I found this in my notes from June 2024 and I've decided to post it.
Failure isn’t personal. Nothing is against you (well, apart from yourself!). That pain you feel when stuff doesn’t work? It’s not personal. Life isn’t personally dealing you blows and picking you in particular and deciding, “Yeah, today, I’m going to make things suck for Akinola and all his businesses.” Again, it’s not personal. There’s a randomness of events and the similarity of experience for everyone, which is “life is hard”. Doing hard things is hard. If creating something and putting it out there for billions of people to use was super easy, everyone would do it, and then it would be nothing. The amount of friction or resistance that moves civilisation forward is almost “catastrophic”. There’s evidence in history — wars have brought about the largest technological advancement, and Covid ushered us into a remote world. Everything that pushed mankind to the next level has come at a cost that the world itself seems to almost resist so the thing has to make its way through. If, at the macro level, that is true. Then, why should it be easy at the micro-level to build a SaaS? Just software? You’re going to fucking grind to make it impactful. It is not personal.
You can't take it personally now that you know it is not personal. I learned not to. Instead, I’ve decided to approach life and everything more scientifically than anything else — if (plan a) doesn’t work, why didn’t it work? Do I have enough evidence that it sucks? What new insights did I learn from this? Okay, onto plan b. It’s not personal. I may feel a certain way about the plan not working, even though I love the idea so dearly, it’s time to say goodbye to it and start somewhere else. I’ve concluded that approaching life with curiosity is a better way to live. I didn’t start here — I made it through many failures to not see failure as what it is but as a guide that says, “There’s no way here; try something else”. These days, I bang my head less on the wall because nothing I’m going through is unique to me. It’s the randomness of life that is hard. (Okay, okay, maybe some mistakes are unique, but making mistakes is also part of the randomness of life; you can’t eliminate it.)
I’ve learned to take stock. To measure what has worked and what hasn’t, but also not be confined to just statistical evidence, and to ask why? To understand its story and real effect, ask, “Why does this matter?” I often let the “intuition” (more on this in the next paragraph) lead the decision-making process. The decision is not made by the committee. I try as much as possible to own the decision 100%.
Finally, “intuition”, I noticed, comes from a lattice of knowledge, frameworks, and experiences. If you only learn from experience, you’ll learn too late and make too many mistakes. So lately, I’ve become more of a learning machine — from people who have done it before me. I won’t be the first or the last to attempt exactly what I am doing. So, as much as possible, I’m conscious about building the “intuition” muscle and making better mistakes.