Failure is Better

When I was a little kid, I wasn't really interested in sports like baseball or football, but I ended up playing a few years of T-ball and little league, because that's what boys did. The first time, and the first pitch I was at bat in little league, where there was actually a pitcher, I smashed the ball into the outfield. It was total blind luck though. After that, I barely ever got on base. I had no idea how to hit a baseball. Since I was a little kid with no experience in anything, maybe 7 years old, I just blindly hacked at the ball. I didn't try to break down the steps or learn any hand-eye coordination. Apparently none of the coaches were great at instructing kids, etc... Anyway, I eventually dropped out of baseball and other team sports.

Maybe by the time I was 13 or 14 I realized I could learn things myself, so to get good at something, all it took was interest. One of my middle school teachers explained the basic steps of juggling for example, and importantly said practice was the main ingredient. I spent a few evenings on it. I still remember the moment when I went from not being able to juggle to juggling 3 balls. Then I realized I could learn and was actually pretty smart, and went on from there.

It is very bad to "succeed" by luck, at least from the point of view of gaining skill and knowledge. There's less than zero information in luck. Luck turns into a self-aggrandizing fantasy for many people. The stock market repeatedly does that to millions of people. The mechanism for it is quite clear. Luck happens. A person has an archetypal model of a "successful investor" like Warren Buffet. They believe they're Warren Buffet. They boldly gamble in the stonk market casino, then lose all their money. They don't understand what "financiers" actually do--they're basically criminals.

The one time lucky Joe Schmoe stonk gambler just replays fantasy movies in their mind's eye about being rich. Maybe some of them seize on "charts" or some similar nonsense and manage to stretch the gambling out for many years instead of losing everything in mere weeks or months.

A lot of the tech industry is built around the concept of "being the next google", so investors will throw millions or billions at some company in the hopes they can buy a whole new market. If some company can grow, even if it's really an implausible business and has no chance of making a profit, at some point it can go public and with some creative accounting and PR, can unload shares on the public and the ground floor investors can chalk up a win. That model is really stupid and is flailing around and failing right now. It was the model of the money printing era of 2000 through a couple of years ago.

Anyway, the lesson I personally learned from doing projects for companies and myself for years and years is "don't do". Almost every endeavor is pretty stupid and a waste of time and effort. When there's an obvious problem to solve that many people need, sure, go ahead and give it a shot. Then if you have a good, efficacious solution, you might "win". If you're trying to do something that's unclear and very complicated, or is a hodgepodge of ideas, no chance. You're wasting your life energy on trash.

There's a much more practical and pragmatic model for the would be engineer or inventor or problem solver. Build your thing--it's pretty cheap to do it these days. Put it on youtube. See what happens. You might even end up collaborating with people on it. You can basically cut out all the corporate overhead people and middlemen people and finance people that way. If you build a better mousetrap, people will actually buy it.

I think "the system" and all its overhead and expenses that will potentially lead to personal riches, just really isn't worth it. We all basically expend our whole lives hoping we can "get rich". The whole system exists to protect a handful of randos who actually do. It's self-defeating dumb-fuck behavior.