Learning to lose well

The no's, the abandoned projects and the clients who left. On why hiding your failures leaves out the most useful part of the story.

If you go through my GitHub you’ll find abandoned repositories and things marked deprecated. They’re there on purpose.

I could delete them. It would look cleaner and it would present better. But then anyone passing through would only see the part that worked, and that’s exactly the part that teaches nothing.

The problem with stories told backwards

Every entrepreneurship story gets told in reverse.

It’s told from the ending, once you already know which decision was the right one, which is why it always sounds inevitable. The founder explains how they saw the opportunity, bet on it and got it right. What disappears is the six months of doubt, the two projects that went nowhere, and the night they nearly walked away.

When you’re fifteen and those are the only versions you hear, you draw a reasonable and completely false conclusion: that people who are any good get it right most of the time.

Then it’s your turn, it goes wrong three times in a row, and instead of thinking “that’s how this works” you think “so I’m not any good.”

Losing isn’t the opposite of progress

Several banks told me no before one said yes. I’ve had projects die without a single user. I’ve priced work badly, estimated timelines terribly, and shipped things I’m not proud of.

None of those times felt like learning. It just feels like losing.

The difference showed up later: losing well means losing and keeping the information. Losing badly means losing and keeping only the embarrassment, which is what makes you take less of a swing next time.

What separates people who keep going from people who stop usually isn’t how often it went wrong. It’s how often they managed to keep it from changing their aim.

How I handle it

Three things that work for me. None are clever, but they’re real.

I publish it. If something didn’t work, I say so. Not out of moral transparency, but because it forces me to look at it instead of filing it away quickly so I don’t have to think about it.

I separate the outcome from the decision. Sometimes you decide well and it goes badly anyway. If you only evaluate by outcome, you learn superstitions instead of judgment.

I set a review date, not a burial. A paused project isn’t a failed one. Almost everything I do now contains pieces of things that once looked like a dead end.

For anyone who just took a no

A no is information about one specific door, not about you.

I came close to reading those bank rejections as a verdict on whether I belonged there. They weren’t. They were six different people applying a procedure that didn’t account for my case.

Keep knocking. It only takes one opening.