the best scorers in basketball have whats called shooters amnesia. They don't think about the shot they just missed. It isnt part of their reality. Focus on the next thing. don't tie your self esteem to your last shot
As Pmarca wrote: attempting to improve your batting average of hits versus misses is a waste of time as you progress through a creative career. Instead you should just focus on more at-bats -- more output.
The ratio of success to failure in tech startups ranges from 1:3 to 1:10 depending on who you read. That means pace yourself, you might have to do this a couple of times before you get a home run.
I wrote about my own experience in recovering from a failed startup. It is sort of like forcing yourself to get up after falling off a bike. It just needs to get done. Hope it helps.
"I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot... and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life."
In my experience, the best athletes have a spooky accurate memory of failure... post-game. They figure out what went wrong, every time it went wrong, even if the overall result was success. So it is not amnesia, it is just a failure to influence their present action.
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." Winston Churchill
Exercise and a break from the computer are both a good idea. I think you have to reflect on what happened but with some emotional distance. Remembering Thurber's observation that "humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility" you should write down your lessons learned once you can laugh about it (at least a little) so that you are not just re-opening wounds. Some amount of lateral drift (reading books, seeing folks you've neglected as your firm was failing, etc..) can also give you perspective on what to do differently next time. I had a painful failure about a decade ago and concluded "I am through with being an entrepreneur." After five years at a big company I realized that I had mis-assessed and that I couldn't help being an entrepreneur. Failing at a startup doesn't mean you should give up being an entrepreneur, but you should get some perspective on how to make "new mistakes" the next time out.
So it is not amnesia, it is just a failure to influence their present action.
This reminds me of my college friend who spent much of his spare time climbing the outsides of campus buildings, smokestacks, et al..
Then one day he claimed to be afraid of heights, which made me laugh. "How can you be afraid of heights when you're constantly taking risks at high altitude?", I asked. His response was something like: "Oh, I'm afraid. But I can ignore that and keep going."
But post game the coaches and players go back to the tapes and see what they can learn from the game. Then they hit the practice courts.
As an aside, my personal experience is that success can also be cause for depression, feelings of failure and weakness. Growing is hard. Surrendering control, and the (inevitable?) cultural dilution post acquisition is hard. It was my baby. Now it's not.
bad analogy i'd say. they may lose some shots but their team mates may score better that day.
At the end of the day, their target is to win the game so it doesn't matter who lost any number of the shots. If they lost the game then the team and all fans are emotionally affected.
The players will get paid at the end of the day. If a startup fails nobody cares and you are certainly not gonna get paid.
