[SFJulie]

Hi tim, nice reading. It put balm in my heart.

Well, I thought I was crazy some times in my life (when I pulled the plug of my own company) for putting my life and my sanity on par with money. I was getting broken, I had a constant flow of ... 70+ /hrs job paid 35 hrs a week and even though I had customers but I was chaining more and more burn-in on burn-out. I was seeing my benefits diminish and my life sucked out.

But I did the right choice retrospectively. When clouds of stress disappears emotional reactions loosen up, then most of the time it shows you that rational thoughts such as the one you are exposing are right.

Risks have to be rationalized else you can get sucked in a gambler attitude. I guess some entrepreneurs are not guarded well enough against the "gambling/irrational risk" addiction that can be fired up.

It is hard because we are driven to entrepreneurship by emotions, and business decisions are best done in a cold sociopathic kind of state of mind.

You have all my regards and I wished I could have written such a concise and clear essay on the difficulty to live with decisions that are right and seem wrong because we human have doubts, emotions, dreams...

[timoth3y]

Thank you. I'm glad it meant something to you. TO tell the truth I was a mess the first week after deciding to shut down. No matter how many ways I could "prove" to my self I was doing the right thing, it still felt horrible.

I'm better now, and this discussion on HN -- even those who disagree with me -- really helps.

[SFJulie]

Lucky you, I pulled the plug a little to late, and now I pay a dear price.

Risk aversion is NOT bad. For 1 success they are hundreds of failures. Even though I accepted the game, it retrospectively feels like going for business is signing a pact with the devil. Either you win, and it is okay, or you lose and damages are doubled since your are marked with the seal of failure.

We live in a time where people want heroes and success stories, not reasonable persons that are boringly facing uncertainty.

When you take a risk of winning, you also take a risk of losing.

My epitaph will tell: "Si l'échec est la meilleure manière d'apprendre alors de mon vivant, j'ai vaincu Karpov et Kasparov".