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>>If you're 25 and aren't yet doing anything individual and attemptedly groundbreaking with your life, you probably are behind, if that kind of thing is your goal.

I think this is the biggest take away. Feeling "behind" is always relative your goal. The feeling is also influenced by a "success bias" in which the examples/role models you see or hear about are the successful ones. Yes, compared to where Bill Gates was at your same age you're probably behind - but what about the other countless number of people your age with similar goals? How do you stack up to them? That should be your real metric rather than the 1 in a million success stories.

I agree in that regret is a useful emotion. But only as, as you said, a tool for evaluation and recalculation. Personally I believe it is better to make decisions based on asking your self "if I do/don't do x, will I be closer or further from my goals?" rather than making decisions based on "oh man if I only did x or y 10 years ago I would be where I want to be".

I think it can nicely be summed up with: "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

also - I know it's become a bit of a meme at this point, but "pivoting" or changing your goals isn't as bad of a thing as people make it out to be. I don't find there is anything wrong with re-evaluating and changing future goals based on progress and failure. I find it's better to change your goal based on a previous failure rather than give up completely or become stuck in the paralyzing regret phase.

> but what about the other countless number of people your age with similar goals? How do you stack up to them? That should be your real metric rather than the 1 in a million success stories.

I disagree with that. Most people are not successful, so if your target is the average, you are aiming at a data point that represents lack of success. It is important to understand that most successful people are not normal, and the higher the level of success, the less normal they are.

> "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

Totally.

Oh man, I wish I knew how to better deal with that paralyzing regret. I'm turning 29 in a few months, and I've been spending the last ~5 years almost entirely trying (and usually failing) to work on major personal projects, solo. Sometimes I tally up all the months where I effectively did nothing and gape in horror. Usually I'm fine, but on some days, after seeing all the 25-year-old creators peddling their incredible companies, art, games, etc. on HN and Reddit — which in turn took them 5-10 years prior to that to get good enough to make — I fall into a nearly catatonic despair. When will I have time to learn all that stuff? Was it really worth giving up 5 years of my social and professional life just to chase some stupid dream? Emotionally, I often feel like a 80 year old man, seeing no real future in front of me.

Common advice is "learn to be happy with what you have", but that will never work if your dream is to do something Great, for future generations to remember -- to not throw away your shot.

What noticeably cheers me up is reading about all the people who started doing interesting things only in their 30's and forward, or those who reinvented themselves at some point in their lives and went on to be famous only on their second (or third) wind. I wish we had more of their stories instead of the endless parade of young genius entrepreneurs. Learning about the breadth and diversity of human experience is always such a pleasure, and it helps me remember that shaping your life and personality to meet your intellectual goals can be a grueling, decades-long process.

(Incidentally, reading Show Stopper! about the NT kernel was really great for this: although Dave Cutler was clearly a very accomplished engineer at the start of the book, he was in his 40's and experienced mostly in "archaic" technology when Microsoft decided to hire him. This wasn't at all the focus of the book, but it was wonderful to witness the power of a competent mind so quickly and confidently adapting to new technologies and problem domains!)

stop wishing you would do something great, and do something, period. nobody talks about their crappy first or second attempts, because they almost always are not worth talking about.

Yes, I'm learning that lesson more and more as time goes on. I just wish I could look at the calendar of my life and be able to emotionally deal with the 3-4 years of "lost time".

>Common advice is "learn to be happy with what you have", but that will never work if your dream is to do something Great, for future generations to remember -- to not throw away your shot. reading about all the people who started doing interesting things only in their 30's and forward, or those who reinvented themselves at some point in their lives and went on to be famous only on their second (or third) wind.

You've mentioned fame and being remembered by others. Is your main desire to do things or to be celebrated for having done things? Which one of those scenarios appears in your mind when you fantasize about your future? The answer to this question can sometimes be the difference between a miserable life and a happy one.

I recognize a lot of myself from a few years ago in that (and I'm 32) and the main things that changed me in no particular order were:

* Adopting a more deliberately Stoicism-inspired philosophy - whether or not I'm succeeding at my goal there will be another struggle waiting after that, so there isn't really an endpoint here other than my death or permanent incapacity. * Buying into feedback loops over goal-and-achievement systems. Feedback is more important to doing good work than any other thing - if you don't have it then you don't know if it's any good. But also, it's easy to miss what forms of feedback are available and sometimes it's as simple as critically thinking about whether or not an expected result happened(e.g. write software, add a feature: did it actually do what you expected?) * Got a lot of money. I did this through crypto. I had no expectations about it, it was just a way of putting another iron in the fire. The amount of physical effort put in was, of course, clicking a few buttons, typing a few passwords. But the mental/emotional effort of "why bother" and "why study this" - that is why you aren't seeing everyone on the street talk about it(yet). I had to make a firm decision to get in for anything to happen. And there's a lot of random chance to that, just as with my game projects, which have hardly gone anywhere in years of trying. And now that I have the money my mind is rearranging things so that I will further devalue my work on games in a monetary sense.

A lot of "striver porn" - worrying about productivity and getting ahead and making Right Decisions - stops making sense post-success. If you end up with the success, great, but I wouldn't try to impose a narrative arc on it. The actual factors involved are just mindboggling. The feedback loops, on the other hand, those are something you can improve from nearly any life status. And they tend to vastly differ from productivity tropes because they're about optimizing a whole cross-section of life, not just quantifiable output. E.g. if you do less but your stress level is lower, do you end up ahead on health later?

Huh. I was gonna type a lot of this, but you've saved me the trouble.

I did want to signal boost the stoicism part, though. There are a lot of good mental health practices available in modern stoicism that tend to appeal highly to nerds and other logical types. I can't recommend the following book enough: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0195374614/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_1...

I reread it every couple years and it has definitely helped a lot with my feelings of loss and "wasted time."

Oh, and getting older. It's incredible how much more mellow I feel at 37 than at 27.

You are still one year ahead of me. Turning 30 in a few months and all the work over all this time has little to show for it.

It's a bit depressing how many currently billion dollar ideas I've had myself over that time too. Makes you feel that given different circumstances it could've been you.

Just like that Van Gogh dude who just started seriously drawing at 25.

Way behind he was.

And don't get me started on that slouch Cezanne . What with becoming a master in his 60s and all that.

Also people who do a PhD in the physical sciences (just restricting it because I don't know how long other PhDs generally take) without doing anything groundbreaking by their 4th year are behind. Which I guess is true as long as there are Terence Taos around.

And Henri Rousseau, who only started painting in his 40s! Largely self-taught, too.

And how happy was Van Gogh?

> Being complacent and saying it's fine, I am only 25, no wait 26, no wait 27 until you are 40 isn't going to help either.

I don't think I read it that way. There are many reasons why someone was not able to or capable of doing something at age 25; finances, experience, whatever. Maybe you just didn't discover the thing you were passionate enough to follow. Maybe you had to care for an ailing family member for 10-15 years, should they not still not follow their own path?

The age at which you discover passion is irrespective of deciding to follow it. And you act like 40 is the end of the road, when in fact for many 40 is just the beginning of when they are financially secure enough to strike out on their own.

People should stop focusing so much on age, and if there was any good message in this article, that's it. Forget about what you haven't done, stop comparing yourself to others, and follow your own path.

Tesla was digging ditches for competitors at 27. Was digging ditches a waste of his talent? Yes. Would he have been capable of giving his name to a car company without that experience? How would we know?

(In comparison, fellow eccentric Howard Hughes had his entire public career - aviation records, hit movies, plane designs, business moves, social life, by the same age Musk is now).

It's worth noting that Hughes started out with a 1 million dollar inheritance from his parents. He managed to convert that to a 2 billion dollar fortune.

Tesla on the other hand was always struggling for money (much of that could be attributed to poor management of what he had).

I'll be honest, the post originally came off as fluffy, though not enough to say anything about it, but your comment made me reread it.

I really don't think you guys disagree that much. You're talking about different perspectives (not behind yourself vs not behind others) and a different focus (you on regret, him on forgiveness). Otherwise you both have some great wisdom in what you've said, don't think it's necessary to put him down so thoroughly.