Re:Ask HN: How do you deal with being “nearly immensely succ...
by graderjs on Saturday January 01, 2022 @04:15PM
(#29762893)
I think the imagination is important..."merely imagine yourself to have been on the brink of being."...is an important thing too. Helps keep your motivation when everyone else thinks you're crazy, and only you can see the path. That's what you need sometimes--you need to be the only person who can see the path, because that's sometimes what you will be. Nobody in the people you talk to or know will be able to support your belief in this...because to their perspective, it's not viable. That's the difference between you and them. One difference. The ability to keep going. So it's not "merely imagining", the imagination is all important. It looms over everything else, and guides. That and your emotions, what you really want. To take you there, that's the only motivation you can really count on: imagination and emotion. Otherwise you won't make it. You'll give up. That's what I think...so those things, imagination and emotion are to be cherished and protected. Like PG's "embryonic" startups, or anyone who knows the feeling of trying to protect a fragile little flame of a thing (an idea, a being, whatever), before it's ready to take on the world without such nurturing protection.
So as well as tempering yourself with reality...which hopefully some of the points above may assist with--you got to keep the flame alive. Be the keeper of the flame. Of your own dream. That's what you need to succeed, one ingredient.
I think without the imagination and emotion emphasis, focusing just on the "reality" and statistical aspects is too dour. Good luck! Whatever you choose to do, good luck !
I don't know--but maybe the following ideas can help add some more pieces of the picture to what you're going through...or maybe add some perspective. But I'm sorry...this will probably come across as some self-indulgent, brow-beating, gonad-breaking, criticism--an easy chance for one person to take a pot shot at someone else vulnerable, in their moment of Ask HN need--just to make themselves feel better. So I'm sure you'll think it's better to take advice from an actual bona fide "immensely successful" person...than from some random unknown commenter on HN who is probably in a similar situation to you "success"-wise...but who perhaps simply feels differently than you about it.
Realize the importance of consistent, sustained, strategic execution, and that it's not where you start (in your case, your idea, your inspiration, your initial implementations) it's where you choose to go from there: in other words, the long trail of a constant succession of choices that generate those results. Almost goes without saying that persistence is a necessary condition of the above.
Correct your perspective: you weren't "inches from immense success", you were a long, and not-straight-line path, made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny choices, from what you merely imagine yourself to have been on the brink of being.
Also, realize the long tail, comprising two insights: 1) Your idea, or even implementations, did not make you unique, nor did it make you alike to the people who executed with a "completed" realized idea that was "very close" to yours; and 2) For every 1 human who succeeds "immensely" with an idea, there are a-to-the-n other humans on Earth who had the same idea (within some measure of "idea similarity"), for each n in 1..steps-away-from-completion and for some a (maybe related to the idea).
Finally, consider why you might be having this reaction...what would lead you to the compelling-yet-erroneous notion (and correlated emotional agony response) that success was as easy as a few steps from where you were (idea, and code), to where those you see are ("immense success")? Could it be maybe--possibly have--something to do with how the media, Tech Media in particular, lionizes and simplifies the lives of "The Founders" into easily digestible, almost-straight-line mythological narratives? Might it be that, somehow? This mythologization serves a purpose, no doubt--surely it inspires successive generations of founders to pursue those fleeting paper riches, like wise men pointing up at a star--but it's not tonic for the long road, nor for the long dark night of the soul, that presumably many on the Path so often face. On that path, there are deeper secrets to learn, but maybe the tech media does not have the strength to reveal them. So... maybe settle for your miracle (of inspiration, and experience) and learn for next time, for the road for you ahead.