> It’s like anecdotes you hear from religious people during a disaster. “I lost five of my kids. But I’m so thankful that God looked out for me and saved one”
I am glad you edited your comment slightly because it was worse than what remained (which is still terrible and insensitive).
That said, one of my favorite quotes, by Mark Twain is:
"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way".
Which is to say that it is impossible for most to align with the mind of someone who loses a business, or much worse, a child, without having held that cat by the tail. And so, your comment, while misplaced, is understandable because you don't have a good frame of reference.
Additionally, in my particular case, well, the 2008 economic implosion caught most everyone by surprise. It was like a nuclear bomb dropped. Few saw it coming. Millions of businesses went down. Millions of people lost their homes and jobs. And, while I not, by any means, perfect and without mistake in my life, I find it hard to interpret such a catastrophic exogenous factor as a personal failure. Sure, it would have been nice to have had $10MM in the bank to survive it. Most non-VC companies do not have this luxury. We had five million dollar sale contracts evaporate overnight when our customers, in turn, had their banks materially reduce or cancel lines of credit. We had customers send truckloads of our products back to help us because they were filing for bankruptcy and the courts would have grabbed hold of our (unpaid) products and they would have been stuck in the hands of a trustee for months, even more than a year. Etc.
Like I said, sometimes you have to hold the cat by the tail to really understand.
I posted that 19 hours ago. I couldn’t have made any recent edits…
> I find it hard to interpret such a catastrophic exogenous factor as a personal failure
I mentioned in another reply that the 2008 crash hurt me too. It was definitely a personal failure that I had five mortgages where I owed a half million dollars, put 0% down on four of them and only 10% down on the fifth and I was only making $70K from my primary job at the time and didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
Your original comment, which I saw before the edit, characterized my comment as copium. Someone else responded to that before your edit.
Anyhow, your 2008 failure was, sorry to say, 100% your fault. Perhaps you were younger and inexperienced. We've all made stupid mistakes due to inexperience. Buying five homes with 0% down payment was an extreme gamble. We live and die by the consequences of such actions.
In my case, we were conducting business as usual and then, out of nowhere, the music just stopped...and there were not chairs. Very few people saw that coming. Those who did were focused on the financial world rather than engaged in running a business. This is why so many businesses got caught unprepared for such an event.
I am sorry you lost it all. That's terrible. I lost a home before due to employment difficulties. My mistake in that case --funny enough, young and stupid-- was to buy it with an adjustable rate loan. When interest rates went from roughly 6% to over 12% my world got turned upside-down in a hurry. Like you, I wasn't making enough money at the time to survive that. I lost the house a couple of years later.
Interestingly enough, that's what pushed me towards entrepreneurship. I had to earn more money. The only way at the time was to start an small electronics manufacturing business while keeping my day job.
So, yes, in that case, really fucking dumb decision on my part. Yet, at the end, it launched my entrepreneurial journey, something I am very happy about today.
> Honestly, that feels like copium.
It’s like anecdotes you hear from religious people during a disaster. “I lost five of my kids. But I’m so thankful that God looked out for me and saved one”
It still says “copium”
> Anyhow, your 2008 failure was, sorry to say, 100% your fault.
Isn’t that what I just said that they were my mistakes?
> And not being willing to admit your mistakes and assess your weaknesses means that you continuously make the same mistakes.
And then I went on to admit my mistakes.
In the very comment that you replied to I said It was definitely a personal failure
> Interestingly enough, that's what pushed me towards entrepreneurship. I had to earn more money
And I decided to upskill and I knew when I signed the offer letter at each job, how much I was going to make without any risk.
> Like you, I wasn't making enough money at the time to survive that. I lost the house a couple of years later.
I didn’t say I couldn’t keep my house. I made more than enough to keep my primary home. It was very much a strategic default. I had another house built and got an FHA loan three years to the day after my last foreclosure. Money is never personal to me
I am glad you edited your comment slightly because it was worse than what remained (which is still terrible and insensitive).
That said, one of my favorite quotes, by Mark Twain is:
"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way".
Which is to say that it is impossible for most to align with the mind of someone who loses a business, or much worse, a child, without having held that cat by the tail. And so, your comment, while misplaced, is understandable because you don't have a good frame of reference.
Additionally, in my particular case, well, the 2008 economic implosion caught most everyone by surprise. It was like a nuclear bomb dropped. Few saw it coming. Millions of businesses went down. Millions of people lost their homes and jobs. And, while I not, by any means, perfect and without mistake in my life, I find it hard to interpret such a catastrophic exogenous factor as a personal failure. Sure, it would have been nice to have had $10MM in the bank to survive it. Most non-VC companies do not have this luxury. We had five million dollar sale contracts evaporate overnight when our customers, in turn, had their banks materially reduce or cancel lines of credit. We had customers send truckloads of our products back to help us because they were filing for bankruptcy and the courts would have grabbed hold of our (unpaid) products and they would have been stuck in the hands of a trustee for months, even more than a year. Etc.
Like I said, sometimes you have to hold the cat by the tail to really understand.