While there are many reasons why communities fail, and businesses fail, and projects fail, sometimes the true reasons for those failures get lost in endless "technical" analysis and number grinding.

We keep crunching numbers, perhaps in the hopes that we can come up with something that might turn a rising tide, but most of the time we end up with absolutely nothing. The failure is inevitable.

The proverbial "elephant in the room" often ends up being more about broken promises than about execution and aptitude. And sometimes the problem can also be traced to the principals having an overly optimistic impression of how the world works.

Recently, I have been watching — mostly from a distance — a fairly prominent Hive based community more or less implode on itself. I'm not going to name anybody here, because the situation is ongoing and may turn into something else and it's not really my job to engage in finger pointing. I'm more interested in looking at the series of events that typically unfold as we move from point A to point B.

A wise person I met many years ago — and whose opinion I always valued — once observed that you should "be very careful about your lips writing checks that your reality cannot cash."

It sounded a bit cryptic to me, at the time, more than 20 years ago. But as time has progressed it has started to make more and more sense to me.

When you make a lot of promises — often rooted in excessive enthusiasm and optimism — and then you end up not living up to those promises what you usually end up with is that your followers or investors give you "a vote of no confidence" in the form of basically selling out of or dumping your offerings.

Sadly, you reach a point where no amount of promising that "things are going to get better" and that "things are being worked on" is going to overcome the disillusionment and skepticism of those that once ardently followed what you were doing. You have basically lost all credibility. And that means there is generally no coming back.

There is also something I have noted here in my blog in the past... that when things start to go badly it's often true that a business or a crypto project stops communicating rather than keeping the information flow going to at least give some semblance of openness with those who are invested in the system, and have stuck with it through thick and thin.

I don't know whether there's a valuable takeaway here... other than maybe to remember that if something seems a bit too "shiny," there's a pretty good chance that it is!

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