Focus and Failures

Life as an entrepreneur is wild.

Some days, you feel unstoppable.

Others, you’re scrambling to fix messes you didn’t see coming.

The past two weeks were a brutal reminder of that for me.

I want to share a story about getting distracted, messing up big time, and figuring out how to bounce back stronger.

Along the way, I learned a ton about focus and why failures can be the best teachers.

It all started when some investors reached out. They had shiny ideas about funding and shifting me to a new project.

At first, I was hooked. Who wouldn’t be?

But then, something felt off. I couldn’t shake this weird gut feeling telling me to slow down.

Gerard Mulliez once said,

"Entrepreneurship is: Mind, heart, and guts."

That hit me hard.

My mind was curious, my heart was tempted, but my guts were screaming no.

So, I stuck with my current project. I told the investors my terms. They didn’t bite and walked away. Fine by me. I thought I’d dodged a bullet.

Turns out, I didn’t dodge much. The whole investor thing left me scattered.

I jumped back into coding, eager to make up for lost time. Big mistake.

I pushed a change to production without double-checking it.

That change had a bug. If certain conditions lined up, it triggered an infinite loop. My API started spamming another API that had a strict rate limit.

My API? No limits at all. Dumb move.

The other API fought back, banning accounts making those calls. Three of my users got caught in the crossfire.

I shut it down fast, but the damage was done.

I spent hours begging brokers to unban those accounts. Stress piled up. Anxiety kicked in. What if they said no? Sleep? Barely happened. It was a mess, and I felt every second of it.

When the dust settled, I started thinking about SpaceX.

Their Starship 8th flight popped into my head. That rocket lost an engine mid-flight. Sounds bad, right? But it didn’t crash into a city or blow up wildly. Why? The engineers planned for it.

They had automated checks and something called rapid scheduled disassembly. Fancy terms for "we’ve got this under control."

That’s when it clicked. I didn’t have controls. My bug spiraled because I hadn’t built guardrails.

Bugs happen. They’re part of coding. But letting them wreak havoc? That’s on me.

SpaceX showed me you can’t stop failures, but you can stop them from sinking you.

I’m not wallowing in it. I’m fixing it. Right now, I’m building a new API. It’s faster, smarter, and has strict rate limits.

No more runaway loops tearing through my system. I’m also slowing down when I code. Every change gets tested hard before it goes live.

This mess taught me focus isn’t optional. It’s everything.

And failures? They sting, but they’re gold if you learn from them.

Like SpaceX tweaking their rockets after every flight, I’m using this to make my project tougher.

Mind, heart, and guts, just like Mulliez said. Trusting all three keeps me steady.

So, yeah, the last two weeks were rough. Distractions pulled me off track, and I paid for it. But I’m still here, wiser for it.

Focus keeps you sharp. Failures make you better.

If you’ve got a story like this, drop it below. Let’s swap lessons and keep pushing.