Nobody's talking about this, but every startup building next gen security tools right now got rejected at least 40 times before one contract hit. I know because I did the public failure version of that in sports. Lost everything in front of everyone. And the weird part is, nobody remembers my worst day except me. Here's what nobody tells you: doing the hard comeback first makes every other hard thing feel like nothing. Pitch meetings, cold outreach, rebuilding from zero, it all feels easy once you've already survived your worst one. Hard things first. Everything else is just Tuesday.