mattman

I'm blown away and truly humbled by the compassion, advice, encouragement, and offers of help in all of your responses and emails. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I feel validated, empowered, and now more hopeful that things could eventually work themselves out. It looks like there is a way to fix all this and I've now gotten some better perspective on where I could start.

I'll use this thread as an action plan to get things going. I've already read some responses a few times and will make sure to review all comments and sincerely think through every suggestion. Please give me a few days to process everything as well as to follow up either via comments or email.

Thanks again, to everyone, for being there for me. You guys are unbelievably awesome.

I'd like to think that I've thought about this, but almost every interest of mine involves something that in no way shape or form includes being around for my family. But you are right in the fact that I need to focus more on what I find enjoyment in / take pride in.

Yes, a lot actually. South America is on my radar for this very reason. My thinking is that if employers, clients, or other startups aren't seeing obvious/immediate value in my collective experiences, that companies/projects in other parts of the world might. I'll look around HN to see what others have done in this area.

Really good point, how do I go about achieving this? I'd like to believe that I have the skills, insights, strength, and endurance for all these things, but yet, I have to accept the reality that so far it has gotten me nothing. I'm open to change/learning - if my family weren't an issue I'd go anywhere in the world to learn, reboot, start over, grow, etc.

Yes I actually agree with you. I should have provided better context: 9-5 meaning that people here are mostly content with what they have. They aren't out and about in the city looking to build new ventures, take risks on big, unproven ideas, etc.

Great direct advice and very true, but tough to stick to in all cases. Thanks.

Thanks for the learned helplessness link. I'll look into that more.

As for exercise, I take walks, bike, etc. The thing I'm missing the most are having other like minded people around to share ideas and progress. But maybe I need to look into building a small Skype-based network for this, or something similar.

1) Re: 9-5 - Thanks for catching that. My frustration came through on that a bit. I changed the wording.

2) Re: skills - I do everything but program. And by everything I mean everything - funding, prod dev, marketing, sales, operations, strategy, etc.

Great point about not doing something driven by guilt. Thanks for your feedback.