Around 2021 I put a lot of my adult identity into a side project that I believed would be my second career. I built it after work for four years. I launched. It got covered in a couple of small newsletters. Two hundred people signed up in the first week. Six months later I was struggling to justify continuing. Twelve months after that I quietly took it offline.
Here is what I did not expect: almost nobody noticed. The failure was public in the sense that the launch had been public, but the death was silent. No headlines. No debriefs. Everyone had already moved on. It was like watching a firework die in the wrong direction — over quickly, no aftermath, the crowd already looking at the next one.
The useful thing I learned is that the audience you imagine watching your failure is much smaller than you think. Almost everyone is worrying about their own thing. The story you write about your failure to yourself matters. The story other people tell about your failure to their friends… does not really exist. That is a huge relief and it changed how I approach shipping. If nobody is watching this closely except you, then the only performance that matters is the internal one.