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Comment by uhtred | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had the drive / focus / interest that you sound like you had when you were at school. I hung around with the wrong people, didn't put enough thought into what I might like to do for a career, valued the wrong things, and as a consequence spent my twenties in lots of meaningless, unsatisfying jobs. I'm in my early thirties now and am lucky in that I've managed to change my circumstances and begin a career as a software developer. But I feel I will never be able to achieve the success I could have if I had only gotten my arse into gear and taken my education seriously when I was 16. Now I find myself spending most of my free time trying to learn things that I should have learnt when I was 18.

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> I hung around with the wrong people, didn't put enough thought into what I might like to do for a career

You say that like they're necessarily causal/correlated.

When I was in high school I was clinically depressed, smoked weed every day, shoplifted whenever I could just for the thrill of it, failed most of my classes, and in my afternoons, late nights, and sometimes up to 6am, I was contributing to opensource, writing phpBB mods that thousands of people were using in their bulletin boards. My most popular mod had over 10,000 downloads. They even accepted me into the official mod approval team for a while.

And despite my obsession with coding and working on my career, I was also an adolescent delinquent.

Life is funny that way.

> I feel I will never be able to achieve the success I could have if I had only...

Learn from your past, take things from where they are today, and change the things that you can, now, going into the future.

There are other people like you today; some of them will do that, others will only continue to live in regret.

10 years from now you can be the person that they will look at and say "if I had only..."

Awesome maxims from the aspirational side.

From the more practical side- the time you spent 'wandering' can pay big dividends over those who are more tightly-focused, when you get to a more strategic role. Having tons of varied experience makes you a better communicator, teacher, & leader...

I had this conversation with a co-worker recently. I complained about how I avoided partying in university years and wasted a perfect opportunity to make friends with diverse people from all kinds of occupations. He said he regrets that he partied a lot instead of sitting like me and engaging in creative hobbies and/or learning career-relevant stuff.

We came to the conclusion that no matter the path of life you end up taking, you'll regret missed opportunities. I could have studied hard since 9 years old, skipped high school and be a PhD now or something, but then I'd probably talk with some people and start regretting that I haven't the time to read the books and watch the movies that could have shaped my imagination.

So the real advice is - instead of obsessing over the road not taken, focus on what comparative advantage you got from your experiences. Even if you "wasted" half your life drinking with random people, there's still a lot to learn and use from those experiences. The reason we have brains is to figure out how to make the best of what we have.

Well said! The grass is(and looked) always greener on the other side of the fence.

I decided to become a musician when I was 15 and wasted 6 years pursuing the unrealistic dream. I somehow managed to gave up the dream and became interested in computing in college. I sometimes wish I had become interested in programming instead of drums in junior high, but those 6 years of hustles taught me a lot about team management, entrepreneurship, and how to learn new things. So I don't think I wasted 6 years. As Paul Graham says, you should explore when you are young.

You are absolutely right. It's easy for me to think when I'm 43 I'll be past it. But I'm pretty sure my 43 year old self will think otherwise, and will be very glad he made the effort 10 years ago!

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