Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

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I feel the same way. I'm also in my 40s, and most of my life goals have passed me by. I spent some time and life energy on a doomed startup in my 20s, spent my 30s recovering from the fallout, and now - working as a freelancing nomad programmer - my options for starting something significant suddenly seem very limited.

The question is indeed, as you hinted, if those limits are largely self-imposed or not. There are certainly some external penalties, but what really keeps me up at night is the fact that past performance is a huge indicator for future performance. If I want to set out to accomplish anything of scale, I feel I have to delude myself into ignoring the nagging feeling that if nothing ever came out of anything I did in the last 20 years, it's more than likely the next (and also last) 20 years will be very similar.

Don't know if this helps, but - that prediction strategy doesn't work if your passion's for a hits-driven / inverse-square-law business.

Lots of authors, for example, write for +-20 years before writing the book that breaks them out - some of them even have HN accounts :) The calculus is similar for starting businesses, films (although the odds there are even more terrible), etc.

And experience accumulated reduces failure chance. I recall there's a statistic that most successful businesses are started by people your age, not people in their 20s.

I feel that same way. But then again I'm in the Marine Corps. My last 20 years seems to have been for nothing considering what it going on over in Iraq right now.

assume "last 20" was on active duty? if so, seems like you and i joined the corps at about the same time. i didn't re-up after 4, but agonized over that decision for the last six months of my tour. in the end, obvious to me that "another four" might as well be 20, and i was too immature to make that decision. (sgt in echo 2/5, btw)

  is the fact that past performance is a huge indicator for future performance

Take Life as a sigmoid function and imagine you are on the slope.

> There are certainly some external penalties, but what really keeps me up at night is the fact that past performance is a huge indicator for future performance.

It keeps me up at night too. But fuck that thought. If it's true, then I may as well go and kill myself now, and spare world the carbon I'll waste living. Faith in man's capacity for improvement is what's keeping me functioning.

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