Comment by pendenthistory

> I noticed some people I just cannot share ideas with. They're in the habit of shooting down anything, and they would have found 100 reasons that any famous company or product would have failed

You’re on the wrong message board then haha

You can't tell people anything (2004)

https://web.archive.org/web/20091025030730/https://habitatch...

I'd consider yourself blessed to be surrounded by cynics. I've always found myself with the opposite scenario where people are overly kind even when I specifically ask them not to be. If you're reasonably objective, I think you can tell if a criticism is garbage or warranted. But if whatever you're making is just the greatest thing since sliced bread then the feedback is completely useless.

I’ve known about the “new ideas are fragile” concept for a while and it’s why I generally will never criticize someone’s early work or ideas, but rather try to hype them up. Because of this, technical people with new ideas and projects have been more likely to come to me early on when they wanna show what they’ve been working on. Admittedly, I actually do think a lot of the ideas I’m presented with are bad, but a smart person starting with a seemingly bad idea may still end up somewhere very interesting. Never be the shooter down of new ideas.

I'm similar to you in that encouragement and external valuation goes a long way for me, but I've found that all successful business-minded entrepreneurial types really love playing the game where they bounce ideas off each other and try to shoot each other's ideas down.

When they pitch a new idea to family and friends they get pats on the head and it doesn't materially help them at all, but when someone says "that'll never work" they get excited and their ears perk up, because that new perspective could save them a ton of money going down a wrong path.

People will sometimes wish you to follow their footsteps. That is because they wish you succeed and they have a framework that lead to their own success. And by success I mean something as simple as just surviving so far.

That means they may try to tell you to give up on any idea that does not fit their framework, simply because having no experience with means it’s riskier than things that do fit.

I don’t mean to defend this behavior, neither to say this is definitely what is happening here, but if it applies, I think it’s a good idea to frame this as people wishing you well, in their own twisted way.

What's the idea?? I'm curious (and won't shoot it down haha)

I understand what you're saying but the last line is kind of weird no? Why do you need to villify them if they didn't give you good feedback? Why do you care so much that you have to mention they "have not acheived much themselves, never taken any risk" etc.

The entire point of feedback is to see it as impersonal and not a value judgement on you (the creator) vrs the project.

Like okay, what if someone was extremely successful and taken a lot of risks and repeats the same feedback you've gotten. Would that make the feedback magically true?

Instead of judging the people who give you feedback, judge the feedback itself and let it go. In the end, you disagreed with them because you knew what was right to do. There is no point thinking about them as good or bad people but just whose feedback was objectively wrong.

Again this is a bit of a ramble but my point is that "i will prove them stupid people wrong" can turn into internal resentment as well where you judge your victory by how much you "showed them" rather than how much you showed yourself. It is very likely you can get all the success in the world and those people will still think you are a loser. You cannot win that battle and if you actually believe them thinking that of you matters, you will not be happy even in success.