
Ask HN: How did you overcome the fear of failing? - fullofsid
You shouldn&#x27;t be afraid to fail is a mantra on every successful founder&#x27;s lips but as much as I agree on the shouldn&#x27;t part I am desperately looking for ways to suppress that continuous stream of thought that keeps negating my efforts and telling me &quot;it&#x27;s not worth it&quot;, &quot;nobody needs it&quot;, &quot;nobody would use this&quot;. If you had a similar experience how did you shut the door on such thoughts and sailed through?
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itamarst
Evidence.

Instead of coming up with idea and guessing what would be useful, I did
research on problems people had, and then got additional evidence that a
particular problem I'd discovered resonated. (See e.g.
[https://stackingthebricks.com/how-do-you-create-a-product-
pe...](https://stackingthebricks.com/how-do-you-create-a-product-people-want-
to-buy-video/) for intro this approach.)

That meant every time I had those negative thoughts, I could come back with
"but you have so much evidence!".

(In my case evidence was: bunch of online discussions of people talking about
problems, wrote some blog posts about those problems, one blog post got tens
of thousands of hits, and other blog posts on topic got lots of hits too. So
clearly a problem people have. And product is something these particular
people will pay for.)

~~~
tudelo
Where would you suggest people go to search for problems?

~~~
itamarst
I suggest going through stackingthebricks.com and just reading lots of the
content there (not my site, just a place I've learned a lot from).

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eksemplar
Those kind of thoughts aren’t really fear of failure, and you can’t just make
them go away. If they burden your life, you should probably see a psychiatrist
about involuntary negative thoughts.

If they don’t burden your life, think them through. Is it true? Would nobody
use your product? Would you? Ask someone else if they would.

Another good thing to start with is the why. Why are you making the product?
Are you trying to become rich? Are you filling a need? Are you doing it
because it’s fun? Are you learning something?

Everyone fails though, what matters is that you admit it when you do.

Knowing when you’ve failed can be a bit tricky though, especially when you
haven’t made an exact mistake. So set some goals for your product, and
evaluate how you meet those goals, and if you don’t, evaluate if it’s worth
setting new goals or trying something else.

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ugochiowo
I try to see life as a big experiment.

The fact that I didn't get something right the first time doesn't mean that I
will never be right. With each attempt, you learn something new. Thomas Edison
made 1000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the lightbulb, but learned,
adapted, and tried again. If you learned something, you didn't fail :)

Go for it.

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codegeek
For me, it is more about the "fear of not doing something that I really want
to do" which keeps me going and not worry about failing. So to overcome the
fear of failing, I would say be more afraid of the fact that you will not do
anything and regret it on your death bed.

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Quequau
My own experience is of getting sucked into the fear and subsequently allowing
it to cause me to fail, like some sort of slow-mo target fixation. This is
unpleasant and leads to undesirable outcomes, so I can't recommend it.

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Huhty
As long as you keep learning, you aren't failing.

