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Comment by austinl | Hacker News Reader

This is something that afflicts a lot of younger, talented students. I was able to breeze through K-8 without studying, then attended a challenging high school where I went from a straight A student to a B/C student. It took me at least two years to realize that I could no longer succeed by simply showing up. Fortunately, this was great preparation for college. I saw many straight-A high school devastated after their first round of college engineering exams.

I think this is an unfortunate consequence of our education system at-scale. It's difficult for advanced students to be properly challenged until they reach a certain reckoning point, which for Terence was impressively during his grad school exams.

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similarly, I was able to go through k-8 with no effort outside of paying attention during class. high school was more or less the same, not to mention interests can easily wander during those years. in college I quickly discovered I could get more or less straight Bs with almost zero effort and figured the effort needed for the last 1 point in GPA was far too "expensive" relative to the first 3 so I coasted.

never having explicitly failed during those years ill admit my level of "grit" is lacking. after a decade and variety of circumstances i sit here, mid 30s, saddled with a ton of student debt and no career. in the grand scheme i have definitely failed; if this reckoning point (realization) had been reached as early as mr. tao perhaps there would be time to turn things around.

If you turn the boat around in the next 5 years, you will hopefully have another 30 years of a flourishing career, more than the entire career of some prodigies who perished young. This assumes a projected retirement of 70 years old. What is particularly exciting is that new industries are starting to form, and any one of us can be pioneers in those industries (fintech, VR, AR, AI, automated vehicles, drones, robotic process automation, Edge Cloud, etc...).

Your comment and the parent's comment both resonated with me, as someone who also finds himself "stuck".

What do you suggest that someone do in this situation--one where they want to reset their career, carve out a new one, etc.?

I'm in the same boat (except I wasn't "stuck," I was climbing, but I wanted to do something else), and my post articulates logic that I am using myself :) I recently cold-messaged someone in a startup in one of those industries, and they were surprisingly willing to carve out an opportunity for me. He's the person who would be my boss and just needs to get approval from the CEO. Even if that doesn't work out, I've learned the following lesson in various ways over the past few months: just applying to jobs isn't enough if you don't have specific applicable experience. That should be common sense, but somehow I had fooled myself into thinking otherwise before. Career switching is a complete grind. That's why it's so important to join a growing industry, do great work, and hopefully never have to switch again.

I welcome comments from someone who successfully reset their career after at least 5-10 years of working.

Thanks for the response. The story about cold-emailing your future boss (hopefully!) is very cool.

And I agree completely regarding applying to jobs. I've sent out some applications recently but it feels like I'm sending them into a black hole of complete radio silence. Part of me thinks that I should go back to school to do a complete career reset, but my academic performance was abysmal during undergrad...lots to think about! Thanks again for the response.

same - done with applying. has only consumed a massive amount of time with no results. perhaps im just from the island of misfit candidates but shifting focus for now to work on a reset as you mention. feel like im just too stale to continue that path. diving into perhaps some of the things @keenmaster mentioned, perhaps working on some certifications. either way, opportunity ebbs and flows (imo) just need to be better prepared to take advantage.

best regards to both of you (and anyone else reading feeling similar circumstances).

thank you for the perspective and you're right (imo) - survive and adapt. your suggestions sound like a great starting point.

This was my experience as well. When I see geniuses that coast through everything thrown at them, I wonder if I have any advantage over them in the future, having struggled before, or they're just so smart that nothing touches them.

I'm sure it depends on the challenge. Most folks that I'd consider geniuses just relentlessly pursue the things they're interested in. Depending on the topic, this gives them enough ability to get by the basic concepts tested in school. And then later in life, a good career if they're lucky (definitely lucked out being interested in computers).

I think these people are still working hard in a sense, they just have a low tolerance for work that doesn't interest them.

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