tasteful_rogue

Interesting! One thing that stood out to me quite a bit is that you had a clear definition of what "success" means to you.

Startups can be wonderful, but only if you (I) learn to enjoy the process. I'm glad you were able to find a way to enjoy your day to day and not continually defer enjoyment to the future!

Awesome, kind of like the "negative visualization" practices the Stoics recommended, haha.

I feel like this would be a good approach for me to work on my aversion to failure.

No worries, I appreciate the straight talk!

The industry I'm in requires a ridiculous amount of pre-work before a client is willing to sign a paid contract (should've mentioned this is a B2B industry). I'm in the signing process with a client now, so will have a paying client and proper users later this year (high volume of users with this one client).

I def hear you that paying, validated customers gives direction and purpose to the whole enterprise. I'll focus on achieving that. The funding is more for the fact that I have major features that I can't implement myself while also rolling out to this customer.

Hit me like a ton of bricks.

I've noticed within myself some long-ingrained fear of failure, and this seems to manifest as dreading my work for fear of a suboptimal "outcome" (I don't know how to solve a problem, a project takes too long, rejection/setbacks on the funding front).

Any tips or strategies that have helped you shift your mindset to being more about "inputs" other than diligent repetition/journaling?