If you try as hard as you can, it will breed a good sort of fatalism about being successful. You can't try harder than as hard as you can, and once you're doing everything you can, what's the point of worrying how well you'll do?
You can change what you're doing, apply the same effort, and be more successful. Roughly equivalent to mechanical leverage. Some management types even call it that.
Not sure about it; you might create world-class products, try at your best, it might still not be enough and this sort of thinking after everything-done-right-but-still-failure will kill your motivation forever. Focus rather on making world better, that's an infinite process, and be bold about your focus.
It depends on OPs definition of successful. Raising a happy family is success. A lasting legacy of a decent human being.
Money as they keep telling us doesn't make you happy.
I live in an area where rich folk come to retire. It's sad seeing old men get excited about surfing, snorkelling, SUPing, kitesurfing, rock climbing... you guys could have been doing this 20 years ago, but you chased the big fat $$$ ... I guess at the time it made them happy. Successful. I don't know. Is there a real answer to the question?
(Edit: I wrote this assuming you were talking about your startup, I may have misread the question. It probably still applies.)
You have to separate yourself and your identity from that of your startup. Yes you live and breathe it but no you are not it. I was my startup and when it fell I fell. It took years to recover, multiple moves, etc. Your startup is just something you're doing. It doesn't matter if it is successful or not because the only thing that matters is that you have finite time on this Earth.
If you aren't capable of doing something without going crazy and losing years and years of your precious life due to panic, then you sure as shit shouldn't have been doing it.
Keep things in perspective. Success is nice, but you will learn a lot from your startup if it fails and you will be better for it. You will have a higher chance of success doing your next startup, and you will have life experience that you can't get any other way.
If you do good work there and it fails, people will still respect what it was and who worked on it.
Stay strong, keep things in perspective, and enjoy what you do. You cannot change the world if you can't stay stable yourself. The only way you can change the world is if you are okay with yourself first.
You can mitigate a lot of these feelings by being aware of your exposure. This community in particular can make even the dazzlingly brilliant feel lumpy and unmotivated.
There was an interesting study[0] done on Facebook users in University that had the following conclusion. A quote from it:
The multivariate analysis indicated that those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives.
We tend to get blasted with other peoples' expectations and visions of success. Without establishing our _own_ definition, we'll never find that illusory success that we've projected upon other people and other circumstances.
What's _your_ definition of success? Everyone's will be different. It might be helpful to shorten your question: How to stop feeling depressed? The bleak patterns of depression are masterful at creating a monster to slay, in this case, for you: "being successful". If that dark knot was gone, would it matter?
Practice gratitude for the things that are going right in your life. Try and be kind to yourself.
People you perceive as “successful” may themselves be facing internal hardships. Placing self-worth in externally-controlled goals sets you up to feel bad about your place in life.
I used to beat myself up about my current progress and constantly comparing myself to others. Once I stopped doing that and instead focused on making small incremental goals, I started to feel much happier. It seems counterintuitive, but once I stopped focusing on “success”, I became much more successful in what I actually wanted to accomplish.
I second this. I used to think practicing gratitude was stupid, or at least not really worth my time. I have recently picked up stoicism and one key techniques seems to be "practicing negative visualization" - basically imagining how much worse of you could be. I found that once I really think through all the hardships that I could find myself in I appreciate my current situation much more and feel much happier.
Curiously, I think I also get more done now because I feel better, am in a better mood and spend less time anguishing about all the things which are not perfect or could somehow be better. It has also made me aware that many people do find themselves in various hardships and my appreciation for my situation has really grown again through this.
Stop being so hard on yourself and cut yourself some slack - if you're the perfectionist type (like me) it does a lot more harm than good!
Psychiatrists don't have special powers when it comes to choosing an SSRI, the process is almost entirely trial and error.
There is nothing wrong with going to a general practitioner, trying Lexapro, and if you don't feel anything on that, trying Wellbutrin, and then on down the line.
If you administer the Beck Depression inventory to gauge your own mood on some consistent basis before and after starting antidepressants you will be introducing far more of the scientific method into the process than most psychiatrists will.
Maintain multiple independent identities. Exercise and make friends with people who do your preferred activity.
If you have a startup or a high profile job, blog or tweet as your own persona about topics that do not fall under your line of work, but are still interesting to you.
Keep up friendships and dating and when you talk about work, only do so when it is a good story.
Socialize with people that live differently than you. There’s nothing as encouraging as talking with a bartender your same age that has a few housemates and can’t decide if they should go to grad school. You realize that you have lots of time to figure things out and to try many things in life
this is great advice, and something I wish I took more to heart when I was doing my startup out of college.
to add my 2c to this answer, I've found it's a lot easier if you've worked in a team in a more established company for 2-4 years. you know what you can and can't do, and don't have to "prove your worth". you can establish friendships, dating patterns, blogging, vlogging.
ultimately, I suspect the depression comes from a sense that you're not part of a bigger group with a shared identity. the above advice works to remind you that you are: you're part of the working class, a boxing gym, a family, etc.
> ultimately, I suspect the depression comes from a sense that you're not part of a bigger group with a shared identity.
I think this is a big part of it. I have chronic depression and anxiety but it’s pretty manageable because I work on a small-ish team and get to solve problems in a group setting a lot. In other jobs I’ve worked where I was isolated (like being the only technical person for an entire company of 100 people) I felt incredibly depressed, alone, and like I wasn’t going anywhere.
A good team early on can make a huge difference in terms of feeling supported and building confidence.
Playing music was how I got myself to do these things. It's a really fresh perspective to hang out with people who don't give a rat's arse about your job, and are better than you at something else.
"Maintain multiple independent identities" is extremely good advice.
As a student I had a moment when I decided that the standard geek "identity package" of things one was supposed to like and do was ... limiting, and that it would be better to have a wider set of interests.
Accepting the "package" is almost like embracing a cult, the cult of conformity, making itself easier to predict and monetize by the omnipresent algorithms of the tech giants that seem to have replaced god by a lot of data-crunching, leaving humanity to devise new schemes of control.
This is a rejection of the process of discovery of oneself and of a, somehow Nieztschean, independent and autonomous path in life.
Independent identities allow you to construct your being with many different fragments and melt them into one, like a Picasso painting or Vivaldi's Four Seasons play.
Being depressed is a state of mind. Being successful or not has not much to do with it (which is proven in many papers). Anxiety about failure is just a way that it manifests. Your brain always finds some ways to rationalize things that it observes. That's its job.
So if you feel a bit of rush because you really want to succeed, or if you think about things that may go wrong in order to take actions to minimize the risk - that's perfectly fine and embrace it. But if it really brings you down, then it's a depression problem, not a startup problem and that's what you want to solve.
I'm sure you've heard many many times how failures are necessary learning experience and all that stuff. But if your brain chemistry is not ok, your brain will rationalize it away - "but that's my only shot" and so on. Once again, you need to fix that chemistry. HN will offer you many suggestions some of them very reasonable, but it's likely that a professional will give you some better options.
>Being depressed is a state of mind. Being successful or not has not much to do with it.
This is so true. It's all in the head. I was doing fine and felt like crap every day, and now I couldn't be more of a loser absolutely and I felt free and my creativity was unleashed and I love my life. Having nothing to lose is a great asset to have.
For me what made me love my life is finally have the guts to say to myself "Shit... I fucked up! I will have to rebuild everything again." Failures are just chances to start everything anew, this time only a bit wiser.
> but it's likely that a professional will give you some better options.
Just want to echo this. If the issue, you suspect, is mostly about depression, just go to a Shrink. They're about as much as a Friday night at the bar, and they really do help out. Maybe try a few of them out and decide. But really, just do it.
Also, eat right, exercise, and sleep enough. I mean, duh. But it really does help a ton.
Multiple critically important things in your life. Prioritize all of them, and set boundaries to maintain this with yourself and others.
This allows your metrics of success to be distributed, success in any topic on your critical list will tend to outweigh your stresses. Also your successful topic will likely rotate among these as nature allows.
Work on not desiring outcomes so much. You have little control over it. Do the best you can, and appreciate the journey. You can even learn to appreciate pain and suffering as interesting phenomena. Meditation can make them less overwhelming or vexing. Let go a little. Be in the moment. Notice and observe. Judge yourself less. Enjoy cheap or free entertainment, fresh air, and exercise.
The problem with success is that it makes you always look forward. But sometimes you need to take a break and look back at your achievements sofar. It helps to look at them independently and not comparing with other people.
Listen to some talks by Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell. It helped me a lot to take a step back and accept here and now instead of worrying about the future. In other words, the only way you are going to end up looking back on a life full of good memories, is to make it good here and now(!), not in the future.
I started going to the psychologist to work on my anxiety/depression and so far I'm seeing good results.
A good psychologist will work on understanding the root cause of your depression, make sure you acknowledge it, and change your thoughts and actions so you can cure it.
Sell everything you own, buy some land in the country, quit your job and just chill out. Grow a garden, raise some chickens, go to farmer's markets and sell your wares. The happiest people I know quit tech years ago and became small-time farmers.
Zuckerberg is a few years older than I am and I compared myself to him back in the day. It's pretty easy to get depressed if you compare yourself to others.
I've found that focusing on yourself and not giving a shit about what other people think worked for me, that and just doing the best you can.
define and potentially reevaluate what success means to you. chances are that goal will shift considerably with lifes up and downs over your next 20-40 years, not once but several times. Acknowledging these changes, reduce a lot of stress, as you realize most of what you feel strongly about doesn't matter any more in a few years
One thing nobody seems to have brought up, is who is reinforcing these anxieties in you.
Is it your parents, is it your friends? Is it school?
4 year olds aren't depressed about being successful - they just live their life.
As you get older, your parents think your happiness is related to making money, having a family, stuff like that.
They're right to some extent. The crucial point is since you have anxiety about this issue, what has happened is their incompetence (this is a crucial point, incompetence breeds anxiety), has created anxiety in them, and they have infected you with it.
They're anxious you're not good enough, they're anxious your grades aren't high enough, they're anxious, anxious anxious. They're comparing you to their friends' kids and they're having an internal competition - they want to tell their friends how well you're doing. Their self esteem is tied to your 'success', success they've defined for you without asking you if that's what you want (This doesn't always happen, but it is extremely common)
All this is unfortunate and extremely common. Your parents/friends are just incompetent at being happy, sorry. They mean well, they just don't know how to live happily and spread that around.
The possible solutions are:
- to succeed, according to your parents' worldview, to shut them up
- to disagree with their worldview and create your own (redefine success for yourself)
- to do a combination of the two - succeed to some extent (get higher education), but also distance yourself away from them, so that their regular dose of anxiety doesn't get in the way of your self discovery
This is something everyone goes through, and doesn't get talked about enough, because most people are not aware of what really happened - they just think everyone is insecure to some extent, and that it's ok. It's not ok, but only a few will be curious enough to rediscover what THEY actually want out of life. That's what a mid-life crisis is - when people finally reach a peak in reaching what everyone else told them would make them happy, and they're not. So it's something you figure out now, or mid-life, or after, doesn't matter when really :)
121 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadMaybe have some other goals in life that you can achieve and be happy. A family. Painting. Music. Sport.
I'll never bee a pro-kiteboarder, but I still enjoy it.
Money as they keep telling us doesn't make you happy.
I live in an area where rich folk come to retire. It's sad seeing old men get excited about surfing, snorkelling, SUPing, kitesurfing, rock climbing... you guys could have been doing this 20 years ago, but you chased the big fat $$$ ... I guess at the time it made them happy. Successful. I don't know. Is there a real answer to the question?
You have to separate yourself and your identity from that of your startup. Yes you live and breathe it but no you are not it. I was my startup and when it fell I fell. It took years to recover, multiple moves, etc. Your startup is just something you're doing. It doesn't matter if it is successful or not because the only thing that matters is that you have finite time on this Earth.
If you aren't capable of doing something without going crazy and losing years and years of your precious life due to panic, then you sure as shit shouldn't have been doing it.
Keep things in perspective. Success is nice, but you will learn a lot from your startup if it fails and you will be better for it. You will have a higher chance of success doing your next startup, and you will have life experience that you can't get any other way.
If you do good work there and it fails, people will still respect what it was and who worked on it.
Stay strong, keep things in perspective, and enjoy what you do. You cannot change the world if you can't stay stable yourself. The only way you can change the world is if you are okay with yourself first.
There was an interesting study[0] done on Facebook users in University that had the following conclusion. A quote from it:
The multivariate analysis indicated that those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives.
We tend to get blasted with other peoples' expectations and visions of success. Without establishing our _own_ definition, we'll never find that illusory success that we've projected upon other people and other circumstances.
What's _your_ definition of success? Everyone's will be different. It might be helpful to shorten your question: How to stop feeling depressed? The bleak patterns of depression are masterful at creating a monster to slay, in this case, for you: "being successful". If that dark knot was gone, would it matter?
[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22165917
People you perceive as “successful” may themselves be facing internal hardships. Placing self-worth in externally-controlled goals sets you up to feel bad about your place in life.
I used to beat myself up about my current progress and constantly comparing myself to others. Once I stopped doing that and instead focused on making small incremental goals, I started to feel much happier. It seems counterintuitive, but once I stopped focusing on “success”, I became much more successful in what I actually wanted to accomplish.
Curiously, I think I also get more done now because I feel better, am in a better mood and spend less time anguishing about all the things which are not perfect or could somehow be better. It has also made me aware that many people do find themselves in various hardships and my appreciation for my situation has really grown again through this.
Stop being so hard on yourself and cut yourself some slack - if you're the perfectionist type (like me) it does a lot more harm than good!
There is nothing wrong with going to a general practitioner, trying Lexapro, and if you don't feel anything on that, trying Wellbutrin, and then on down the line.
If you administer the Beck Depression inventory to gauge your own mood on some consistent basis before and after starting antidepressants you will be introducing far more of the scientific method into the process than most psychiatrists will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck_Depression_Inventory
That's not snark, it really does mean different things to different people, and your own definition will change over time.
Also consider how many people can reasonably meet a particular definition, and what they have to give up to get there.
If you have a startup or a high profile job, blog or tweet as your own persona about topics that do not fall under your line of work, but are still interesting to you.
Keep up friendships and dating and when you talk about work, only do so when it is a good story.
Socialize with people that live differently than you. There’s nothing as encouraging as talking with a bartender your same age that has a few housemates and can’t decide if they should go to grad school. You realize that you have lots of time to figure things out and to try many things in life
to add my 2c to this answer, I've found it's a lot easier if you've worked in a team in a more established company for 2-4 years. you know what you can and can't do, and don't have to "prove your worth". you can establish friendships, dating patterns, blogging, vlogging.
ultimately, I suspect the depression comes from a sense that you're not part of a bigger group with a shared identity. the above advice works to remind you that you are: you're part of the working class, a boxing gym, a family, etc.
I think this is a big part of it. I have chronic depression and anxiety but it’s pretty manageable because I work on a small-ish team and get to solve problems in a group setting a lot. In other jobs I’ve worked where I was isolated (like being the only technical person for an entire company of 100 people) I felt incredibly depressed, alone, and like I wasn’t going anywhere.
A good team early on can make a huge difference in terms of feeling supported and building confidence.
As a student I had a moment when I decided that the standard geek "identity package" of things one was supposed to like and do was ... limiting, and that it would be better to have a wider set of interests.
This is a rejection of the process of discovery of oneself and of a, somehow Nieztschean, independent and autonomous path in life.
Independent identities allow you to construct your being with many different fragments and melt them into one, like a Picasso painting or Vivaldi's Four Seasons play.
So if you feel a bit of rush because you really want to succeed, or if you think about things that may go wrong in order to take actions to minimize the risk - that's perfectly fine and embrace it. But if it really brings you down, then it's a depression problem, not a startup problem and that's what you want to solve.
I'm sure you've heard many many times how failures are necessary learning experience and all that stuff. But if your brain chemistry is not ok, your brain will rationalize it away - "but that's my only shot" and so on. Once again, you need to fix that chemistry. HN will offer you many suggestions some of them very reasonable, but it's likely that a professional will give you some better options.
This is so true. It's all in the head. I was doing fine and felt like crap every day, and now I couldn't be more of a loser absolutely and I felt free and my creativity was unleashed and I love my life. Having nothing to lose is a great asset to have.
For me what made me love my life is finally have the guts to say to myself "Shit... I fucked up! I will have to rebuild everything again." Failures are just chances to start everything anew, this time only a bit wiser.
Just want to echo this. If the issue, you suspect, is mostly about depression, just go to a Shrink. They're about as much as a Friday night at the bar, and they really do help out. Maybe try a few of them out and decide. But really, just do it.
Also, eat right, exercise, and sleep enough. I mean, duh. But it really does help a ton.
This allows your metrics of success to be distributed, success in any topic on your critical list will tend to outweigh your stresses. Also your successful topic will likely rotate among these as nature allows.
argmax happiness through ensemble methods
Depending on your field of expertise, it can make a big difference. The bigger safety net reduces stress levels.
A good psychologist will work on understanding the root cause of your depression, make sure you acknowledge it, and change your thoughts and actions so you can cure it.
I recommend giving it a try.
I've found that focusing on yourself and not giving a shit about what other people think worked for me, that and just doing the best you can.
Is it your parents, is it your friends? Is it school?
4 year olds aren't depressed about being successful - they just live their life.
As you get older, your parents think your happiness is related to making money, having a family, stuff like that.
They're right to some extent. The crucial point is since you have anxiety about this issue, what has happened is their incompetence (this is a crucial point, incompetence breeds anxiety), has created anxiety in them, and they have infected you with it.
They're anxious you're not good enough, they're anxious your grades aren't high enough, they're anxious, anxious anxious. They're comparing you to their friends' kids and they're having an internal competition - they want to tell their friends how well you're doing. Their self esteem is tied to your 'success', success they've defined for you without asking you if that's what you want (This doesn't always happen, but it is extremely common)
All this is unfortunate and extremely common. Your parents/friends are just incompetent at being happy, sorry. They mean well, they just don't know how to live happily and spread that around.
The possible solutions are:
- to succeed, according to your parents' worldview, to shut them up
- to disagree with their worldview and create your own (redefine success for yourself)
- to do a combination of the two - succeed to some extent (get higher education), but also distance yourself away from them, so that their regular dose of anxiety doesn't get in the way of your self discovery
This is something everyone goes through, and doesn't get talked about enough, because most people are not aware of what really happened - they just think everyone is insecure to some extent, and that it's ok. It's not ok, but only a few will be curious enough to rediscover what THEY actually want out of life. That's what a mid-life crisis is - when people finally reach a peak in reaching what everyone else told them would make them happy, and they're not. So it's something you figure out now, or mid-life, or after, doesn't matter when really :)