This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful. Given enough chances you will make it, big. That means the #1 factor in success is the number of chances you get to fail and try again, not necessarily how inherently good you are. I try to remind myself of this often. I have been given so many chances, and I took them.
This always sounded intuitively correct to me, but looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net. They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.
Contrast this with some of the people I grew up who came from wealthy families: A lot of their parents pushed them toward entrepreneurship and funded their ventures, but to date I can only think of one business from this cluster of friends that went anywhere. When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this, other than to remind myself to keep pushing through the difficult times for things I really want even when I could fall back to an easy path and give up.
I've seen quite a few of these funded entrepreneur-lifestyle kids now; I've worked (briefly) with many of their companies. Many of them are making enough of a real go at it such that I can't tell them from others, but quite a few don't know enough about how a default alive business works and deliver a DoA even when the core idea or a short pivot works and has traction - these guys need so much better PMF to succeed.
The best businesses I've seen parents find for their children are lettings agents (urgh) and basic manufacturing (last mile door assembly etc.). You can get the business model in a six month course, the staff are minimum wage, the product is high margin. If your parents buy the building you are so close to default alive its a joke. Grow the business, flip it, and try the big idea.
Peter used to say, that every successful company could look back at a defining moment early on, where they would have died had it not been for the courage, and the tenacity, and maybe the insanity of one visionary person who put it all on the line, even though it seemed like a huge mistake at the time.
A moment where all the metrics and the numbers didn't mean anything.
It was all about the emotion. It was about belief, rational or irrational.
> looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net
There’s probably some truthyness to this but it doesn’t account for survivorship bias. And there’s a baseline amount of resources necessary to take a risk and be able to try again (e.g., good luck taking a risk when preoccupied by [lack of] health, housing, food).
Every single western "entrepreneur" who starts making a little more than 100k/year likes to tell itself this story.
Did you have any (real, not GenZ) mental or physical disability?
Did you have a house to come back to every day? Did you have a hot meal waiting for you whenever you wanted?
Did you have a community that supported you through your business?
Did you have a legal structure around you that allowed you not to worry about getting kidnapped/killed? A structure that enforces getting paid after you've earned your money?
98% of what you have was given.
I do agree, however, that a lot of people don't even bother to put in the remaining 2%.
you can extend that to all Silicon Valley and the US in general.
It has one of the weakest social security systems. Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed. Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".
I agree with the other commenter: safety nets and multiple tries are always good to have, but persistence and grit are even more important, and these come more from necessity.
> Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".
Probability: highly unlikely.
Speaking for Europe, I see a lot of silent innovation. No press, no LinkedIn posts, not an article on their website. There are a lot of US firms that shop in Europe for high tech. (I know of instances were the US company buys the IP from the EU supplier + take public credit for it + forbids the supplier for showcasing their success in public.)
What is different is:
1) the amount of money available in the US. The US enjoyed a very beneficial position post-WOII, enabling them to run high deficits.
2) the US has a positive attitude to entrepreneurship. You are not a failure when your company goes bankrupt, you learn from it and you go-go-go.
Most of the US graduates have their degree and a network to fall back on. It's nice to have actual money in the bank, but it can also be acceptable to have a high chance of getting a rewarding job if the moonshot doesn't work.
In other words, human capital.
Most of the entrepreneurs I meet are not going to be homeless if things don't work out. They'll be employed.
Exactly this many also have parents who can help subsidize them, stay on their parents health insurance until they are 26 and worse case move back home. This isn’t just the privilege rich, this can also be your mid to mid upper income couple who can help their kids out.
Yep, and most of these fallbacks are insurance-like: you can always say you never asked your parents for anything. Like me. Thing worked out, so I didn't need their money. But if they hadn't, I would have a place to sleep and eat.
In some areas and for some people, Medicaid probably does count as proper healthcare. But it certainly doesn't for other people / other places. Imagine there being one doctor within a multi-million person metro area who takes Medicaid for some sub-specialty. 90 minutes away from you by car. And you don't have a car. This is the reality for millions of Medicaid recipients, including ones I know personally in Chicago.
Sure, although in some areas healthcare is effectively unavailable to Medicaid plan members because providers have stopped accepting those patients. Being insured doesn't mean much if you can't schedule an appointment.
It's like a baseball game. Most people are benched their whole lives. They never get a chance at the plate. More privileged people with a lucky combination of the right family, the right education, the right timing, and the right opportunity get an at-bat, and they'll either strike out, or hit the ball. A few very lucky people will get to stand at the plate maybe once or twice more.
The wealthy get infinite at-bats. They get to stand at the plate for however long they want, and swing and swing until they get their home run. I worked with a founder like this. He would always talk about his business's humble beginnings, starting from a garage and so on--you know the story. What he would neglect to admit was this was like his 7th try. Every time he failed, he'd just chill on his family's couch, dreaming up his next startup idea.
I think it was Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell) that talked about a similar concept as well. Ignoring the 10k hour thing, it also talks abut small compounding advantages that later add up to more opportunity (for those that take it).
To go with the sports analogy, (paraphrasing, been awhile since I read it) it mentions how birth date coinciding with the youth sport season was a strong determiner of success at that sport because being ~11 months older in the same age group meant they were bigger faster more experienced and would be played more, compounding increases in skill.
This is not true. No matter how many different teams I try out for, I as a 51 year old short male with a limp will never be a star basketball player or ever make it to even the D leagues.
There are plenty of people who tried repeatedly to “succeed” in their own company and failed. Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress
I think the level of success one wants also require having a check for delusion and realism. If a "51 year old short limp" thinks they are going to be a star basketball player, they are delusional and no longer realistic.
How many people right here on HN have you seen over the years who built something and have no idea about marketing or a go to market strategy or knew anything about sales?
That’s the equivalent of a 51 year old with a limp not being self award enough to know that I don’t have the skills to be a basketball player just because I can dribble.
That sounds good, but with a safety net, are you really going to be hungry enough to make sure your one shot at getting out of the ghetto doesn't fail? The entrepreneur that says to themselves, if this doesn't work, I'll just ask mom for another $300k at St Barts over Christmas doesn't sound like the one sleeping under the desk at the office to get the demo ready for TechCrunch Disrupt. Or maybe they are (to prove daddy wrong). The human condition contains multitudes.
This is definitely not true. How many people for instance can go into journalism and do unpaid internships without family support?
The entire idea of most entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their bootstraps in tech is a myth. Out of all of major tech companies now, how many of the founders came from disadvantaged backgrounds?
Safety net and resources correlates heavily in almost all aspects of your life, having a better life helps immensely in any project you do in your life, including entrepreneurship
The “one that works out” can also give you a misrepresentation of how the world works and a false sense of how lucky one should expect to be over a long period of time.
At an earlier point in my life, I had been applying to many well-known big tech companies right out of school (not a top school either). I never got a reply from any of them so I ended up accepting a local job with a non-tech company after months of searching.
But I didn’t give up my hopes and kept applying to big tech, and while I did manage to get the occasional interview with some mediocre companies or the random startup, I also miserably failed all of them too.
At some point during my long period of despair at never getting a better job, my very top pick (and arguably one of the best tech companies in the world at the time) reached out to me. Even more miraculously, I somehow passed their interview (the only tech interview I passed in the prior year) and accepted a job there.
I really enjoyed working there. Some of the best years of my life. And my performance reviews were great too, so the imposter syndrome from having failed so many tech job interviews sort of faded into the background. But after a while, perhaps due to the “hedonic treadmill” mentality, I thought I could do better. So I left to join a startup.
Well, the startup failed, as startups tend to do, but what I didn’t expect and what caught me off guard was that I was now back in the same situation I was in right after graduating from college. Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere. But much like the first round that I tried to forget about, I once again failed all the interviews.
Unfortunately, this second time around never procured a “get out of jail free” card.
So I guess my lesson is: 1) there’s a lot of luck involved in these things, 2) if life gives you a winning lottery ticket at some point, don’t throw it away for the chance to win an even bigger lottery, and 3) that famous saying about “the only actions regretted are those not taken” is absolutely, totally wrong—almost all of my regrets in life relate to taking some action I shouldn’t have rather than inaction.
A lot of people experienced that during the 2020 boom. The lucky break wasn't a lucky break it was just a huge hiring boom. Once that's over the status quo returns.
Corollary: Choosing _not_ to do something is as much an action as choosing _to_ do something. Which shines a bright light on the meaninglessness of the phrase “the only actions regretted are those not taken”.
What do you do if the job that makes you an offer doesn't excite you? What if the house that feels like home needs more repairs than you can afford? What if the program that accepts you has crappy funding? What if the person who chooses you has red flags?
Do you say "screw it," cross your fingers, and walk through the door that kind of sucks? Or do you keep looking as long as your resources last you?
Maybe consider that we are all calibrated to standards that are this hodgepodge of other people’s messaging of what standards should be, and they communicate them for a variety of reasons, very few of which are truly designed for your reality, your situation.
So when you say, ‘kinda sucks’, perhaps ask if the opinion is grounded in (your) reality?
Once recalibrated to accept that what we are in, is inescapable true life, then we stop looking for something better, and instead focus on the challenge of making it better than it should naturally be.
Happiness I believe, is a decision, we choose it when we feel it’s a sustainable perspective. I think it’s sustainable to allow ourselves to be happy, whenever we achieve marginal improvement on what is natural.
Every situation is different, and none of us can reliably predict the future. Sometimes dealing with a bad job until you get a better one is the right move. Sometimes it's the wrong move.
Specifics, about the job and yourself, matter. If you feel like sharing, this is a pretty good community with good instincts.
The magic in "all it takes is for one to work out" is in the strength it gives you to keep trying. Trying something that might fail is hard, even when we know that trying is the right thing to do.
Often the "one" you need isn't the ideal, it's just what gets you into the market. I'm thinking a job that gets you some experience and much needed pay or a property that lets you build equity while prices continue to climb.
Right. All it takes is for one to work out, if you have several suitable options. If some of the options are only vaguely suitable, or it comes to light through the process that some of them are not suitable at all, then it takes more than just one working out. That's what I was thinking while reading this.
Unfortunately, the "one" which accepts you, is no guarantee of it being the one which "works out" (in the short or long term). My experience is now 4x "found one that ultimately doesn't work out" (each lasting 2 to 3 years).
I'm now taking time out to try to figure out how to escape the confines of the career path I've taken to find something different.
Open to suggestions of entirely different careers that I could switch to that might have higher odds of not being toxic rat-races full of people telling lies and bullshit just to survive.
But broader experience suggests the world of work just sucks these days (and yes, it's these days - our parent's generation had a brief period of doing 9-to-5 jobs which paid well enough to afford homes, have families and social lives and holidays. We don't get that now.). No wonder large numbers of my generation are dropping out of the workforce...
We job hop, have multiple hustles. Many people on this board have started multiple companies, sometimes at once, on an ongoing basis. Do you only want just one friend? People tend to have multiple romantic/sexual entanglements, sometimes at once, but generally more than one over a lifetime.
I think this can be a useful maxim to get you to the next day, but in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life. We grow and change and need novelty. We are held in a web of interdependent, ever-shifting relationships - with people, businesses, material goods, ecology. I think that generally people are seeking connection in a broader sphere. To be held in community, to have multiple significant identities (mother/wife/boss), to live in richness and abundance where any one thing is not make or break.
> in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life
We seem to view "reality" through different lenses. I've usually found "one" to be a magic number; as long as it's the "right one." That's the gist of what he's saying.
In my experience, needing more than one, often signals issues that need closer examination.
In my community, we have a joke: "An addict is someone that needs two One-A-Days."
I find the same, individual jobs or relationships seem to give supralinear returns.
There's a lot of initial investment and groundworks, then once you're well-integrated, the marginal returns get higher for the most established relationships.
Do you really think that is what the author meant? They're not saying "you only need 1". They're talking about going from 0 to 1. It's sometimes a long and arduous 0. Your framing doesn't help someone trying to get from 0 to 1. Once they're at 1 though, sure. But getting there can feel helpless, and that's what this post is about.
We can try to walk in 10-20 directions at the same time and move a tiny direction all, or none.
Or we can realize we have some things to learn that we will learn no matter whether we pick the startup, or job to learn transferrable skills and also become better well rounded.
A corollary to this, for me at least, has always been: don’t try to fake your way into an opportunity. Be yourself, let people pass on the real you if they want, because you don’t want to land a job where you can’t thrive as yourself. Obviously there’s great privilege in that and sometimes you need to eat shit in order to eat at all, but if you have the option I hope you’re able to wait for the right fit.
“All it takes is for one to work out.” is not the same as "You just need the one [job] that’s the right fit." or "You just need the one [house] that feels like home." or "You just need the one [life partner]."
Author's examples are, spiritually, the opposite of their friend's advice - in fact, "all it takes is for one to work out" is something often said to people who lost hope because they got lost being too picky.
Simplifications always leave something out. It's like the three body problem: people think one factor matters most, and one other factor controls it. But once they realize there is a third factor that alters one or the first two, or mediates between them, it gets more complicated.
Taking a break from studying for my interview in two days at a FANG company, I checked Hacker News and this article was at the top. I've been studying for this interview harder than any of the others in the past. I feel well-prepared, but there's always the luck factor. I hope this is a sign that this interview will be the one to work out!
On the one hand it is a wholesome article. On the other hand - so much wasted potential of people squeezing out the last bits when competing. Nash equilibria can suck
I thought HN is supposed to upvote articles that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Does this article gratify intellectual curiosity? I don't understand why these shallow feel-good articles devoid of any intellectual curiosity always get upvoted to the top! There are so many high effort, substantive articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest that nobody upvotes!
because even when it isn't why people come here, and if there was too much of it you may be right - a message which brings up a smile or warm feeling is enough for people to be thankfull
Obviously the article is voted to the top. So the the lurkers at /newest and the general HN audience must like this. Still I wish though that upvoters stuck to the HN guidelines of upvoting stuff that really gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, not just some feel-good piece. There is no shortage of other places where I can find feel-good articles. I want HN to stick to HN guidelines.
This is all the more sad for me because among all the spam, many high effort articles get posted to /newest but many don't get the upvotes. These shallow, feel-good articles always get the upvotes. I guess it takes more time to read and appreciate a high effort article. So I understand why this happens. But ...
This is a great approach! After every opportunity that closed on me another arose, and it always was the better one.
Through these experiences I totally agree, and try to apply it to life, but it's hard, even knowing that it's true. How cool is it for every college, person, job offer, scholarship to want you?
Even though we're looking just for "the one" it's very hard for me to mitigate the feeling of getting rejected, even knowing it was not "the one". Rejection generally hurts, when you care about the goal
No it's not. Gambler's fallacy is "I just flipped tails so heads is more likely now". I read this article as "heads has a 50% chance of coming up so I'll get one eventually" (which is true - law of large numbers).
I think none of those blanket statements here work.
Really it's just odds of finding success vs effort / time spent. And whether that's worth it.
Any of the blanket statements could be true depending on what the exact odds are.
There could be near 0% chance of finding success and it would be better idea to rethink and spend time elsewhere, or yes, there's 10% chance of finding success and it's significant enough that trying 20 times is enough.
If we are talking about e.g. finding a house, if you are not finding any it could very well be that your expectations vs budget is unlikely to find anything and you have to reconsider strategy.
Someone could be repeatedly trying to find work, and thinking it's just a matter of time, but really time would be better spent on improving their strategy, resume, or other means.
These statements to me seem like motivational non-sense which misrepresent how real world works or what the patterns really are like. At best they just give someone a false understanding of how the world works, at worst they make someone spend all their time in the wrong direction.
Indeed. "Just one more roll of the dice and I'll be ahead."
Worse, this guy isn't trying to get a job. He's just trying to get into grad school. Which is no longer a guarantee of a good career, but may be a guarantee of a big debt. Remember that "I did everything right" post on HN a few weeks ago? CS degree from a good school, but nobody wants junior CS people any more.
It's also interesting to consider that we are such adaptative creatures that we will likely settle to a similar level of happiness no matter what the choice.
Purely poetic advice. If the local economy collapses, you will very much want to move. There's still a 50% chance the first spouse doesn't hold up until death. There are many schools that give out degrees that aren't worth a wooden frame in today's job market.
On a much less optimistic dark humor note, this is the same argument in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies about a superintelligent AI emerging and being a threat to humans.
I agree with his sentiments and his examples. But my fear is that on a place like Hacker News, people might not understand the difference between his advice and trying to have a successful startup.
>You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
When I’m applying for a job, I can apply for multiple jobs at once and interview for multiple jobs over a a few weeks. It’s especially easy when I am both interviewing and working remotely. I don’t have to make excuses to leave work during the middle of the day or worse case fly out for an interview.
The same is true for buying a home, I can put bids in for multiple homes - or in my case just have my homes built in 2003 and 2016. I know the world is different now.
>You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.
This is one place where of course you can shoot your shot at multiple potential partners and date often. What you don’t want to do is try marriage multiple times if it can be avoided. A bad marriage will wreck every part of your life and a divorce will set you back financially. (Happily remarried for 15 years after a horrible first marriage.)
None of his examples are applicable to starting a business. 9/10 startups fail and even out of those that “succeed” only a small number of those have an outsized return for the founder where they wouldn’t be better off financially working a regular old enterprise dev job for those years let alone getting a job at BigTech.
VCs can make multiple bets at one time and be more assured that they capture the 1/10 startups that succeed than a founder.
There is a huge difference between being able to take multiple chances at once in all of those scenarios and being stuck with the 1/10 choices you make for multiple years.
Why are so many people in this thread purposefully misinterpreting the post so they can criticize it? The author obviously doesn't mean you only need one thing per domain to work out in your lifetime, but the present. I.e you don't need two girlfriends at once, even though you might have multiple relationships throughout your life...
While it’s true that all we need is one to work out, in general we strive to be in positions where we have multiple options, not just hinging everything on one passing chance. Life is less stressful that way, and that’s why people today feel like they are under so much pressure and have little choice over how their lives unfold.
I'm confused. This just seems like feel-good bullshit advice that only works for people in extremely good circumstances.
There's a false equivalence between -
“All it takes is for one to work out.”
and the following:
- "You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit."
- "You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home. "
The latter assumes that _every_ attempt you make has a chance at being "the right fit", "the one that feels like home". That is not the way things works for 99% of us.
Contrast this with some of the people I grew up who came from wealthy families: A lot of their parents pushed them toward entrepreneurship and funded their ventures, but to date I can only think of one business from this cluster of friends that went anywhere. When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this, other than to remind myself to keep pushing through the difficult times for things I really want even when I could fall back to an easy path and give up.
The best businesses I've seen parents find for their children are lettings agents (urgh) and basic manufacturing (last mile door assembly etc.). You can get the business model in a six month course, the staff are minimum wage, the product is high margin. If your parents buy the building you are so close to default alive its a joke. Grow the business, flip it, and try the big idea.
Succeeding without safety net is hard -> only the best can do it -> the best entrepreneurs you know did not had a safety net
Peter used to say, that every successful company could look back at a defining moment early on, where they would have died had it not been for the courage, and the tenacity, and maybe the insanity of one visionary person who put it all on the line, even though it seemed like a huge mistake at the time.
A moment where all the metrics and the numbers didn't mean anything.
It was all about the emotion. It was about belief, rational or irrational.
And I think...
I hope that I just witnessed that.
There’s probably some truthyness to this but it doesn’t account for survivorship bias. And there’s a baseline amount of resources necessary to take a risk and be able to try again (e.g., good luck taking a risk when preoccupied by [lack of] health, housing, food).
Did you have any (real, not GenZ) mental or physical disability?
Did you have a house to come back to every day? Did you have a hot meal waiting for you whenever you wanted?
Did you have a community that supported you through your business?
Did you have a legal structure around you that allowed you not to worry about getting kidnapped/killed? A structure that enforces getting paid after you've earned your money?
98% of what you have was given.
I do agree, however, that a lot of people don't even bother to put in the remaining 2%.
It has one of the weakest social security systems. Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed. Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".
I agree with the other commenter: safety nets and multiple tries are always good to have, but persistence and grit are even more important, and these come more from necessity.
Probability: highly unlikely.
Speaking for Europe, I see a lot of silent innovation. No press, no LinkedIn posts, not an article on their website. There are a lot of US firms that shop in Europe for high tech. (I know of instances were the US company buys the IP from the EU supplier + take public credit for it + forbids the supplier for showcasing their success in public.)
What is different is:
1) the amount of money available in the US. The US enjoyed a very beneficial position post-WOII, enabling them to run high deficits.
2) the US has a positive attitude to entrepreneurship. You are not a failure when your company goes bankrupt, you learn from it and you go-go-go.
In other words, human capital.
Most of the entrepreneurs I meet are not going to be homeless if things don't work out. They'll be employed.
…except it is. Health insurance is available on a sliding scale based on income and essentially free for most low income people.
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/medicaid-insurers-doct...
The wealthy get infinite at-bats. They get to stand at the plate for however long they want, and swing and swing until they get their home run. I worked with a founder like this. He would always talk about his business's humble beginnings, starting from a garage and so on--you know the story. What he would neglect to admit was this was like his 7th try. Every time he failed, he'd just chill on his family's couch, dreaming up his next startup idea.
To go with the sports analogy, (paraphrasing, been awhile since I read it) it mentions how birth date coinciding with the youth sport season was a strong determiner of success at that sport because being ~11 months older in the same age group meant they were bigger faster more experienced and would be played more, compounding increases in skill.
There are plenty of people who tried repeatedly to “succeed” in their own company and failed. Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress
That’s the equivalent of a 51 year old with a limp not being self award enough to know that I don’t have the skills to be a basketball player just because I can dribble.
For what? Their garbage SaaS that barely works and is just a thin veneer for advertisers to gorge on my data?
The entire idea of most entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their bootstraps in tech is a myth. Out of all of major tech companies now, how many of the founders came from disadvantaged backgrounds?
At an earlier point in my life, I had been applying to many well-known big tech companies right out of school (not a top school either). I never got a reply from any of them so I ended up accepting a local job with a non-tech company after months of searching.
But I didn’t give up my hopes and kept applying to big tech, and while I did manage to get the occasional interview with some mediocre companies or the random startup, I also miserably failed all of them too.
At some point during my long period of despair at never getting a better job, my very top pick (and arguably one of the best tech companies in the world at the time) reached out to me. Even more miraculously, I somehow passed their interview (the only tech interview I passed in the prior year) and accepted a job there.
I really enjoyed working there. Some of the best years of my life. And my performance reviews were great too, so the imposter syndrome from having failed so many tech job interviews sort of faded into the background. But after a while, perhaps due to the “hedonic treadmill” mentality, I thought I could do better. So I left to join a startup.
Well, the startup failed, as startups tend to do, but what I didn’t expect and what caught me off guard was that I was now back in the same situation I was in right after graduating from college. Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere. But much like the first round that I tried to forget about, I once again failed all the interviews.
Unfortunately, this second time around never procured a “get out of jail free” card.
So I guess my lesson is: 1) there’s a lot of luck involved in these things, 2) if life gives you a winning lottery ticket at some point, don’t throw it away for the chance to win an even bigger lottery, and 3) that famous saying about “the only actions regretted are those not taken” is absolutely, totally wrong—almost all of my regrets in life relate to taking some action I shouldn’t have rather than inaction.
What do you do if the job that makes you an offer doesn't excite you? What if the house that feels like home needs more repairs than you can afford? What if the program that accepts you has crappy funding? What if the person who chooses you has red flags?
Do you say "screw it," cross your fingers, and walk through the door that kind of sucks? Or do you keep looking as long as your resources last you?
So when you say, ‘kinda sucks’, perhaps ask if the opinion is grounded in (your) reality?
Once recalibrated to accept that what we are in, is inescapable true life, then we stop looking for something better, and instead focus on the challenge of making it better than it should naturally be.
Happiness I believe, is a decision, we choose it when we feel it’s a sustainable perspective. I think it’s sustainable to allow ourselves to be happy, whenever we achieve marginal improvement on what is natural.
Specifics, about the job and yourself, matter. If you feel like sharing, this is a pretty good community with good instincts.
The magic in "all it takes is for one to work out" is in the strength it gives you to keep trying. Trying something that might fail is hard, even when we know that trying is the right thing to do.
More widely applicable advice would be how to deal with compromise, not how to hold out for "the right one."
I'm now taking time out to try to figure out how to escape the confines of the career path I've taken to find something different.
Open to suggestions of entirely different careers that I could switch to that might have higher odds of not being toxic rat-races full of people telling lies and bullshit just to survive.
But broader experience suggests the world of work just sucks these days (and yes, it's these days - our parent's generation had a brief period of doing 9-to-5 jobs which paid well enough to afford homes, have families and social lives and holidays. We don't get that now.). No wonder large numbers of my generation are dropping out of the workforce...
I think this can be a useful maxim to get you to the next day, but in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life. We grow and change and need novelty. We are held in a web of interdependent, ever-shifting relationships - with people, businesses, material goods, ecology. I think that generally people are seeking connection in a broader sphere. To be held in community, to have multiple significant identities (mother/wife/boss), to live in richness and abundance where any one thing is not make or break.
We seem to view "reality" through different lenses. I've usually found "one" to be a magic number; as long as it's the "right one." That's the gist of what he's saying.
In my experience, needing more than one, often signals issues that need closer examination.
In my community, we have a joke: "An addict is someone that needs two One-A-Days."
There's a lot of initial investment and groundworks, then once you're well-integrated, the marginal returns get higher for the most established relationships.
Or we can realize we have some things to learn that we will learn no matter whether we pick the startup, or job to learn transferrable skills and also become better well rounded.
I should probably still try that.
“All it takes is for one to work out.” is not the same as "You just need the one [job] that’s the right fit." or "You just need the one [house] that feels like home." or "You just need the one [life partner]."
Author's examples are, spiritually, the opposite of their friend's advice - in fact, "all it takes is for one to work out" is something often said to people who lost hope because they got lost being too picky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
and that is a good thing
This is all the more sad for me because among all the spam, many high effort articles get posted to /newest but many don't get the upvotes. These shallow, feel-good articles always get the upvotes. I guess it takes more time to read and appreciate a high effort article. So I understand why this happens. But ...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k
It didn't try to maximise by how much it won, but just that it won. Apparently it changed the meta for human pkayers.
If you have the time for it, the movie/doc is worth watching https://youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y
Through these experiences I totally agree, and try to apply it to life, but it's hard, even knowing that it's true. How cool is it for every college, person, job offer, scholarship to want you?
Even though we're looking just for "the one" it's very hard for me to mitigate the feeling of getting rejected, even knowing it was not "the one". Rejection generally hurts, when you care about the goal
Really it's just odds of finding success vs effort / time spent. And whether that's worth it.
Any of the blanket statements could be true depending on what the exact odds are.
There could be near 0% chance of finding success and it would be better idea to rethink and spend time elsewhere, or yes, there's 10% chance of finding success and it's significant enough that trying 20 times is enough.
If we are talking about e.g. finding a house, if you are not finding any it could very well be that your expectations vs budget is unlikely to find anything and you have to reconsider strategy.
Someone could be repeatedly trying to find work, and thinking it's just a matter of time, but really time would be better spent on improving their strategy, resume, or other means.
These statements to me seem like motivational non-sense which misrepresent how real world works or what the patterns really are like. At best they just give someone a false understanding of how the world works, at worst they make someone spend all their time in the wrong direction.
Worse, this guy isn't trying to get a job. He's just trying to get into grad school. Which is no longer a guarantee of a good career, but may be a guarantee of a big debt. Remember that "I did everything right" post on HN a few weeks ago? CS degree from a good school, but nobody wants junior CS people any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...
After reading the article, I like my version better.
>You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
When I’m applying for a job, I can apply for multiple jobs at once and interview for multiple jobs over a a few weeks. It’s especially easy when I am both interviewing and working remotely. I don’t have to make excuses to leave work during the middle of the day or worse case fly out for an interview.
The same is true for buying a home, I can put bids in for multiple homes - or in my case just have my homes built in 2003 and 2016. I know the world is different now.
>You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.
This is one place where of course you can shoot your shot at multiple potential partners and date often. What you don’t want to do is try marriage multiple times if it can be avoided. A bad marriage will wreck every part of your life and a divorce will set you back financially. (Happily remarried for 15 years after a horrible first marriage.)
None of his examples are applicable to starting a business. 9/10 startups fail and even out of those that “succeed” only a small number of those have an outsized return for the founder where they wouldn’t be better off financially working a regular old enterprise dev job for those years let alone getting a job at BigTech.
VCs can make multiple bets at one time and be more assured that they capture the 1/10 startups that succeed than a founder.
There is a huge difference between being able to take multiple chances at once in all of those scenarios and being stuck with the 1/10 choices you make for multiple years.
You have already lost, you can only win.
If you're never done growing, you're never done peaking, nor ever really done trying.
One working out can lead to the next way.
Wishing everyone well who this piece resonated with.
Applicable not just for grad school applications, but also to job apps, startups, and relationships.
Hang in there y'all, all it takes is for one to work out. Keep working hard, kings & queens.
Sheesh. HN is grumpy today.
All it takes, is for one to work out.
There's a false equivalence between -
“All it takes is for one to work out.”
and the following:
- "You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit."
- "You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home. "
The latter assumes that _every_ attempt you make has a chance at being "the right fit", "the one that feels like home". That is not the way things works for 99% of us.