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Comment by Fraterkes | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice piece. But as a random dutch guy, going to the authors about page, seeing that this 22 year old kid has started multiple companies, ai stuff with 500k users, and is writing about all these Large Life Lessons, (and seeing that he grew up in cupertino)... sometimes it realy feels like hackernews is a portal to a completely different world, one that parodies itself occasionally. (Im pretty jealous too of course, wish i had been a bit more productive when i was younger, and i especially wish i had written more)

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Keep in mind that this is likely survivorship bias; for every 22 year old that did all that, there's millions that didn't. This kid is the 0.001% or less, and it's unreasonable for anyone to feel like they missed out. I get it though, it's guilt or the pang of missed opportunity, "if only I worked harder", "if only I wasn't so lazy at the time", but honestly... it's fine. Be glad where you are. Because for every one 22 year old that achieved all that, there's millions that never got that old, millions that ended up in poverty, millions that ended up worse off than you, etc.

Here's something I hadn't thought of: there's been 10–12 thousand generations of people, stretching back ~250000 years. And, yet, you could (in theory) meet ~7% of all humans who've ever been alive right now.

I think when you dig into people's self-promotion pitches you often find they're less impressive than they initially appear, so taking them at face value might be bad for your morale.

I have no problem with a 22 year old blowing their own trumpet to get along in the world, but as an example from that bio, the AI generated news site with 4m views is effectively just a load of SEO spam so is going to get a lot of views in 5 years. It has 2 linked articles about it. I can't read one, but the other is completely trashing it both as a concept and in its execution. If I'd made it at 22, I'd probably be pleased enough to put it on my bio of course.

Comparing yourself to extreme outliers that had all the ability, persistence, support and an amount of luck that out dwarfs all of that is a recipe for some real misery.

As long as you're alive you're able to go out and do what you can and work towards what you want. Croc made McDonalds into a franchise practically as he was about to retire after a life of nothing notable at all. And well, peaking too early comes with its own psychological torture, how do you live knowing that you'll never do anything as impressive as you did when you were like 16?

You might be impressed by his achievements, but you may also feel some comfort in knowing that this random poster finds those inflated statistics a bit off-putting.

I prefer a modest introduction followed by a pleasant surprise, but that's probably not the best way to become a billionaire.

I'm a modest guy.

I would be happy being a hundred-millionaire.

> sometimes it realy feels like hackernews is a portal to a completely different world

HN is very silicon-valley centered, and SV itself is a fairly isolated and unique world.

Maybe in 10 years from now, noone would die anymore. Plenty of time to get back to where you wanted to be :)

Why do you wish you had written more? To have a window into your past self?

You cannot be an influencer unless you write, create videos or podcasts.

Because I feel like Ive changed a lot I suppose, and I feel that even if I had written slightly pretentious blogposts that Id roll my eyes at now, it would be nice to slightly reexperience what i was like back then. I sometimes think the only way you ever get to see yourself as other people see you is to look at the way you were a long while ago.

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