from Hacker News

Show HN: Eating Glass, a book about entrepreneurial failure

by markdjacobsen on 8/4/21, 5:57 PM with 1 comments

  • by markdjacobsen on 8/4/21, 5:57 PM

    Author here. I recently released a book titled "Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal", which I wrote in the aftermath of a painful entrepreneurial failure. Nothing in my experience or reading prepared me for the brutal reality of that season. In our rush to celebrate failure, we often sanitize it, so honest accounts are rare. That can leave us struggling for guidance when we face soul-shattering experiences. I have since met many others--founders, creatives, or just ordinary people--who felt similarly lost when they had to weather life's storms. That led me to write the book I wish I'd had during that season.

    I'm sharing with HN because it's my favorite community of creative, entrepreneurial people who also have thoughtful, serious, and real conversations about what it means to live well. I believe the book will resonate with popular HN themes about ambition, failure, resilience, work-life balance, midlife, and the spiritual quest to work out what constitutes a well-lived life. I have provided a large amount of free content (both written and audiobook excerpts) at www.markdjacobsen.com/eating-glass.

    This excerpt from the Introduction gives a sense of my style and themes. Enjoy!

    --

    "Fail fast, fail often, fail forward." That is the mantra in Silicon Valley. We celebrate failure like Viking raiders toasting comrades fallen in glorious battle. We clank our frothy steins and hail their courage and honor. We weave epic tales of their battlefield prowess and the journeys of their immortal spirits to Valhalla. We yearn for a death half as good as our fallen heroes.

    Any real warrior knows a battlefield death is not glorious. It is stupid mistakes, ill chance, screaming misery, urine and shit, fear and indignity. Dismembered youth strewn along the beach sob for their mothers.

    We wrap battlefield death in legend not because it is so glorious, but because it is so terrible. We construct the legends, the myths, and the rituals so we can tame our own terror. Behind each of those gruff, bearded faces, a petrified child peers into the abyss of his own mortality. Will we have the courage to die so well? We clash our mugs, bellow at death, and applaud our own bravery.