You'll fail. Over and over again. If that sentence makes you uncomfortable, stop reading. You're not ready.
The first product you ship will suck. No one will use it. Or worse-they'll laugh at it, then copy it when you quit. The pitch deck you spent 72 hours perfecting will be trashed in 2 minutes by a VC who invests more in wine than in people. The algorithm won't work, the sales won't close, the team will fall apart. You'll get humiliated. Rejected. Replaced. That's good.
Every single successful product I've built came from a graveyard of failed ones. The code I wrote at Harvard was a disaster. The first rockets I launched blew up. Literally. You want a fair shot? Stop expecting it. It doesn't exist. The market doesn't care about your feelings. It doesn't hand out wins to the most talented or the most hardworking-it hands them to the most relentless.
I've watched people smarter than me fold. I've hired them, admired them, lost to them, then outlived them. Not because I was better-but because I was dumb enough to keep going when logic said stop. I was too deep in it to quit. That's what you need to understand: failure isn't a phase-it's the cost of domination. You want outsized results? Prepare for outsized losses.
Most people can't stomach this. They get punched once and crawl back to comfort. They post a quote about learning from failure, then never launch again. That's cosmetic resilience. Looks good on LinkedIn. Doesn't build anything.
