Older people tend to hang on to the past, so they are less "innovative" as per the current trends. For eg: For the love of God, I can never understand TikTok and why it is famous. There are a slew of new emojis which I don't understand. Sometimes, I feel that these are important to understand while coming up with ideas to stay relevant.
Maybe I’m not yet old enough to be like this but I honestly don’t think it’s the case.
Instead - I think about how whatever I do in the next ten years is it. This is my last productive decade.
I can’t risk wasting my time. I need to work on low risk projects with short payoff times.
I’ve got half a dozen products and projects that I could launch, some of which I think could really make a difference… but I’m going to take a job in an industry I like and get a steady income, instead.
There is enormous risk in innovation and that was great for the first ¾ of my working life - not so great for the last ¼. My wife and kids don’t want to eat ramen and live in share houses for 2 years while I hustle and grind until I get PMF or die trying.
> I can’t risk wasting my time. I need to work on low risk projects with short payoff times.
Perhaps I am too young, but I rather imagine myself to be completely different when I become old: the older I get, the more risk-affine I'll become since if something goes insanely wrong, I will have less years in which I have to bear the bad consequences.
To the present day, this describes my life quite well: the older I got, the more risk-affine I became.
In those terms, if you're young and you do something high risk, and you lose all your money (or just spend 5 years not making money), you still have plenty of time to recover and make enough money to be comfortable when you're older.
But, by definition, that's not true when you're older.
The counterargument to this was exactly a point of my reply: if you are not able to recover, there exist less years in which you have to live poorly when you are older. A little bit macabre, but true.
I think it is important to understand, but I don't think you should learn to like it.
Reciprocally, youth can be highly innovative because it’s more/still full of energy and discovery and randomness (or intentlessness), which favor unusual/new approaches.
uh, 67 yes old and adhd. the past is so yesterday and frequently not remembered unless traumatic. Innovation and new learning are weekly events.
F.E. I now use chatgpt to generate most of my code then I tweek/debug it to usefulness. clock is ticking and I'm not done yet