swombat.com

daily articles for founders

Running a startup in the UK (or with a UK subsidiary)? Get in touch with my company, GrantTree. We help with government funding.
Don't dwell on startup mistakes  

That was the point when the failure really hit me for the first time. I'm a very optimistic person, but for a few weeks there I was very unhappy. The company didn't end though. I let it linger via my nights and weekends for another year and half or so, while I essentially dwelled on the past.

Continuing to think about it and tinker with it was certainly preventing me from moving forward onto bigger and better things. It was essentially a complete waste of time.

I had trouble letting go. And then one day everything changed. It wasn't an explicit decision I can remember, but more of a shift in state of mind. If anything, the trigger may have been moving my server and losing some of the files such that I couldn't easily get the learnection code running again.

Knowing when you've failed is a lot harder than knowing when you've succeeded, but you need the former to get to the latter.

As I argued before, impatience may kill startups, but it also frees up the founders of those startups to move onto better opportunities.

More from the library:
Working for a no-shot startup
Three traffic triage questions
Business storytelling