Staying Grounded
Set your values before the wins arrive. Success and failure both knock over anyone who has not figured out who they are yet.
Kevin's belief is that the danger in a startup is not failure, it is success that lands before your core values are set. A round, a YC acceptance, a viral moment, any of these can take a person "above the clouds" and stop them from doing the actual work. The antidote is to have your philosophies mostly figured out first, so that a win is something you absorb instead of something that redefines you. This crystallized for Kevin in a long debate about maturity. Source: User, 2026-06-07
Values before wins
The argument that landed: when your core values and philosophies aren't mostly set up, it is far easier to get carried away by early success (or failure) and lose the ground you need to do meaningful work. A person whose identity is still forming will let the first big result write it for them. Someone with their values already in place treats the same result as data, celebrates it, and goes back to the work the next morning. Source: User, 2026-06-07
Both directions destabilize
It is not only success that knocks people off. Early failure does the same thing in reverse, sending an ungrounded person into a spiral instead of a fixed point. The skill is the same in both cases: feel it, then return to the same baseline of who you are and what the work is. Kevin recognized this pattern in himself over the months in SF, which is part of why it landed. Source: User, 2026-06-07
Celebrate, then go back to work
Raising a huge round or getting into YC should be celebrated. The failure mode is letting the celebration become a permanent altitude, where the person stops shipping and starts performing the identity of someone who succeeded. The founders Kevin respects most treat the win as a checkpoint and keep their head down on the real problem. Source: User, 2026-06-07
Connections
- The Greatness Trap: chasing greatness as identity is the failure this prevents. Staying grounded keeps the work about the work.
- Gratefulness: a grounded person can hold a win and stay thankful without inflating.
- Want It Bad Enough: drive without grounding burns hot and scatters.
Timeline
- 2026-06-07 | Page created from a maturity debate about values: they must be set before success or failure carries you off, and celebrate-then-return as the discipline. Source: User, 2026-06-07