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Comment by velcro | Hacker News Reader

Comments so far are sort of singling out the "negatives" i.e. make it seem like 40yo just don't want to put in the time anymore (for one reason or another) but the article also mentions stuff like:

- At 40+ you're more judicious about where you put your energy

- In your 40s, you have some accumulated wisdom: you recognize patterns faster and are more willing to change course

Do I have the blind faith to grind it out 5+ years in a stagnating startup on an off chance it might take off someday - especially if I've done that before? Looking for a better way is not always a bad thing. On another hand - my 20yo self wouldn't have believed my 40yo self - some things you just have to live through.

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I'm the author of the post. I think you've discerned the central tension I was exploring here.

Part of what I'm identifying is a simple truth: in your 40s, you don’t have that same kind of “raw firepower” you had when you were younger.

That doesn't mean you can't still be ambitious or leverage your accrued wisdom, network, and resources to launch a company; it just means the dynamics are different.

As the saying goes... work smarter, not harder :)

> Part of what I'm identifying is a simple truth: in your 40s, you don’t have that same kind of “raw firepower” you had when you were younger.

I wish this self-harming myth would stop being repeated as a "simple truth". It's a simple falsehood. It comes from a 100-year old idea about scientific productivity, that science (and specifically mathematics) is a young person's game. This has been widely debunked for many decades now.

The reality is that a lot of people use this myth to not admit the fact that they burned themselves out and lost their drive. Then they don't take care of their mental health and use this unscientific nonsense as the excuse for why things went wrong.

I see it in colleagues all the time in science. Some burn out, others get far better, smarter, and can get things done that they couldn't have a decade before. It has nothing to do with wisdom, network, resources, etc.

Then why are chess champions young? You can offset the loss with experience, but there is a loss, otherwise experience would easily win.

Chess champions mostly haven't been young, but the dominant ones have often been dominant from the time they were young. Here's a list with ages: https://sportstar.thehindu.com/chess/world-chess-championshi...

The WCC is just a tournament though, and the winner isn't always the best player. In 1993 for example Kasparov split from FIDE, and nobody thinks of FIDE's champions as "real" until Kramnik brought the titles back together in 2006. Meanwhile Kasparov lost a match and his title to Kramnik in 2000, but remained the highest rated player until he retired. And Magnus outranked Anand for years before bothering to contest the championship.

The top three classical players today are in their 30s (with Arjun right there behind Fabiano and Hikaru). The most impressive to me though are Anand in his fifties and Aronian in his forties, in the 10th and 11th spots. And then of course there's speed chess, where the youngsters are barely competitive.

I do think youthfulness can mean better performance, but don't forget that in modern times youth development has been much more optimized than ever before so the youth have advantage of that, getting the best development while the brains are most plastic to improve.

> I wish this self-harming myth would stop being repeated as a "simple truth".

In an industry that exploits a pool of young workers, paying them less but assuring them that they're smarter and their skills are more up-to-date than those middle-aged coders of yesteryear, it's still effective rhetoric.

"In a study published in the journal Nature Aging in August, a team of Stanford scientists described “waves” of aging, where major biomolecular shifts happen in the body around ages 44 and 60."

Source: https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/feeling-suddenly-older-s... Mirror: https://archive.ph/7C1Wl#selection-2469.0-2473.75

It's one data point, here is another perspective that says that depending upon the field of endeavor, people can become more proficient with age. "Old Masters and Young Geniuses" https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w8368/w8368...

Generalizing always misses things. I'm 65, and until recently, sometimes worked 15 hour days with no breaks. I value "being able to work" increasingly more with each passing year.

It's possible only because I've a had a lot of years to learn and experiment with how to have MORE "firepower". I had so many health issues when I was younger, I couldn't accomplish much. It affected my life goals and perspective tremendously. At the same time, if I don't do enough things right now, I suffer faster. Even with my issues at a younger age, I could get away with much more when I was younger.

I'm only 30 and honestly, sometimes I sit down at a side project and think "How the heck did I just sit here and grind out this entire desktop application" when now I'll struggle to work on it for an hour at a time.

Part of it is motivation in that it went from being a personal project I use to something others primarily use but I also constantly ask myself "Is this really what I want to spend my time on" which was never really a thought back then when it was just fun (and something I needed)

Not exactly the same but echoes of the raw firepower thing where it's easy to fully commit if you either have nothing else or you're fully sure of your dedication otherwise you're sort of one toe in the pool and aren't sure whether to save your energy

>On another hand - my 20yo self wouldn't have believed my 40yo self - some things you just have to live through.

As Otto Von Bismarck once said: "Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others."

How old was Bismark when he said that?

What difference does it make?

Sure - and Plato once said: "Quotation marks are always a sign of absolute truth."

An he also said: “Don’t believe everything that is attributed to me as truth, especially question those who put “my words” under fake quotation marks.”

He also said "What we learn from History is that no one learns from History."

He was the Prussian friggin' Yogi Berra.

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