Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?
Guys, nobody in this thread has given the advice to give up!  If you were a scientist who travelled back in time in an accident from 2117 when humanity created a black hole, and you have a solid physics degree and don&#x27;t really have anything to do except 1) become rich and influential and 2), make sure that a certain very specific experiment isn&#x27;t repeated, or, for example, personally finance that it first be tried on Alpha Centauri (4 light years away), so everyone can see that Alpha Centauri disappears in a black hole (about which your probe sends back data), so they won&#x27;t try it on Earth, then you will be in the following position:
You will know about lots of inventions from the next one hundred years. You don&#x27;t really have anything to do, you don&#x27;t care about preserving any timeline or anything like that.<p>Obviously you&#x27;re not exactly an engineer, so you can&#x27;t make any inventions from the next hundred years in your garage - you just know generally how they work.<p>A sane course of action under these constraints would be to get identity papers somehow (after all, you&#x27;re stateless), get a patent on a future invention that you understand well-enough to describe clearly, then get financing for it and build it.<p>You&#x27;re an educated and very high-IQ person with degrees, so after minor set-backs around getting jobs and papers, you get set up, very clearly and eloquently describe your invention (in a patent filing), wait for it to be granted, and now you are free to get money from anyone.  You send the patent papers to 150 vc&#x27;s without a response, which you consider odd. You send them to a further 500 people in a position to help but still get no response.<p>You go to your alma mater, of course you don&#x27;t recognize any faculty, it&#x27;s from before your time, and they ask you if you have a prototype - you say no, you&#x27;re not an engineer. They ask you how you know it would work. You hem and haw and say,it&#x27;s all written down very clearly. They suggest you build a prototype. This is actually beyond your skills - you&#x27;re a theoretical physicist not an engineer.<p>This is very frustrating for you.<p>This is when you post &quot;what inspires you to persevere through adversity.&quot;<p>But the answer is that you should realize that the 2017 idea-stage funding climate is not sufficient to fund you. It doesn&#x27;t matter if your idea patent can be the basis for a $20 billion company, which is enough to finance your Alpha Centauri demonstration.<p>You&#x27;re stuck.  You know very well what will happen if you don&#x27;t intervene (though actually, you&#x27;re not certain - the physics here isn&#x27;t clear, whether the same timeline is likely to repeat.)<p>At any rate you GIVE UP trying to fund your patent. Instead you decide that you will finance it yourself by doing something completely different. You do remember that around 2025 or 2026 there is a huge bubble followed by an unfathomable crash, and you had actually just read - before your travel - the biography of a founder in that era who quickly built dynastic wealth. Since you are very smart and just need funding for your prototype, and anyway you have sixty years to get rich, there&#x27;s no hurry, you decide to find him and be one of the first ten founders.  You tell him some simple inventions from the future in just a few words, and to your great surprise he is completely on board and instantly agrees that they are all viable, he straight-up gives you 50% equity in his company, you start pulling 120 hour weeks and seven and a half years later you have exited with $20 billion and start doing your space stuff. (You muse that this was all thanks to working on whatever HE wanted, even though it had nothing to do with anything you knew about - you started with ZERO knowledge of 2017 web tech. All that knowledge of one hundred years of technical development paled in comparison to a name you recalled offhand - thereby proving the old adage, it&#x27;s not WHAT you know, it&#x27;s WHO you know.)<p>Anyway, a few years later your space research shocks the world - oh, also you read something about telomeres - you can&#x27;t BELIEVE you forgot about that, you&#x27;ve always hated and hardly paid any attention to biology but you remembered you actually know enough to slow aging by 90% especially in the skin, and back in your time all babies were given telomere extension shots, which has been going on since shortly before your birth in 2090. Since you&#x27;re a billionaire with a lot of time on your hands you read up on it, order a small animal and then human experiment, and long story short you give about 8 billion people longer, happier lives by inventing something in 2030 that was slated for 2085, even though you didn&#x27;t even care.<p>Oh, and as for your original first patented invention, on a lark you wonder if anyone would finance it now that you have $20 billion, you have the spiffy prototype built, hold a big VC meeting on a private island where anyone who&#x27;s anyone shows up with three partners - and still nobody has any interest whatsoever. As great at it is, whatever it is, it turns out it&#x27;s not fundable.  The world&#x27;s just not ready for it.<p>Moral of the story: sometimes you should just give up, and the sooner you give up, the sooner you can start making some kind of progress.