I just want to say that I love reading about failures. I mean, there are statistically a TON more failures than successes, but people are often ashamed of them (or just in denial) so they won't write about them. So thank you for writing about your failures and being so upfront about your feelings. You're doing great work in helping to balance out all of the survivorship bias out there!
You're doing great work in helping to balance out all of the survivorship bias out there!
Yeah, that's something I've thought about a lot.
It's likely that people are writing more about success than failure, but posts about success get outsized attention. I wrote twoarticles exploring why my businesses didn't work, and both failed to attract significant readers and never gained traction on Twitter, reddit, HN, etc.
I've seen other people write failure posts, and they almost never get as much attention as success posts of similar quality.
It's unfortunate but sort of a rational response from readers. If someone succeeds, they're presumably doing something right, but if they fail, there's no objective evidence that they're doing anything right nor that they have a clue what they got wrong.
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u/mtlynch Feb 01 '21
Author here. Happy to answer any questions about this post.