What do few youngsters do differently that makes them create new industries?
I have been seeing examples, say Matt Mullenweg who created WordPress, Vitalik Buterin who created Ethereum and the list can go on.
1. Experience (or lack thereof): It's a double edged sword, you may stop making any progress through paralysis-analysis. Progress is the best motivator and when you don't it starts affecting you in ways you will be surprised.
2. Cost of living: As you get older the cost of living only climbs up. You will be shouldering a lot of more responsibilities but biggest of all which I experience personally is associating dollar-cost with my time. You start valuing cost of money over cost of opportunity. If I am not making money that means I am loosing money.
3. Social pressure: We are social beings and when you see your friends moving ahead in life and you tend to remain where you are ( think first 1k days https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L03vBkOKTrc), you need to have a certain kind of personality to be able to get through that period. Not vacationing, living a frugal life & compromising at every stage takes a toll on you personally. It starts affecting your mind in weird ways.
This is by no means a comprehensive list but it's my own experience & it's a constant battle especially when the chips are down.
EDIT to clear #1 speaking as an older developer.
For all the reasons mentioned above, older folk have a lower affinity to risky ventures. Younger folk often take up risky ventures; a small fraction succeed, but they get a lot of attention.
In college I had 12+ hours/day I could spend doing anything I wanted, even accounting for classes, studying for midterms, etc. Multiply that across 4 years and you have 17,000 hours to spend all of your energy on. Some people do choose to go down that rabbit hole, and out of those people some will be successful.
Now that I've been working in tech for a few years, I feel lucky if I can find the mental energy to work on something for 4 hours/day outside of work.
Consider how babies/children so easily pick up tablets and smartphones while their grandparents have a difficult time discovering any kind of functionality.
Consider also that as these children mature (thinking teen years) and start to seriously develop their world view, they're exposed to a different slice of technology and ideas from us, many of which enable them far more than we were at our respective formative periods.
Now consider that all of this is internalized almost totally. It is a core part of who this average person is; a product of their environment and technology era.
This is what I think about when I hear about some 20 year old coming out with a major advancement in a field, or who built an app at age 10, or someone at age 24 built some revolutionary device.
They've had the advantage of growing up with and internalizing and thinking and reasoning with a set of ideas and assumptions that we from different generations don't have. With a degree of freedom that we didn't have. Pair that with other arguments here (less pressure, more financial freedom, etc) and to me it seems like a very fertile ground for powerful and enabled ideas. Especially in the last decade.
lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment. "the administration's naiveté and inexperience in foreign policy" innocence or unsophistication. "they took advantage of his naiveté and deep pockets" synonyms: innocence, ingenuousness, guilelessness, artlessness, unworldliness, trustfulness; More
the only thing that they have in common is they started doing something, you should buy a lotto ticket to win one!
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/722huo/little_girl_...
Young people have a different experience of current circumstances than older people, so they see different problems and opportunities. Digital natives will have different mental models of life, the universe and everything. While older people are still trying to adjust to the new fangled thing, youngsters are envisioning the logical next step.
Some industries and solutions benefit from long experience and wisdom. Others benefit from a relatively clean slate, unburdened by excess expectations of how things "should" be done.
(My adult sons seem to just know how to do things on a tablet. I prefer the tablet to a laptop, but I often get help from my kids. Touchscreen tech in no way comes naturally to me, even though I have spent more time on a tablet in the last few years than a PC or laptop.)
Now add being born in a good country, or having rich parents, or getting good education
then add a bit of luck
there you go
Every successful "youngster" you see has been helping someone around her/him or in her/his tribe achieve something they themselves did not envision or think possible.
What sets the successful youngster apart from the rest is their empathy, and their wish to see other people around them flourish. Elevate the people around you and it is very wonderful what will land in your basket.
A youngster has nothing to lose if it starts a 1000 hour project. In the worst case scenario it will be a very good resume that will get him hired.
For an experienced professional that is already making good money from it's current job/business and has a family to sustain, losing 1000 hours on a project that can get him 0 in return is simply not viable most of the times.
So youngsters are much more likely to experiment more.