[timr]

"...instead of bunch of failed entrepreneurs who write medium posts about why they think their startups failed to either feel better about themselves or to capitalize on their failure with the attention they get from the blog post"

That's really cynical. For a long time, people were complaining about the opposite on HN: you never heard about the failures, which leads to a massive selection bias.

I've always felt that you can learn far more from failure than success. Successful people often have little actionable insight into why they succeeded (e.g. "we worked hard and made something people wanted"), but most people can write volumes about what they've done wrong in life.

[volaski]

you're right i'm being cynical, because i genuinely believe you have not much to learn from people who have failed but haven't succeeded yet.

That said, there are PLENTY of successful people who used to be a failure. In fact 99% of the successful people have been a failure at some point in their life. THESE are the people you listen to.

The things you read in the media about a genius who got it right on their first attempt are very exceptional cases, which means they were not only talented but also very lucky. And you're right that there's a selection bias when it comes to these people and they may be totally out of touch because they don't understand why they succeeded.

But like I said, the vast majority of accomplished people in the world were once failures. They just kept trying and made it happen. Which is why these people are worth listening to. They are the ones who actually learned from their past failures, applied it to their life, and finally succeeded.

But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to.

From what I see, there are too many people who've never tasted success but just use their failures as an opportunity to get more attention for the sake of getting attention. Most of the times when you read their posts, they're full of "failure biases", which is much worse than success bias. And I think most of the "lessons" they learned are shit, and most of the times demonstrates exactly why they failed--because they were out of touch (which is why they think they understand why they failed)

So my point is, you should listen to people who have failed AND succeeded. There are many people like this.

[timr]

"But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to."

I am mostly neutral on what you wrote, but this is just wrong. If you think that only "successful" people have valuable stories, you're drawing a very bright-line definition of success (i.e. how successful do I have to be before you'll deign to listen to my advice?), but you're also entirely discounting the value of experience. For example, I have failed at two startups now, but I could give you volumes of practical advice on how to avoid the mistakes I made. It would take you years to learn the same lessons from scratch, and some of the advice I'd give you is stuff that a "successful" entrepreneur in another field couldn't possibly know. Does this information suddenly only become useful if I have a successful startup on my Nth try?

If most of success is learning from failure, you should be trying to make that process as efficient as you can. How do you do that? By listening to the people who have failed before.

[volaski]

The reason why your advice is not as useful as you think is because chances are, if you google around, most of that lesson would be already out there. Don't take this the wrong way I mean no offense. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons and I'm sure they're all valuable lessons, just saying most of what I read online nowadays are basically rehash of what these failed entrepreneurs heard from someone else, who probably heard it from some other successful person.

My point was "why listen to failures when you can listen to people who've both failed AND succeeded, especially when most of what the former would say is a rehash of what the latter said?" Think about it. I've thought about this myself as a once-failed-entrepreneur, and come to a realization that until you actually have succeeded in life and gained enough confidence to be able to think independently AND have the confidence to share your lesson you came to independently, most of what you think you understand are basically what you heard from other more successful people. You may think otherwise, but if you think deeper, that's what you're doing.

There's nothing wrong with this on its own, but the problem is that most of the articles I'm referring to actually mislead other people into believing in some seriously wrong interpretations of why they failed, and they all stem from the fact that these people have no idea why they failed but just try to come up with their own "theory" of why they failed with their limited knowledge. There are many reasons why people fail at something. Some people make all the bad decisions yet still succeed because they made one small decision that made a huge difference. Some people make all the right decisions yet fail because they made one small decision that messed it all up. Without this COMPLETE context, your advice is not complete because it's just small tidbits that may or may not work. If this comes from someone who has succeeded at least once, you at least know this is something that has happened. But if you follow "advice" from people who have only failed, then what are you really believing?

[timr]

"The reason why your advice is not as useful as you think is because chances are, if you google around, most of that lesson would be already out there. Don't take this the wrong way I mean no offense. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons and I'm sure they're all valuable lessons, just saying most of what I read online nowadays are basically rehash of what these failed entrepreneurs heard from someone else, who probably heard it from some other successful person."

I don't take offense, but you're wrong. You have no idea what kind of advice or knowledge I have, but you're jumping to the conclusion that you've heard it all before.

This thread is extremely off-topic, and it feels silly to try to convince someone to listen to other people, so this will be my last post. Good luck.

[volaski]

As someone who tries to position oneself as someone with all the wisdom in the world, you sure are acting immature, closing your statement with "okthxbye" type comment.

Also, "You're wrong" is not such a mature way to engage in a conversation, and yet that's exactly how you start every comment you posted here. Could have been a productive conversation if you acted maturely.

And even though I said no offense and clearly meant it in a generic manner (and not attacking YOU), you actually sound very offended. Why are you so offended by some random guy on the Internet?

But I guess I'll never get an answer, since you're probably a man of your words and keep your promise to keep that last comment your last post :)

[dasil003]

How do define success? I get there are a lot of clueless Dunning-Kruger cases writing Medium posts who are so far from competence that their ideas are worthless to anyone else, but those cases are straw men. What about the people who have some modest success but haven’t created a household name? There’s a lot more of those out there and yet they seem to get less credibility than some middle manager at Google who really had nothing to do with their success but just still gets to ride the coat tails of their success.

[volaski]

any success is a success as long as you truly believe it was a success deep inside.

Which means the people you're talking about are all success cases. You don't have to be a household name to be considered a success.

A food stand guy who makes a good living and has learned tons of things about life and street smarts is a huge success and we have much more to learn from those people than idiot VC funded startup entrepreneurs who con their way into raising capital and burn through all their money without making anything work. These people may even pretend they're a success by "acq-hiring" themselves to a larger company, but anyone who's actually been in a startup know that's all fake bullshit. If you get acq-hired you have failed, period. Don't listen to these people's advice either.

The specific category of people I'm criticizing are those who have nothing to show for themselves but failure. They write Medium articles on their way out, so that they can:

1. get a pat on the shoulder

2. get more exposure so that they can get a job now that they're jobless.

3. get more exposure so that they can use that false influence to keep their charade going.

4. just do what everyone else does (they genuinely think for some reason that writing a post-mortem is some sort of a ritual to celebrate the liquidation of their startup for which they raised tons of money from strangers)

Most genuine entrepreneurs I know don't do this. They instead try to analyze what they did wrong, but they're humble enough to not shout out loud to the world to listen to what they have to say about why they failed. They show the lessons learned through action, not through medium post.

[workinfunk]

The merely smart learn from their failures. The wise learn from others' failures.

[newbie912]

It's also well understood that we incorrectly attribute success to the individual and failure to externalities when measuring outcomes, so the successful entrepreneur says "be like me", while the failure lists a lot of factors. Accounting for bias means there's a lot more value in the latter.