Excellent advice

Also one needs to keep in mind that many startup "successes" are actually either negative or neutral outcomes. I know several "acquisitions" where the end result was investors making negative returns (receiving back pennies-on-the-dollar, if anything.) Meanwhile, the former CEO gets a cushy job as an advisor at the new place, announcements all over social media, etc. The actual companies barely had any revenue

Yep so called firesales. One of the companies I worked at sold so low all employees options were worthless. But they were in the news and they had been on Deloitte’s fastest growing startups for a few years (never reached profit).

This was the case with Rancher being acquired by SUSE. The financials were so out of whack for a normal acquisition but SUSE had a dire need to acquire a k8s company and Rancher wanted to exit and now the board has huge regrets over spending so much on something thats brought so little value to the business!

You have to get better friends, mate -:) Cause you're the average of five people you hang out with. My almost all friends are making millions from huge customer lists they've accumulated. Others have millions in revenue. Like I said before here, we programmers suck at marketing. And until we unsuck ourselves, we'll feel like giving up.

When can I buy your ebook?

There is no ebook. But there's my old email sequence I used to have back when I was writing to software developers. Contact me via email if you want me to put you on that list. It's got tons of amazing ideas.

Agreed, expectations are everything or at least very important to keep sanity in this area.

Reality is that big majority of startup-s do fail to "make it" 90% of time to even be self sustaining. Financially meaning that you pay from your pocket overall and the resources have to come somewhere, day job or whatever, making it very much overwhelming and can break even a strong man. Only small percentage out of those 10% actually make it to sustainable enough to live by.

Percentages can begin to rise on your favour after learning from failures but there is of course no guarantees, some domains are inherently much less forgiving or have fierce competition. It is important to resarch and understand the landscape you're going into.

If you realise your odds then mindset starts to get clearer, you know what you risk losing and accept that loss is likely, you still put enough effort to win but don't set your mind so deep that everything collapses with the project.

It might be contrary to some suggestions that you have to put everything into startup to have a chance but that is also correct imo, you do have to be able to invest all your available time on the project. Keeping in mind that the project is not absolute everything in life and being able to walk away at right time as to not sunk endless resources to unfruitful endeavour keep you healthier.