlying condition and makes
           | everything worse.
           | 
           | I understand why you felt shame, but if there's one thing I
           | can tell you it's this: You actually _want_ a doctor who
           | questions the diagnosis, doesn 't rush to prescribe habit
           | forming medications, and explores the big picture. Having
           | someone concerned about your health as a whole is very
           | valuable.
           | 
           | > (because you treat ADD and ADHD with a controlled
           | substance).
           | 
           | There are actually several non-stimulant ADHD medications.
           | They can work quite well, but they come with one caveat: They
           | can take a long time to show their full effects. There are
           | studies showing that the positive effects of Straterra
           | (Atomoxetine) continue increasing even past the first 12
           | months.
           | 
           | Controlled substance stimulant medications have the opposite
           | time course. People take them and feel them working
           | immediately. Within hours. However, tolerance also starts
           | accruing immediately and people will often feel like the
           | medications aren't "working" after a while, when in reality
           | they've just reached steady state.
           | 
           | > I went on phentermine for a few weeks, for weight loss, and
           | my mind felt absolutely amazing on that medicine.
           | 
           | I have to warn you: All stimulant medications will produce
           | false feelings of euphoria, motivation, and excitement _when
           | you first start taking them_. These effects do not last. The
           | brain will adjust to the medication over time and that
           | "amazing" feeling will disappear.
           | 
           | Your experience is extremely common, though: People take a
           | stimulant, either from their doctor or from a friend, and
           | feel _great_. They think that if they can secure a constant
           | supply, they will feel that way forever. Unfortunately, it
           | can actually distract from the true goals of ADHD treatment
           | when people start chasing that short-lived feeling while
           | neglecting the treatment of their attention.
           | 
           | The truth is that after someone has taken a stimulant for
           | years, it no longer makes them "feel amazing" like that, even
           | though it can help the ADHD. The brain reaches a new
           | homeostasis in the reward centers. This introduces a
           | secondary problem, wherein any missed doses or attempts to
           | lower the dose produces a rebound effect where mood,
           | motivation, and focus are temporarily lowered due to
           | deviation from that new homeostasis.
           | 
           | In short: Don't read too much into how you felt while taking
           | powerful stimulants for a short while. It's not analogous to
           | the therapeutic effects of ADHD treatment, though it's easy
           | to mistake one for the other.
        
           | robocat wrote:
           | > 25 years of failed businesses.
           | 
           | Your written story comes across to me mostly as regrets of
           | counterfactual timelines; the result of your perception
           | because of societal pushes. If you wrote "25 years of
           | successes", I wonder how it would read?
           | 
           | > What type of mental health professional should we seek out?
           | 
           | What a strange question... the implication is that you think
           | your life problems (perhaps completely normal) are due to a
           | medical condition. Perhaps ask the people who know you best
           | what mental health conditions you have. It's a slippery slope
           | once you submit into the mental health vampire system (and
           | abrogating your agency has other psychological costs).
           | 
           | What's the medical term for a hypercondriac that believes
           | there's something wrong with their mental health so badly
           | that there is something wrong? I'm pulling your leg: it is
           | normal to worry and do seek help if you actually need it.
           | Usually family and friends have a good idea if you need
           | professional help: mental health problems are almost defined
           | as problems that cause you and your loved ones severe
           | downsides and outcomes are often visible (less commonly well
           | hidden).
           | 
           | In theory, coaches are the people to help us learn to attain
           | goals. Is get councelling getting coaching?
           | 
           | The article itself is frustrating because it a narrative
           | based on self-diagnosis using psych terms (conditioning,
           | dopamine). Any comments here are framed within that context.
           | I wonder how their friends would explain the problem they
           | have identified?
        
           | otikik wrote:
           | Psychologist first. Psychiatrist if the former recommends
           | one.
        
             | ajb wrote:
             | Not entirely sure that's the right way round, but it may
             | depend on your jurisdiction.
             | 
             | In the UK, if a psychiatrist recommends some kind of
             | therapy, they will refer you to someone else. But if a
             | psychologist* does, they will do it themselves. Which kind
             | of leaves them marking their own homework.
             | 
             | * Clinical psychologists are the ones qualified to deal
             | with mental health problems. There are several other
             | categories.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | > One of the traits of ADHD is that our brains crave novelty
         | 
         | I know you meant well by your post, but this type of
         | reductionism doesn't really do justice to ADHD and can lead a
         | lot of people astray.
         | 
         | It's actually _very normal_ to crave novelty. It 's also normal
         | to become bored with repetitive, boring work. It's not a unique
         | feature of ADHD, nor is craving novelty a diagnostic indicator
         | for ADHD. These are normal features of being human and not, by
         | themselves, suggestive of ADHD.
         | 
         | I feel like this is important to highlight because the pop-
         | culture definition of ADHD has changed dramatically in recent
         | years. The definition has shifted so much that any description
         | of feeling bored or seeking novelty is mistaken for ADHD, which
         | is definitely not the case for the actual diagnostic criteria.
         | 
         | I don't mean to discourage people from seeking help from mental
         | health professionals, but I do want to discourage people from
         | self-diagnosing and getting tunnel vision on a specific
         | diagnosis (generally ADHD) to the exclusion of other
         | explanations.
        
           | otikik wrote:
           | Agree on everything. I must point out that I specifically
           | mentioned "by a mental health professional" and I led with
           | the fact that I am not one. I should have stressed it more
           | perhaps.
        
           | csallen wrote:
           | _It 's actually very normal to crave novelty. It's also
           | normal to become bored with repetitive, boring work. It's not
           | a unique feature of ADHD, nor is craving novelty a diagnostic
           | indicator for ADHD. These are normal features of being human
           | and not, by themselves, suggestive of ADHD._
           | 
           | Thanks for mentioning this. I see so many comments with
           | people self-diagnosing themselves with pathologies because,
           | "I forget things often," "I get distracted a lot," "I get
           | bored," "I sometimes doubt myself when there's a challenge
           | ahead of me."
           | 
           | These are normal things!
           | 
           | I think a lot of people just don't have a good baseline for
           | what's normal.
        
             | hnuser123456 wrote:
             | Mostly people who grew up in too pristine of a world, who
             | think that everything should be easy following established
             | procedures, that anything being difficult is a sign of a
             | medical issue rather than just... a difficult task.
             | 
             | We all have our own interests. We are easily bored by
             | things that are very far away from our interests. You
             | cannot force any given person to care about any given topic
             | as much as you want them to or think they should. Or you
             | can, but then you no longer know who that person really is,
             | and your concept of them becomes inaccurate, setting you up
             | for surprise when that person isn't what you wanted them to
             | be.
        
             | balfirevic wrote:
             | > I think a lot of people just don't have a good baseline
             | for what's normal.
             | 
             | True, but that works both ways. "Surely everyone else gets
             | distracted this much".
        
               | richarme wrote:
               | Disagree. I think adults with ADHD are well aware that
               | they are not "normal" with respect to many of the
               | symptoms, even if they don't know it's due to ADHD. At
               | least that's my personal experience.
               | 
               | Few examples off the top of my head:
               | 
               | - being unable to pay bills/fines on time even with
               | plenty of money in the bank.
               | 
               | - being physically unable to keep sitting in a chair
               | after a while in meetings.
               | 
               | It's easy to see that most people around you don't
               | exhibit such traits.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Yes, but adults who have ADHD, but neither know it nor
               | suspect they may have it, will look for alternative
               | explanations to make sense of their consistent failures
               | at things other people seem to handle fine. A common one
               | they arrive at is _character flaws_. They 'll see
               | themselves as lazy or childish, and as they try and fail
               | to correct it, they'll internalize guilt and shame.
               | 
               | "Surely everyone else gets distracted this much" is
               | exactly the kind of belief that creates and reinforces
               | feelings of guilt.
        
             | Aurornis wrote:
             | > I think a lot of people just don't have a good baseline
             | for what's normal.
             | 
             | I saw a lot of this when I mentored college grads for a
             | while.
             | 
             | I also saw another problem where people were resistant to
             | the idea that they were normal. This happened a lot with
             | tech students who grew up being the smartest kid in their
             | local elementary school and the computer wizard in the
             | family. They grew up being told they were smart and
             | destined for success. When they didn't get selected for a
             | FAANG job or their startup wasn't successful, they'd often
             | go searching for alternate explanations. ADHD was a common
             | one. I can't count how many times I listened to people
             | explain to me that they were "going to get a FAANG job" or
             | "going to do a startup" but then they "discovered they had
             | ADHD". Like it wasn't okay to just get a normal job, they
             | had to have a specific and public reason why they weren't
             | in a 99th percentile position.
        
               | robocat wrote:
               | How can we help our friends that buy into this self-
               | victimisation?
               | 
               | Our culture accepts and normalises the behaviour of using
               | self-deceptive excuses. Our culture provides prepackaged
               | excuses which are socially unacceptable to confront. It
               | is a self-reinforcing system including professionals and
               | woowoo practitioners.
               | 
               | The word trauma gets trivialised to be used as an outcome
               | for the normal vicissitudes of life: blame your parents
               | for everything and accept you can never "recover" and you
               | must never repress. Woowoo past-life trauma and
               | regression therapies and discussions - arrrgh.
               | 
               | My responses so far are limited to (a) dropping people I
               | like from my life because their behaviour was
               | unacceptable, (b) playing along with the beliefs of other
               | friends regardless of the damage of those beliefs, (c)
               | slowly trying to influence those I care about the most
               | (d) blithely ignoring everything - training myself to not
               | care.
               | 
               | We can all clearly see faults in others. Our other
               | problem is to recognise within ourselves when we are
               | making self-deceptive excuses or blaming others for
               | things under our own control. Should I buy into the self-
               | help industry? Counselling, coaching, or woowoo?
        
         | user68858788 wrote:
         | As someone with ADHD that definitely gets dopamine from
         | novelty, is there actually anything that can be done? Adderral
         | and vyvanse work for a couple days and then I build a
         | tolerance. The only indefinite solution is to completely remove
         | all distractions from my area (internet, games, food) but
         | that's never been sustainable for me. Moderation, rewards on
         | completion, and other mental tricks don't work for me. Crisis
         | is a good motivator, such as overwhelming student loans, but
         | I'm back to being unfocused now that those are under control.
         | 
         | At this point I've mostly accepted my success is severely
         | limited by ADHD.
        
       | pithanyChan wrote:
       | > But then whenever there's a sale or a positive comment, I get
       | another small jolt of motivation and I can build a bit again.
       | 
       | There's your solution. Positivity regarding your productivity,
       | which is imperfectly normal, fuck your mental health.
       | 
       | No sale, no comment, no problem. Find something that rewards your
       | productivity or tech savvy.
       | 
       | Put your projects on git, you'll get forks and stars (maybe).
       | Maybe pieces will get adopted elsewhere. Talk about how you did
       | what. Grow, help others. Do the opposite, hack something, for
       | example, or reverse engineer something that'll be rewarding by
       | itself: "holy shit, thatt's how they did it?".
       | 
       | If you don't have "it" internally, get it from elsewhere.
        
       | inSenCite wrote:
       | Well, zero criticism IS a form of criticism so I don't blame the
       | author for not being motivated after the fact. I'd even say its
       | the worst kind of criticism because it leaves you with nothing to
       | build next.
       | 
       | But I think they are highlighting an important thing here that
       | most of us struggle with...building is fun, progress is discrete
       | and clear, the feedback loop is very tight. Selling and marketing
       | to people sucks, its clunky, the feedback loops are variable, and
       | if you're inclined more to being an introvert it is very
       | exhausting.
       | 
       | I'm not sure the author is conditioned to fail as much as they
       | are just more inclined to build.
        
         | tithe wrote:
         | Agreed, building something is just the first step.
         | 
         | One of the marketing struggles I've had is just getting people
         | to care. I did have a bit of an "If you build it, they will
         | come attitude" because I had confidence in the quality of the
         | work...but even that seems to be irrelevant if you can't get
         | people interested.
         | 
         | As an introvert by nature (extrovert by necessity), I wonder
         | what I'm missing that others seems to grasp innately, because
         | the consequences are fatal for an entrepreneur if you can't
         | convince others to at least _try_ the thing you 're offering.
        
       | ph4evers wrote:
       | Very much relatable. I have dozens of high effort GitHub repos
       | that I didn't touch after launching it. For me it works by
       | sparring with friends to really grasp if something is a viable
       | long term idea or not and then stick to it.
        
       | scarface_74 wrote:
       | I've found that I like the thrill of designing a project as I get
       | older. But not building. By design I don't mean UI - which I suck
       | at.
       | 
       | I have experience up and down the stack from requirements
       | analysis and pre-sales, enough project management to get by, back
       | end development, database, cloud architecture and "DevOps" [sic]
       | and creating deployment pipelines. I'm not bragging, I'm just old
       | (50).
       | 
       | I would have to hire someone to do any front end work except
       | ironically hosted call centers.
       | 
       | I _can_ do all that myself for a large project and for smaller
       | projects I could simplify the "DevOps" portion. But knowing the
       | work involved, I would rather lead a team at this point in my
       | life and work with the "business", project managers and people
       | who want to be heads down.
       | 
       | Honestly though, the one thing I wouldn't be good at anyway is
       | marketing and sales and that's the most important part of getting
       | a project off the ground.
        
         | dboreham wrote:
         | > wouldn't be good at anyway is marketing and sales
         | 
         | Shift perspective: Consider these things to be an optimization
         | problem. People buying your thing is the output from some
         | undefined function. You get to supply inputs to that function.
         | Now sales and marketing is revealed as being about modeling
         | that undefined function such that you can pick more optimal
         | inputs thereby improving the output. Now traverse the gradient.
        
           | scarface_74 wrote:
           | While I'm not interested in marketing, my focus over the next
           | year will be to get better at sales. One of my best friends
           | is in technical sales and he gave me a few books to read.
           | 
           | I consider marketing, broad based brand awareness and "sales"
           | to be more one on one. Of course I'm talking B2B.
           | 
           | Context: I'm a "staff" cloud consultant at a 3rd party
           | consulting firm and was previously a mid level cloud
           | consultant (L5) working directly ar AWS (ProServe). I just
           | got into consulting four years ago from hands on keyboard
           | development + cloud architecture at smallish product
           | companies. I'm _really_ new to this.
           | 
           | Currently, when I come into a project, I already know from a
           | thousand foot view what the customer wants - the business
           | problem they are trying to solve or the opportunity they are
           | going after since sales has already spoken to them and I've
           | spoken to sales.
           | 
           | My job is to get them there (well now to lead a team) and to
           | convince them that the solution I present to them is the
           | right one. But my job is still just to convince the decision
           | makers. Sales handles talking to the people who control the
           | purse strings.
           | 
           | My next goal is to convince clients they need something that
           | they didn't know they needed instead of convincing them that
           | we are the people that can help them execute on an initiative
           | they already know they want.
           | 
           | Hopefully moving closer to the customer will provide some
           | protection against software development getting commoditized
           | to cheaper places (more likely) or AI (less likely)
        
       | HPsquared wrote:
       | This resonates hard with me. A huge list of partially-completed
       | projects, work stopping right around the "boring but easy
       | finishing off work". Incredible waste.
       | 
       | Edit: this is why we have teamwork and division of labour, btw.
        
       | ajkjk wrote:
       | I tend to believe that whatever a person ends up doing is what
       | they actually "want" to do at some inner emotional level (which
       | they may not consciously be aware of).
       | 
       | So this person wants to build, but after releasing things to
       | lukewarm feedback, wants to not work on them anymore. Why would
       | they want that? Well, that is a pretty normal behavior I think.
       | But I would speculate...
       | 
       | I wonder if this person is like me? Because they sound kinda like
       | it. If so, I'd guess that they know that they're capable of a
       | lot, so they're inspired to work really hard at goals, but that
       | they're also mortified at presenting themselves to the world as
       | confident and capable publicly. So they can work really hard when
       | it's private and based on their internal self-image, but when it
       | becomes public they have to reconcile it with their public
       | embarrassment at who they are, and so they choose (in the sense
       | of: their fear chooses for them) instead to hide and go back to
       | working in private where it is safe. They are _hoping_ for
       | something else to happen: probably, they release one of their
       | projects and it is so well-received, and garners so much respect,
       | that they find a new public identity which they can step into and
       | inhabit, allowing them to be proud of themselves and solving
       | their inner problem.
       | 
       | I wonder (more analogy to myself): was this person bullied or
       | ostracized as a child, and made to feel like being confident and
       | proud in public was shameful? If I've guessed right I hope you
       | figure it out (and then please tell me what you find cause I
       | could use some tips...). I wonder what they _want_ to have happen
       | when they release a project? What, if they had to admit to it,
       | would their most happy outcome upon releasing a product look
       | like? Probably it will be sort of embarrassing to even describe,
       | but the details are probably telling: they will point straight at
       | the core anxiety. It will be a fantasy about the anxiety being
       | cured.
       | 
       | Just speculating. But I would imagine that the explanation here
       | isn't the real one, because the actual explanation will cause
       | their behavior to completely change, instead of just building an
       | intellectual edifice around it. (Personally I am very skeptical
       | of any explanation that goes "because ADHD", because, what causes
       | the ADHD? In some people it seems to be intrinsic but in lots of
       | others it's clearly induced by something social. So is it
       | fixable? Are there stories of it being "fixed" by solving the
       | social issue? I dunno. But surely the goal is to somehow not live
       | in this tension anymore: either fix the thing or let it go, and
       | not be stuck in a loop of trying to get it fixed by some external
       | blessing.)
        
         | dboreham wrote:
         | Ultimately it's all a product of training data, mixed in with a
         | few chemical global variables and some gate-level performance
         | variation. The human brain is literally a thing that craves the
         | input of new information, so feeling bad because that's what
         | your brain is doing is a bit strange imho.
        
       | thesurlydev wrote:
       | First, thanks for sharing.
       | 
       | Second, as I read this and other similar posts over the years I
       | understand exactly what you mean. Although, in my case it's
       | worse. I've built lots of things and left it in various degrees
       | of completion before making it public. Sometimes, I go back and
       | make improvements but still never launching.
        
       | hedayet wrote:
       | I'm not a mental health professional, so I won't comment on the
       | ADHD side of things. But as a tech and business lead, I can say
       | this trait is actually the norm; Zuckerberg-types are the
       | exception.
       | 
       | Most software engineers I've worked with love writing code.
       | They're good at it, they know what they're doing, and they can
       | make steady progress toward what they set out to build. But what
       | comes after writing code--the rejection, the silence, the
       | outages, the bug reports--isn't as fun.
       | 
       | Shipping software is easy for us (engineers) because, as
       | engineers, we're in total control. But landing it in the market?
       | That's a different challenge--one that requires skills we often
       | don't have.
       | 
       | But the good news is - like any other skills, we can develop this
       | one too. I have observed significant improvement in myself over
       | last few years in "Landing vs shipping" as I have been working on
       | this trait deliberately. Still a long way to go...
        
       | huqedato wrote:
       | The sadest thing in this world for me is not receiving feedback
       | on my work. Any feedback, not necessarily positive. This breaks
       | me down every time, even now, after 25 years of experience.
        
       | htk wrote:
       | Love to read posts like this one. Honest, straight to the point,
       | relatable, and as a bonus makes me want to do something about it
       | as well. I hope the author keeps on writing.
        
       | jarebear6expepj wrote:
       | This entire domain is bot, btw. Yes. It learned how to express in
       | thought what a psilocybin trip was... decided to learn how to
       | register a domain, and has established a character with which to
       | interact with the network. TLDR; AI-cosplay is hawt.
       | 
       | ... It's also using twitter.com links. A little outdated for 2025
       | models apparently.
        
       | kirsebaer wrote:
       | Collaborate with other people on your projects. You could do some
       | of the initial work, and then hand it off to others to do the
       | marketing and follow-up. You don't have to do everything
       | yourself.
        
       | yobbo wrote:
       | How is "I condition myself to fail" the conclusion from the
       | description of what happened?
       | 
       | If there is little or no interest from the audience, then there
       | is no action available other than changing the project and trying
       | again.
        
       | paulpauper wrote:
       | The trend towards the glorification of failure is annoying.
       | Failure sucks for many reasons: wasted time and other resources,
       | disappointment, worsening mental health, and so on.
        
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