

Ask YC: What would you attempt if you knew you couldn’t fail? - danw

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mburns
* Sneak onto the space shuttle and go into space. Optionally jumping out the door at any time (going up, in orbit or one the way down).

* Kidnap myself and demand a ridiculously high ransom from the state.

* Restart the Free Love movement.

* Put my name is as Democratic candidate, sweep the rest of the election and 100% of the super delegates, and then become the most unexpected and powerful man in the world by winning the general election

* The most epic, cross-country, high speed police chase ever.

* My favorite parts of GTA, in real life. This includes pilot lessons after breaking into an airport by jumping a 15 foot fence with a BMX bicycle I stole from a gangster on the sidewalk down the block.

* Flip a quarter heads up, repeatedly, on national TV under scientific scrutiny. Sound boring? Wait until I do it 1000 times in a row, all heads up. The astronomical odds would make me more likely to be a demigod than just a really "lucky" guy. Not enough? Flip it 10,000 more times. If you do the near-impossible enough times, people will think you are the third coming. And then life gets fun. :)

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jsmcgd
I would try to deliberately fail on purpose just to see what happened. Could
be dangerous though.

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brlewis
I bet you wouldn't try.

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jsmcgd
You're right, I would be way too scared.

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kirubakaran
Sleep with supermodels, starting with Jessica Alba.

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anaphoric
Just open your eyes to the many beautiful women around you right now.
'Supermodels' are just an illusion -- cartoon characters which distract you
from what is real.

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kirubakaran
"beautiful women around you right now"

I don't fail with them :-p

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marvin
I'd make everybody happy, without compromising the long-term prospects of the
human race. And then I'd do something even more awesome, but I'd have to begin
somewhere.

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pg
Envisioning what things will be like 10,000 years from now.

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kirubakaran
Won't it make life unbearably painful for you now?

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koolmoe
I think the possibility of failure is a great motivator, so I wonder if I
would have the motivation to attempt to succeed if I knew I wouldn't fail.

The most interesting things I've ever done started with questions that began
"I wonder if..."

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wallflower
I've changed my mind. After reading some of these answers. I remember reading
(some possibly apocryphal) stories about Tibetan monks able to run for days on
end and sit on mountaintops in freezing weather without getting cold.

I would attempt to learn how to unlock the true power of the mind and teach
others to do so (to eliminate fear and the self-talk stuff that stops us)

[http://www.presscluboftibet.org/china-tibet-17/lung-gom-
pa.h...](http://www.presscluboftibet.org/china-tibet-17/lung-gom-pa.htm)

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sspencer
I'd attempt (and succeed, apparently) at creating pervasive and reliable life-
extension technology.

Either that or some kind of upload technology. Charles Stross' "Vile
Offspring," here I come!

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ralphb
Strong AI, obviously.

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wallflower
Start a profitable business and be successful in mentoring others how to start
their profitable business (not network marketing by any means)

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imgabe
The lottery.

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marcus
What does the word "fail" mean?

~~~
brlewis
It means to throw an exception.

I suppose if I knew I couldn't fail, I'd just have to overload the meaning of
the return value.

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ced
In that spirit, maybe you can't fail, but _will you terminate_?

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whacked_new
ToE.

Which makes this a very funny question: you could also attempt to calculate
the instantaneous position of an electron within an atom. And not fail. And
when you don't fail, you failed.

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nkohari
Solve the halting problem. One minor detriment: because it would effectively
create an infinite solution in a finite space, the resulting impact on space-
time would probably be cataclysmic.

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thorax
Become ruler of the world?

Ground me somewhere on this one.

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davidw
Fly?

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lvecsey
Some kind of space propulsion company like John Carmack

And also autonomous control of some other things.

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rmason
Cure hunger. Challenging problem where you would need the wind at your back.

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edw519
Sex

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kirubakaran
Just curious... How can one 'fail' at sex? :)

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falsestprophet
Obviously you've never been to high school.

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kirubakaran
Oh I didn't realize that only "involving at least one additional person" type
sex counted.

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mbup
I would set 1 = 2, and the universe would implode!

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anaphoric
Dive the blue hole in Dahab

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speric
Begin a career as a trader.

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philh
Faster-than-light travel.

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DarrenStuart
take on world poverty.

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grammer
time travel!

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curi
Persuade parents to act much more rationally, invent enough life extension and
backup-and-restore-of-people for immortality, win the war on terror (with a
single heartfelt speech), make dirt cheap self-replicating, easily
programmable nano-bots that understand English.

