> Lots of people who learn to do this cause lots of chaos and destruction in their wake.
At the same time, lots of people who do this end up being extremely successful.
The difficulty is knowing which rejection and criticism to ignore. Imagine losing out on a multi-billion dollar business because your initial pitch was dismissed by people saying your business is pointless and redundant because rsync already exists[0].
On the flip side, there's a lot of founders who... have more determination than experience, let's say, and when told their idea won't work, instead of using factual data points (or getting an MVP out to collect data points) operate purely on belief until they run out of money.
It's truly a challenge to know which is which — the foolish and the prescient both look like people with similarly bad ideas when they first start out.
> "Each time you have to make a decision, make the right one" would be what I would say in a commencement speech. Truly sage advice.
It honestly is great advice. Most (useful) business advice I've seen amounts to "how to make better decisions". This includes things like doing market research or a business model canvas (to make better decisions about your customers), releasing MVPs quickly to test the market (to make better decisions around product and pricing), picking which metrics and data points to measure (so that you can evaluate if your decision was actually correct and quickly course correct if not), etc.
I don't have a college degree. I made a deal with the head of the college math department that he'd sign me in to (senior level) Numerical Analysis (this was the early 1980s) if I taught myself calculus first; which I did. He had misgivings about this self-guided selection of study, and summed it up thus:
How do you know what's important?
Now of course ML is all the rage, but that question has stuck with me. I still ask myself that question, and I don't always know the answer.
At the same time, lots of people who do this end up being extremely successful.
The difficulty is knowing which rejection and criticism to ignore. Imagine losing out on a multi-billion dollar business because your initial pitch was dismissed by people saying your business is pointless and redundant because rsync already exists[0].
On the flip side, there's a lot of founders who... have more determination than experience, let's say, and when told their idea won't work, instead of using factual data points (or getting an MVP out to collect data points) operate purely on belief until they run out of money.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863