+100. I can tell the guy writing this essay is young. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'd love to be young again too. But when I look back over my twenties I don't find myself wishing I had worked more hours on my startup.
I would still love to work at a startup at some point, but I'm not going to rush into it. I want to take advantage of my youth to discover more things that make me happy. I want to travel—a lot. I want to learn new languages. I want to meet amazing people. I also want to design and build things, but I don't think that it has to take over my life.
I'm very fortunate to be where I am now: fresh out of college, already doing something that I enjoy, and making enough money to be comfortable while working a reasonable number of hours per week. Do I have to dive immediately into the startup world to be happy? I don't think so.
Here are a few other posts that have hit home recently:
http://mrooney.github.com/blog/2012/07/01/freelancing-a-6-mo...
"In short, I felt that given a finite lifespan, there were more fulfilling and enjoyable ways to spend some of my healthiest years than 40+ hour weeks in an office."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4213386
"I think the kind of worry in this post is a response to the world born out of hyper-competitiveness, and I don't think its a healthy one."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4213736
"His mission statement shouldn't be that he wants a better epitaph. Other people get to write his epitaph, and by that time he'll be fucking dead. It's out of his control. What is in his control: whether his life was meaningful to himself. Did it express his unique talents, did it give him and others joy, did it help others? Did he make his own rules about how to evaluate his life or was he a slave to the caprices of fame and fortune? And this is about so much more than just a career."
Beyond that, it depends on what you value in life. The commenter probably doesn't care about being the richest guy in the cemetery while someone else may be obsessed with keeping score. Not saying one way is better than another - to each his own.
Perhaps in the future, even succeeding, you'll look back to those younger days in which you put aside everything for your pet project and realise you lost the opportunity to have great experiences with your friends, boy/girlfriends, spouse, kids and/or family.
Remember, working passionately in what you love is great, but forgeting that you are not a working machine, and that you work to live, not the reverse, are perhaps more valuable advice for your future self than all the books on productivity in the world combined.
My point was that, as I've gotten older, I've found that my most meaningful experiences have come from seemingly random encounters with people. The startup world is full of interesting people, but they all are kind of the same in terms of their daily lives and motivations. I wish I had spent more time in my twenties connecting with people who care about things besides venture capital, IPOs and the latest technology stack.
To that end, I now go out of the way to stimulate more random encounters. I'd rather take a salsa dance class than go to a big data meetup.