In 2012, I got super into the rationality community in New York. I was surrounded by people passionate about thinking better and using that thinking to tackle ambitious projects. And in 2012 we all decided to take on really hard projects that were pretty likely to fail, because the expected value seemed high, and it seemed like even if we failed we’d learn a lot in the process and grow stronger.
That happened—we learned and grew. We became adults together, founding companies and nonprofits and creating holidays from scratch.
But two years later, our projects were either actively failing, or burning us out. Many of us became depressed and demoralized.
Maybe in retrospect it would have been wiser to try to form success spirals of increasingly ambitious projects?
I don’t think that would have solved this particular problem. Each individual person was capable enough to choose the project they choose. A lot of people worked together on the startup Metamed, and I (don’t think?) anyone regrets the experience per se—starting a company is going to be risky no matter how skilled you are, and people did in fact learn a lot from the experience.
The problem was not that some people failed, the problem was that everyone failed at the same time.
(Different people who started different companies may have different experiences, and in some cases a smaller project may have been appropriate, but it didn’t seem like the case for the company founders at least)
Maybe in retrospect it would have been wiser to try to form success spirals of increasingly ambitious projects?
I don’t think that would have solved this particular problem. Each individual person was capable enough to choose the project they choose. A lot of people worked together on the startup Metamed, and I (don’t think?) anyone regrets the experience per se—starting a company is going to be risky no matter how skilled you are, and people did in fact learn a lot from the experience.
The problem was not that some people failed, the problem was that everyone failed at the same time.
(Different people who started different companies may have different experiences, and in some cases a smaller project may have been appropriate, but it didn’t seem like the case for the company founders at least)