Ask HN: How do you deal with absolute failures?

by lifeplusplus on 10/27/2021, 10:49 PM with 8 comments

I'm not talking about a situation when you had 5 things going and you lost top best 2, and ended up in not ideal but still manageable position. I'm talking about failures that will have life long consequences unless solution is found or miracle happens soon. When your last hope utterly shatters. When you have already tried multiple times and failed. When there is no space left behind you to retreat. When it's your fault too and lot of being unlucky.

How do you deal with rejections and failures where everything was riding on it and you did 200% and hoped for the luck, but it still didn't work out just like last 10 times it before it.

I guess I want to know how to rebound, how improve chances of success, how to not let every setback cause you to think back on last 1000 back to back failures.

I've read all motivation quotes so don't cite them.

  • by JackOfCrows on 10/27/2021, 11:41 PM

    The United States and SV culture especially have invested a ton into the idea that all you have to do is work really really hard and you will be rich and get all the rewards.

    And that's just not true. As you're finding out.

    Hacker News and Tech Crunch and all the rest of these sites are full of people who made it and companies that succeeded. How many people are going to come back here crowing like "bro I totally bro-ed down and microdosed and lived in the office for years and we went bankrupt hahaha I had to move back to Iowa!"

    Very few. I mean the REAL dogs like Juicero that are comically bad sometimes get that treatment. Or Theranos.

    But most just quietly let everyone go and liquidate the Herman Miller chairs and ping pong tables and either keep bouncing around San Francisco or finally have to pack up and go home.

    You don't want motivational quotes so here's one: "you can do everything right and still lose. That's called life."-Captain Jean-Luc Picard -Michael Scott

    The upside is you've been given a gift. You found out its all bullshit before you're 65 and on your third heart attack and realize you've been working your ass off to make other people wealthy and you haven't got that much to show for it in the end.

    So go. You're free now. Go build a life. Go travel. Have kids. Build a family. Become a weird guy that lives alone and has a model train collection. Move to a farm. Go to cooking school.

    You can do anything.

  • by kleer001 on 10/27/2021, 11:44 PM

    Read more older books. There's nothing, at the root, that we're dealing with that hasn't been wrestled with over two thousand years ago. Those guys wrote it down.

    There are things we know as cliches, all those motivational quotes you don't want to hear anymore. But all those cliches are deeply related to hard fought wisdom. Learn to make that translation.

  • by runjake on 10/27/2021, 11:36 PM

    Acceptance and try to make the best of it.

    Also, try to maintain optimal physical and mental health so that I can best deal with stress.

  • by PaulHoule on 10/27/2021, 11:31 PM

    Get aerobic exercise.

    See a talk therapist.

    See your primary care doc and get a prescription for an SNRI or SSRI antidepressant.

  • by stevenalowe on 10/28/2021, 4:26 AM

    If you can learn from it, it's not a total failure.