Ask HN: How did you overcome the fear of failing?

[fullofsid]

You shouldn't be afraid to fail is a mantra on every successful founder's lips but as much as I agree on the shouldn't part I am desperately looking for ways to suppress that continuous stream of thought that keeps negating my efforts and telling me "it's not worth it", "nobody needs it", "nobody would use this". If you had a similar experience how did you shut the door on such thoughts and sailed through?

[itamarst]

Evidence.

Instead of coming up with idea and guessing what would be useful, I did research on problems people had, and then got additional evidence that a particular problem I'd discovered resonated. (See e.g. https://stackingthebricks.com/how-do-you-create-a-product-pe... for intro this approach.)

That meant every time I had those negative thoughts, I could come back with "but you have so much evidence!".

(In my case evidence was: bunch of online discussions of people talking about problems, wrote some blog posts about those problems, one blog post got tens of thousands of hits, and other blog posts on topic got lots of hits too. So clearly a problem people have. And product is something these particular people will pay for.)

[tudelo]

Where would you suggest people go to search for problems?

[itamarst]

I suggest going through stackingthebricks.com and just reading lots of the content there (not my site, just a place I've learned a lot from).

[eksemplar]

Those kind of thoughts aren’t really fear of failure, and you can’t just make them go away. If they burden your life, you should probably see a psychiatrist about involuntary negative thoughts.

If they don’t burden your life, think them through. Is it true? Would nobody use your product? Would you? Ask someone else if they would.

Another good thing to start with is the why. Why are you making the product? Are you trying to become rich? Are you filling a need? Are you doing it because it’s fun? Are you learning something?

Everyone fails though, what matters is that you admit it when you do.

Knowing when you’ve failed can be a bit tricky though, especially when you haven’t made an exact mistake. So set some goals for your product, and evaluate how you meet those goals, and if you don’t, evaluate if it’s worth setting new goals or trying something else.

[ugochiowo]

I try to see life as a big experiment.

The fact that I didn't get something right the first time doesn't mean that I will never be right. With each attempt, you learn something new. Thomas Edison made 1000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the lightbulb, but learned, adapted, and tried again. If you learned something, you didn't fail :)

Go for it.

[codegeek]

For me, it is more about the "fear of not doing something that I really want to do" which keeps me going and not worry about failing. So to overcome the fear of failing, I would say be more afraid of the fact that you will not do anything and regret it on your death bed.

[Quequau]

My own experience is of getting sucked into the fear and subsequently allowing it to cause me to fail, like some sort of slow-mo target fixation. This is unpleasant and leads to undesirable outcomes, so I can't recommend it.

[Huhty]

As long as you keep learning, you aren't failing.