One of the things that people need to understand is that there are various kinds of failure. Some ruin your life; others are mild annoyances whose negative consequences are paid back by what is learned. It's really important to know the difference before forming an opinion on failure (i.e. "fail fast") that is supposed to apply to everyone in all circumstances. What are the effects of the failure?
Losing a job is not a big deal, usually. Layoffs and business failures happen. Closing your venture because it didn't work out doesn't always ruin your life. But if you took out $80,000 in credit card loans, or took on personal liability to get a bank loan, or had a vindictive investor who decided to ruin your reputation, welcome to Fuckedville.
There are a lot of young people out there right now who are far too willing to risk their careers, reputations, resumes, and savings opportunities on terrible prospects and in business with some really unethical people. The fact is that if you don't gain a certain credibility quickly, you're going to be screwed. If you don't look out for your career and really think through what happens in the case of failure, you could very easily end up at a bad end. I've lost close to $200,000 on bad startups, but at least I always made sure that I kept learning and building skills, no matter what. Now that I'm older, having kept my skills sharp is starting to pay major dividends.
We have these obscenely privileged people, who are so well-connected as to be tied in with what's essentially a private welfare system, who go out there and preach about how failure is no big deal and everyone should risk everything all the time, knowing that they're Stanford grads with partners at six different VC firms in their cell phones. That's not realistic; and people who don't have the social resources to take extreme risks (i.e. the 99%) shouldn't be decried as cowards because they do less risky things like, you know, take regular jobs.
Losing a job is not a big deal, usually. Layoffs and business failures happen. Closing your venture because it didn't work out doesn't always ruin your life. But if you took out $80,000 in credit card loans, or took on personal liability to get a bank loan, or had a vindictive investor who decided to ruin your reputation, welcome to Fuckedville.
There are a lot of young people out there right now who are far too willing to risk their careers, reputations, resumes, and savings opportunities on terrible prospects and in business with some really unethical people. The fact is that if you don't gain a certain credibility quickly, you're going to be screwed. If you don't look out for your career and really think through what happens in the case of failure, you could very easily end up at a bad end. I've lost close to $200,000 on bad startups, but at least I always made sure that I kept learning and building skills, no matter what. Now that I'm older, having kept my skills sharp is starting to pay major dividends.
We have these obscenely privileged people, who are so well-connected as to be tied in with what's essentially a private welfare system, who go out there and preach about how failure is no big deal and everyone should risk everything all the time, knowing that they're Stanford grads with partners at six different VC firms in their cell phones. That's not realistic; and people who don't have the social resources to take extreme risks (i.e. the 99%) shouldn't be decried as cowards because they do less risky things like, you know, take regular jobs.