I Conditioned Myself to Fail

I'm not a mental health professional, and I don't know the author. Please be assured that I don't mean any disrespect whatsoever: consider getting tested for ADHD by a mental health professional.

I was diagnosed very late, since my ADHD was of the "inattentive" kind. I would not be troublesome at home or at school, like an hyperactive child would. A lot of people like this go undiagnosed.

One of the traits of ADHD is that our brains crave novelty, and that is definitely one of my struggles. Having professional help makes a difference.

> When I’m building something, that information is the thing coming to life in front of my eyes, every new button etc is awesome.

The neurotypical version of this is called "being in the zone", which just means "enjoying what you are doing, so holding concentration for long periods of time takes very little effort". The ADHD version of this is more intense, it's called hyperfocus. The activity absorbs all of your attention. You barely feel hunger or sleepiness, you can literally go a it for days, you keep thinking about it while you are not doing it. It's useful if you happen to hyperfocus on something that is helpful to you.

Well, zero criticism IS a form of criticism so I don't blame the author for not being motivated after the fact. I'd even say its the worst kind of criticism because it leaves you with nothing to build next.

But I think they are highlighting an important thing here that most of us struggle with...building is fun, progress is discrete and clear, the feedback loop is very tight. Selling and marketing to people sucks, its clunky, the feedback loops are variable, and if you're inclined more to being an introvert it is very exhausting.

I'm not sure the author is conditioned to fail as much as they are just more inclined to build.

First, thanks for sharing.

Second, as I read this and other similar posts over the years I understand exactly what you mean. Although, in my case it's worse. I've built lots of things and left it in various degrees of completion before making it public. Sometimes, I go back and make improvements but still never launching.

This hits home. I love the thrill of the build and I immediately stop caring once it's done. I love the 'rewire for action' perspective because I've conditioned myself that seeking information IS action. But it's not really, it's decision avoidance via constructive procrastination. And that feels amazing because it makes me more knowledgeable while also ensuring that I avoid any anxiety associated with execution. Gotta fix this.

This resonates hard with me. A huge list of partially-completed projects, work stopping right around the "boring but easy finishing off work". Incredible waste.

Edit: this is why we have teamwork and division of labour, btw.

I tend to believe that whatever a person ends up doing is what they at actually "want" to do at some inner emotional level (which they may not consciously be aware of).

So this person wants to build, but after releasing things to lukewarm feedback, wants to not work on them anymore. Why would they want that? Well, that is a pretty normal behavior I think. But I would speculate...

I wonder if this person is like me? Because they sound kinda like it. If so, I'd guess that they know that they're capable of a lot, so they're inspired to work really hard at goals, but that they're also mortified at presenting themselves to the world as confident and capable publicly. So they can work really hard when it's private and based on their internal self-image, but when it becomes public they have to reconcile it with their public embarrassment at who they are, and so they choose (in the sense of: their fear chooses for them) instead to hide and go back to working in private where it is safe. They are hoping for something else to happen: probably, they release one of their projects and it is so well-received, and garners so much respect, that they find a new public identity which they can step into and inhabit, allowing them to be proud of themselves and solving their inner problem.

I wonder (more analogy to myself): was this person bullied or ostracized as a child, and made to feel like being confident and proud in public was shameful? If I've guessed right I hope you figure it out (and then please tell me what you find cause I could use some tips...). I wonder what they want to have happen when they release a project? What, if they had to admit to it, would their most happy outcome upon releasing a product look like? Probably it will be sort of embarrassing to even describe, but the details are probably telling: they will point straight at the core anxiety. It will be a fantasy about the anxiety being cured.

Just speculating. But I would imagine that the explanation here isn't the real one, because the actual explanation will cause their behavior to completely change, instead of just building an intellectual edifice around it. (Personally I am very skeptical of any explanation that goes "because ADHD", because, what causes the ADHD? In some people it seems to be intrinsic but in lots of others it's clearly induced by something social. So is it fixable? Are there stories of it being "fixed" by solving the social issue? I dunno. But surely the goal is to somehow not live in this tension anymore: either fix the thing or let it go, and not be stuck in a loop of trying to get it fixed by some external blessing.)

    > But then when I launch, I either don’t get much feedback at all, or I get a lot of feedback for a day, which then dies down completely after the launch.
    
    The harsh reality is that most products fail and due to so many failed attempts, I kind of internalised that I’m doing effort for nothing.
    
    But then whenever there’s a sale or a positive comment, I get another small jolt of motivation and I can build a bit again.

There's nothing wrong with that.

Despite Garry Tan's advice, I ended up building a travel planning app (initially just for personal use). I shared it with Reddit and ended up with a few thousand users. It had a big peak of active users that's settled down into a small community of very sticky users; never a commercial success. What keeps me coming back to it time and again is that I use it myself to plan my trips and every time I take it on a trip, I learn something new and spend a bit more time tidying it up or adding some missing feature.

I’ve found that I like the thrill of designing a project as I get older. But not building. By design I don’t mean UI - which I suck at.

I have experience up and down the stack from requirements analysis and pre-sales, enough project management to get by, back end development, database, cloud architecture and “DevOps” [sic] and creating deployment pipelines. I’m not bragging, I’m just old (50).

I would have to hire someone to do any front end work except ironically hosted call centers.

I can do all that myself for a large project and for smaller projects I could simplify the “DevOps” portion. But knowing the work involved, I would rather lead a team at this point in my life and work with the “business”, project managers and people who want to be heads down.

Honestly though, the one thing I wouldn’t be good at anyway is marketing and sales and that’s the most important part of getting a project off the ground.

Very much relatable. I have dozens of high effort GitHub repos that I didn’t touch after launching it. For me it works by sparring with friends to really grasp if something is a viable long term idea or not and then stick to it.

I’m starting to feel like yeah, dopamine and information overload have their effects, but I also feel like there is a certain point in life where people age out of “the extrinsic motivation force field” that insulates and propels young people toward adulthood and then leaves them once resources are reallocated to the next crop of kids who are primed to enter the labor market.

I found the image at the bottom very surprising and enlightening. I wonder where it is from. It's really a new thought for me.