Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

From slide 6, "Why should I not do it?"

You should not do it if... you can't focus if everything else is falling apart

I have to say, this has probably been one of the most essential skills for me. There is an incredible amount of crazy shit going on in any real start-up, stuff that threatens the very existence of the start-up, on a pretty regular basis. "The world could end tomorrow" seems almost like the standard situation for most of the early life of the start-up. If you can't get stuff done in those conditions, you're pretty much toast right from the start.

I wonder what other skill correlates with this... I've always had an (un)healthy ability to ignore people around me and focus on whatever it is I'm doing (whether it's working, reading, playing computer games, etc). That ability also applies to meta-distractions... I can still throw myself into my work even when I don't know if that work will still have any meaning the next day, or when something really disruptive has just happened in my personal life, or when I'm sitting under a large cloud of uncertainty about my future. Sometimes that might give the impression that I don't care about what's happening around me, but I do - it's just that I can put it aside and focus on the task at hand...

From the same slide:

You should not do it if... you have a low appetite for risk

I would disagree with that, though. Appetite is the wrong word. I don't like risk, I don't enjoy it, and I avoid it whenever possible. However, what I think does help is to have a high tolerance for risk. This is somewhat related to the point above, of course. Tolerance and appetite are different, though.

Your comment about a low appetite for risk reminds me of the entrepreneur Bob Reiss who wrote the book "Low Risk, High Reward," which was all about controlling and offloading risk in a startup. His central thesis was that good entrepreneurs are actually quite adept at getting others to take on the risk, or structuring deals so as to convert fixed costs to variable, and that no good entrepreneur actually enjoys having more risk when they can take on less risk.

Sure, tolerance is probably a better word, but think back to when you were starting woobius... weren't you just itching to take that risk no matter what the consequences?

I've often wondered if you can acquire this quality that stops people from committing to building a startup. This ability to delude yourself, to be relentlessly resourceful, to "get shit done" without being too concerned with whether it will work or not. Self-doubt is _really_ _really_ hard to get over.

I don't think you ever get over self-doubt. It's just another thing you have to overcome day after day. One strategy, as you mentioned, is to delude yourself. My cure is a dose of self-deprecating laughter with my co-founder. "We are such idiots for doing this..."

Risk is not something you tolerate nor is it something you have an appetite for, instead it's just something you get used to. It's analogous to getting your sea legs on a boat.

I think what you are calling an appetite for risk is actually a desire for adventure and the excitement of discovery. Risk is just something that tags along for the ride.

think back to when you were starting woobius... weren't you just itching to take that risk no matter what the consequences?

Absolutely not. I was very keen to start it, but very worried about all the different risks involved, and what would be the best ways to reduce them.

In the end, I had to choose to tolerate some of those risks - but that's not the same thing as saying that I had an "appetite" for them!...

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