My father was an elite worker in a Communist country. He cared about his work(in contrast with most of his colleges), was smart and had an independent mindset. He left because his life was impossible to live there. He went away with some close relatives while it was yet possible(over time it became almost impossible to escape).

In a capitalist society and with very little money he experienced a shock at first but over time he did very well.

Going back for visiting after the Iron Curtain fell he was considered someone like a traitor or something by the people that remained there. Most of them were nostalgic of the communist regime.

It is easy to understand, first the people that loved freedom or autonomy either left or were just exterminated. The people that remained were like sheep with zero personal initiative that needed constantly someone leading them telling them what to do.

Then suddenly the System collapses and they are told to live by their own means. They are old(and old dogs can't learn new tricks) and there is no people around that can show them as they were exterminated, or institutions, or examples to copy.

Countries like the US were created mostly by people that could not stand being told what to do in their original European countries. That makes not only the structures in the US but their genetics as well.

In communist countries people with initiative were exterminated and that not only affected their economic and political structures, but their genetics as well, they did not passed their genes to a new generation.

Probably because of my genes I am entrepreneur today. It is not for everyone as there is not such a thing as "safety".

I disagree.

In my career I started getting close to the people that had already done what I wanted and just asked them for advice.

The advice they gave me was incredible and the most useful thing you could do.

The most important thing is that it must be an active process. You must do the work to decode and extract the information.

Different personalities will give you different advices. If someone has a very strong visceral nature, her advice is going to be "don't be too visceral, think before you act", because that is the advice she needs, but not what you need.

That advice is completely useless if your nature is thinking too much, and you don't have a problem thinking, you love to think all the time. The advice you need is acting instead of thinking, to take decisions.

So you need to be active and ask specifically the problems you are having when trying to do what you wanted. Most of the time you will realize the super big problems that you have are the most stupid and obvious thing for the person you are asking.

It is so easy for them because their own nature or personality makes it so for them. 9 times out of 10 they will give you an easy, "obvious" solution you never thought about.

Yes. It's important to analyze why the person giving the advice is suggesting a particular course of action.

If it's face to face, after I ask for advice, I always follow up with "Why?"

If you learn something in a bad way it takes more effort that learning that straight well.

If you learn English pronunciation from Europeans you are not really learning English, you are learning Spanish, German or French pronunciation rules on English words.

Spain and all the Spanish speaking countries(Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela,Ecuador, Peru...) is such a big environment speaking just one language that they usually don't have the need to learn proper English pronunciation. You could even live in parts of the US speaking Spanish only.

Also happens with French in Africa. I have so many French friends that don't speak English well because they don't need it.

Any Spanish speaker can communicate with a Portuguese, French and specially Italian with little effort because they are so similar.

It also happens in Germany, being much smaller environment but having all those Nordic countries that speak Germanic languages they can communicate with little effort.

The exception being small countries like Netherlands or Switzerland in which work is done in English being interconnected with the global economy.

>Any Spanish speaker can communicate with a Portuguese, French and specially Italian with little effort because they are so similar.

For any native French speaker without prior exposure to it, Spanish is just as incomprehensible as Russian or Dutch.

As someone who has spent more than 10 years working remotely I don't understand what you are talking about.

When I was working away I spent two hours everyday on my car commuting breathing the toxic air of traffic jams of big cities. That exhausted me and was very expensive in time, energy and money.

I can interact with humans I love on my own terms now much more time than that every day. I can do exercise outside for an hour on the Wild, a luxury impossible before.

Are you an adult or a child? Are you a slave or a serf?

It looks like you have some kind of education that make you powerless when nobody tells you what to do every second.

That even in your own house you are not the master, but someone else is.

I recommend the first thing you do is work on your mindset:

You are the master of your life and can take ownership and responsibility for it.

>Some people are quite good at focusing at home. It varies person by person. We have some people, who are great at fully remote work.

I am really good at focusing at home NOW but it took lots of training to be good at.

People are taught to read and write or ride a bicycle but are expected to be productive working from home from day 1.

I know extremely successful people and all of them made huge mistakes in their lives. But I don't believe you are using a good strategy here and find your advice is bad:

1. You should quit as soon as possible is you are getting nowhere. We don't need more miserable entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is probably not for you if you fail consistently. Don't waste your live doing something you are miserable at.

2. Each failure can really hurt you, no different from making a mistake while skiing or driving. It can destroy your life: Your relationships, your wealth and health.

3. You don't automatically improve as time passes. Specially if you learn on your own without good teachers. You will acquire "bad practices" or "vices" like if you try to learn to play tennis on your own: It will take you longer to "unlearn" your vices than if you learned from good teachers.

The first thing I would recommend is that you make friends that are entrepreneurs so you learn from each other and support each other.

I sense a very individualistic behavior from your writing but I see customers as friends and that helped me a lot. I give them way more value that what I extract to support my business, and that is the secret. People are not stupid, in the same way children "sense" who really loves them fast, customers could sense very fast the value you give them.

You also develop over time a good intuition on the value you are creating if you know how to listen to your custommers. You don't need 12 years for that, 1 or 2 years is enough.

I understand that "what does not kill you makes you stronger" but I have experienced what failure feels, and it really can kill you, emotionally, mentally, socially and finally physically.

The way to success is making mistakes frequent and small, so small that it can't hurt you: Instead of risking a million dollars you risk a thousand and escalate.

Instead of making mistakes you meet the people that have done what you want and you learn from THEIR mistakes, so you don't need to repeat them.

They will help you and love to do so. Dozens of entrepreneurs have helped me when I just asked them and some of them are good friends now.

> I see customers as friends and that helped me a lot. I give them way more value that what I extract to support my business, and that is the secret. People are not stupid, in the same way children "sense" who really loves them fast, customers could sense very fast the value you give them. You also develop over time a good intuition on the value you are creating...

I see it this way as well. I serve a small niche, and some specific problems therein. I really want the people with these issues to have my solution. It sounds lame but that is more of a motivation to me than the money. Broken thing turns into fixed thing that resumes generating value for the customer. That endpoint is my goal.

I won't devalue my efforts by underpricing, people should pay a fair price. But the money is not the primary driver. If either profit or passion were not there I would probably just do something else.

My equation seems to be that if I get at least a few customers, enough to cover my out-of-pocket costs, then I'll take a risk on my time getting eventually paid for.

The guy had a bunch of great ideas because he did things like dissecting hundreds of bodies, studied and analyzed and drew what he learned so other people could benefit from that.

He was a master painter that worked all the time.

Most engineering ideas of Da Vinci were shit precisely because he never executed them. But he was a great illustrator.

How do you know an idea is awful or not?

Paul Graham does not have an idea, and he is a grand master expert in the field.

The best ideas from YC backed companies looked awful for Paul Graham, he just trusted the people behind them.

This is a horrible story: Someone works so much that falls sleep and kills his family members.

Working so much is the definition of "negative returns": Working over the limits of exhaustion means you do not only not create wealth, but destroy it in huge amounts. And killing people is an invaluable loss.

If you work so much that fall sleep with your truck and destroy your truck, if you only destroy material things like your truck you just evaporated years of work. If you kill people you just have destroyed your entire life.

When I started working on a warehouse as an adolescent, a working colleague fall sleep for working so much with the forklift and had an accident. It meant hundreds of thousands of euros in medical procedures for the insurer, and never being able to walk again normally for the rest of his life.

It is not worth it but people do it again an again.

People that do it are not role models. It is a toxic influence.

Pick role models of people that work reasonable hours and are wealthy and healthy.

>how on earth am I going to convince my corpo overlords that this language belongs anywhere near a production system?

Well, I don't see any difference with any other language you could use, from SQL, to C ,CSS or JSON.

The fact is that the higher your corpo overlord, the less is he going to understand your scrawl.

Instead of them understanding your language, it is you who need to speak theirs. You will need to understand MBA talk in order to communicate in simple terms(elevator pitch) why you using this weird language is important for the company.

Then they will leave you alone if what you promised is true, or just fire you if it is not.

This is true. Usually you have to convince your own colleagues, not management. (Obviously everywhere is different though.)

Your senior software engineering colleague who is a huge "Python is the second best at everything" fan will be more of a hindrance than your boss, typically. It's not wholly invalid, but it can easily become a social/political issue rather than a technical one. If someone else is proposing a popular approach (like building a backend in Python), and you're proposing an oddball one (like using Lisp), be prepared for their solution to start off with 50 points of consensus and yours zero.

Given that so much of building anything new and delivering it in a timeframe that is useful is risk management, I think that's the right place to start. Especially at a company where the risks of Python are mostly known and the risks of lisp are mostly not.