Ask HN: Are You a Failure? Do you have a failed business, career, or "general" venture? If so, I would appreciate it if you could provide a brief description or a link to the project, as well as answers to the following questions: What is the threshold for failure in your specific case? Was there something that implicitly caused the failure that you have now realised? Did it result in a net loss in terms of financial investment? |
If you met me you wouldn't be able to tell I'm this ruined because I can socialize without problems, I'm not addicted to substances and I'm generally well liked (people invite me to events, etc). I just had a string of bad coincidences and I got thrown out of society.
especially in Italy, I feel once you go off the tracks it's hard to get back in society.
- Not having my own business
- Not managing people at the moment or doing many leadership activities
- Not having 7 figures networth
- Being a homeowner, but still paying mortgage for the next 10 years
- Not being yet an excellent communicator, and oh boy, I did invest sooo many hours into this
We all feel like this sometimes, despite many achievements, it's part of being a human to desire for more, and admire others for making it much further than us.
Nevertheless, I think we need to appreciate what we've got going for us, no matter how small that thing is, because life is full of surprises and if I look back, many of my achievements were because I kept fighting no matter how unfavorable the odds were.
Another aspect is that time in our lives is limited. With my poor upbringing I've already spent countless hours dedicating myself to making more money and becoming more successful and optimizing for certain outcomes.
Is it worth to keep doing this endlessly, until I have no more days left, or just give me time to enjoy what I have now? That's why it's important for us to understand what we want out of life outside of what is expected from us. So removing a few items of your "life TODO list" and accepting to be a failure on them is okay.
Maybe all you needed was more summer days in a park and you are wasting your time looking to become more prestigious in your field of work.
Comprehending the price of success and allowing yourself to "be a failure" seems to be more interesting to me lately... also more challenging, as I've been trained to win. I took years of therapy to reach that conclusion, hope it helps you and calms your heart.
There are a lot of reasons why, but the one that is relevant to this thread is not grasping the following: not realizing that people who stand out in life are so adept at picking themselves up from failure, do it so rapidly and seamlessly, have had so much practice at doing it that you don't even recognize they do it.
Practice doing that. No matter how insignificant the task is. My threshold for failure now is not doing that, and not pushing myself in life tasks where it really matters to me personally. (Important to distinguish.) And I'm already seeing a difference.
Meanwhile, in comparison I failed more and more, and am still struggling to this day. Unlike you I am not broke, but I have severe health anxiety, as well as a lower intelligence level than most (at least when it comes down to academics). Needless to say, I'm a college dropout.
Oddly enough my friends are successful people. PhD holders, Business Owners, and people working in very respectable fields. I just wish I was a little like them, but alas.
We shall overcome!
God I feel that. I’m not one to usually be spiteful or jealous or others success but it’s getting really hard to see everyone’s wins while it seems like my life is collapsing now.
Basically I tried to hop onto the train several times and each time it felt like I shouldn't (so I didn't), yet at the same time these were the perfect opportunities to do so. If at any point in my life I'd decide to take it more seriously I might have been able to significantly increase my wealth. I wonder if the next best moment to do so is now.
Long story short, I'm sure I would have sold Bitcoin a looong time ago too, had I purchased it. Don't beat yourself up over it! And especially don't go after other silly high risk investments to make up for the FOMO!
Your post seems like a sophisticated advertisement, and it probably is.
Every now and then I see a job posting that piques my interest, but I'm largely content with my life and plan to run out the last 12 years of work with as little stress as possible. I could buckle down and make more money and retire sooner, but it really isn't worth the stress.
Doing great now, but I'm never giving a job any more effort than I'm comfortable giving. I killed myself with crazy hours for 3 years and had nothing to show for it.
Every successful person has failed at something, until they succeeded. That's how it works.
The premise of this post is very shaky.
- I have health issues that decrease my quality of life and leads to embarrassment. I can't work an in-person job anymore.
- I work freelance but have one client, and they're an miser - very tight with cash, so I barely meet my minimum needed income to cover expenses and save a little.
- Because of the above, I have been stuck in a very poor apartment for the last 8 months. Water leaks, air quality issues, noise, shit-water rings around the toilet base, dangerous electrical faults, etc
- Prior I was a late to graduate college student, then worked at a few corporate jobs, but it killed me to be a part of that corporate dysfunction I saw every day.
- I quit multiple jobs because they burned me out.
- I think I'm still burned out because my client is being a prick, not giving me the hours I need yet expects me to be available.
- I keep thinking about starting my own business, but no sustainable income = no business
- I have an addiction to THC edibles because it makes my situation feel less hopeless.
- I'm a complete idiot see above.
I know something like THC or drugs will be my downfall in life, I have a very addictive personality and often cannot escape addiction of any kind
A deeper root cause is perhaps a different kind of failure in the past. Several times in my career I've had the experience of appearing to have career success due to either initiating or being very early involved in successful projects. But this didn't lead to a stable or cushy career. Instead what happened each time is that after a few years the organizations in effect thanked me for my work and then pushed me aside due to various forms of back-room politics. I've never been fired but have been sidelined or driven to quit, each time with the people closest to what happened making it clear that what happened was deeply unfair and often not just involving me but also others being pushed out at the same time (and thus usually it wasn't strictly personal but involved wider organizational dysfunction).
Creating a company was my hope for an escape from this, to find peace and stability at last where good work done can build something for the long term, without the constant mental drain of wondering if there are people manoeuvering behind the scenes to tear it all down. Alas, you can see the key weakness: the company was created to satisfy my own needs, not because I saw an upswell of untapped customer demand. Creating successful companies is hard, especially in the software world where there are many competitors who are engage in market dumping with loose VC money for years or decades at a time. I chose not to raise (a deliberate choice, the option was there), because building a cash burner is easy but doesn't satisfy the goal of creating long term stability. So unless we pivot and get lucky with some new idea I'll probably have to return to the corporate world later this year or next and just get used to the idea that life will likely always be somewhat restless.
As for why, there’s too much to try and condense into a single HN comment, but my career started off on the wrong foot, and I was not really that “into” tech by the time I decided to make the jump from hobbyist to professional.
I would not say it was a net loss though, mostly because it didn’t cost me much and I did manage to snag some decent money finally by the end. No, the net loss is probably going to be in whatever I try to do next.
My main cause would be naivete. I believed all the stuff you're taught about the world in schools, by parents, etc. I believed the company when they told me stuff like they don't outsource or layoff. I'm wasn't aggressive enough to go after promotions or switch jobs. This resulted in me (dev, masters, 10+ yoe) living in a med-high COL making close to $100k with a family to support.
If you don't mind me asking, are you the only person in your household with a significant income & do you live in a country with social services for childcare?
I should have checked my partners more closely and also the product.
Looking back, I don’t understand it - but I stopped it then. Since then I’ve been fighting to start a promising venture with no success. Yet. It’s been a year and a half.
Now I work in IT for a private college. Pay sucks, benefits are great.
I tell a lot of stories to the young folks.
Thanks for posting
I love making things and solving problems, and the medium isn't as important as I once thought. I wish I had realised this earlier and perhaps I would be further along in my career and financially more successful, but life doesn't work like that I guess. I feel like I've done things in reverse as I often read about software engineers romanticising woodwork.
Didn't touch code or an editor again until 2009 or so, on accident so to speak trying to debug something for the boss. Found out a couple years later that I could get paid to code...had no idea. Then saw what all those kids at Stanford did and were making, and immediately felt like I missed the biggest opportunity of my life.
Oh well. Millions of what could have beens in life, no sense in wondering...
Yeah. Moving away from programming had an incredibly positive effect on my life. Almost everything that used to be awkward for me is easy now because of that one choice. Especially socialization, communication, speaking in public and with confidence, interpersonal skills in general. I really developed as a person in ways I don't think I would have otherwise.
I do miss that long deep thoughtful concentration though. Just thinking about software. The ideas present in the code and how they relate. Better ways to express them. Like a beautiful little puzzle coming together. A reflection of my mind. Twelve hours straight of nothing but this.
I'm glad I can afford to do this as a hobby now.
> Then saw what all those kids at Stanford did and were making, and immediately felt like I missed the biggest opportunity of my life.
Managed to avoid that particular dreadful feeling at least. Typical software engineer salaries that get posted here are truly ridiculous amounts of money in my country. Would be wonderful if I could make that much money working remotely from here but they're not gonna pay US salaries to non-US citizens. The exchange rate arbitrage is what makes them attractive to employers in the first place. I calculated how much they'd have to pay me for it to make sense to switch careers and was pretty happy with the result.
We're all just strangers on the internet, but I feel just like you do. It does discourage me. I've cried. I've been angry against people who have tried to help me out of pure altruism. It's hell. People who are lucky enough not to experience this will never understand what's like to have a mental breakdown on a Friday Night at 8pm, in which you question your entire life, while people your age are having the time of their lives partying and drinking.
No matter what you do, keep on trying. That's what I do. There are other things in life who make it worth living besides a salary and a career. Again, virtual hug.
Edit: If this sounds like an AI response I used ChatGPT to correct my grammar, I can barely write a coherent sentence on my own, even though I am a native speaker.
My latest failure was Wize, a mobile app that let anyone share their skills. It was a great idea, a bit early for its times (live streaming app before Instagram Live and Tik Tok), and it had a great start--we were in the top 20 at the Launch Hackathon, won an award from Google, and we had grammy award music teachers teaching on the platform. It failed because we pivoted too early. Building the two sided market was challenging, but instead of narrowing our focus to one topic, we decided to pivot to a "professional 1-1 coffee chat platform", and then again to a networking app–"Tinder for professionals." After going to a lot of conferences and meetups and talking to professionals, the resounding message we heard was that this domain was tough to dominate and it was going to be an uphill battle for us.
The biggest lesson I learnt in this is take advice with a pinch of salt. There are many successful apps today that resemble v1 (Maven), v2 (Intro), and v3 of Wize, and I think we would have been fine if we had persisted.
A more detailed write up of Wize, if you're interested: https://swamiphoto.com/wize
For example, I have a wife I couldn't imagine living without, and a child who fills my days with laughter. I've been married twice, so this isn't a case of not knowing what's out there, but appreciating what I have now. I have a nice enough house, my health, a vehicle, even a fun little dog.
So any vision of an alternate path would have to exclude all that. Maybe it would be better even. Maybe it would be far worse. I wouldn't trade what I have for a billion dollars, so that removes most of the financial incentives, I guess.
I realize that you are possibly rationalizing and grieving a loss, ie employing a "sour grapes" perspective, but programming is not an inexorable obstacle to interpersonal skills. On the contrary, it can be—and has been for the gross bulk of my career—a highly social activity not unlike relating anecdotes at cocktail party while playing the piano. It's a true shame, and pet peeve, that coders are painted all with the brush of introversion, seclusion, isolation and singular, misanthropic focus.
Only after I moved away from programming to a people-oriented profession did that change. I'm sure others will have different experiences and they're just as valid.
I don't think I have a sour grapes perspective at all. I'm proud of my choices. When I was writing that post it just became clear to me the consequences of those choices: what I gained and what I gave up. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like had I made different choices but overall I'm happy with the path my life took. I still consider myself a failed programmer but that's okay.
I just wanted to point out that to consider yourself a failure because you're "only" making 100k is a bit ridiculous. Going by that metric, 99% of the world's population is a failure. You're not a failure. You've just fallen through some hard times. Try your best, and you'll be out of them soon enough.
Virtual hug.
Ok, I'll put it a different way - houshold income is below the 50th percentile for the area. So by that measure, 50% of the world population is doing better than I am on a location-based relative measure.