You're Young. I'm 18. So what?
theindustry.cc
theindustry.cc
Age is a proxy for wisdom. The longer you are on this earth, the more wisdom and experience you will acquire. That has value. But that's not to say that age alone should be a dealbreaker or barrier to success, as the author has proven.
I'm 32; I look back at me at 18, 19, 20, even 25 and laugh at how little I knew. I have learned so much since then, and continue to do so. The main problem with being young is that you don't realize what you've yet to realize.
That being said, there are lots of exciting things to do when you know not what you realize. Especially for certain types of overachievers and perfectionists, we are significantly more hampered by what we can do excellently vs what we can simply deliver passably.
Go enjoy life and collect those data points, success and failure. :)
Well, maybe. You get experience when things happen. The more you play it safe, the less happens. And you only get wisdom when you think about your experiences.
There are plenty of people with wisdom well beyond their years.
> The main problem with being young is that you don't realize what you've yet to realize.
Bad news! It gets worse. At some point, just when you start to feel like you know what you don't know, you realize that they are making new things up faster than you can keep track. Talking to people a generation younger than me can be a humbling experience. I have to tread carefully, as you do when you're talking with a person from another country.
I still haven't met any. I've met plenty of smart kids, and I'm pretty sure I was one, 15 years ago. However, I had no idea what I was doing, and worse yet, had the hubris to think I did.
I was insufferable, and I'd never hire 15-years-ago me. I also won't hire any other young engineers -- I'll let them find out how little they actually know on someone else's dime.
On the other hand, if I was in the VC game, I'd absolutely leverage young engineers as grist for my mill. They're the most amenable to the risk, and it doesn't really matter if the vast majority of small investments fail (and they will, especially given the inexperienced teams), if you hit just a few home run exits.
> Bad news! It gets worse. At some point, just when you start to feel like you know what you don't know, you realize that they are making new things up faster than you can keep track. Talking to people a generation younger than me can be a humbling experience. I have to tread carefully, as you do when you're talking with a person from another country.
That's unnecessarily defeatist. There are steady advances, but there's very little that's genuinely new under the sun, and quite a bit of what the youngsters get excited about is just the cyclic rediscovery of what we already knew.
Your loss, really. I've interviewed and worked with several young engineers who were really top-notch, who worked out great, and were mature in their approach to work and life in general. They also tend to come with a lower price tag. Some have not worked out so well, but I don't have any reason to believe that the failure rate changes dramatically with age.
As I myself get older, I'm not so sure that the maturity level changes all that much either. People are just better at hiding their flaws as they grow older, then you find out too late when there's an issue.
Despite their intelligence they've always required constant senior level supervision, and have generally been the ones most likely to create maintenance-heavy components due to inexperience.
I'm not sure why our experiences differ so substantially, but I'm happy to hire only senior engineers and let other companies pay to train the young ones. The senior engineers are more than worth the minimal financial premium.
Sounds like you have bad projects management and let people go cowboy and build bad things because you don't communicate with each other.
Getting good work out of junior engineers requires a management investment greater than the cost of simply hiring experienced engineers to begin with, and they still will not produce code to the same level of robustness and quality.
I can see from your company that you don't operate this way. I assume this choice expands the apparent pool of available applicants, but it also ensures that your company is likely completely uninteresting to senior, experienced, genuinely expert engineers.
In my experience, there are two kinds of engineering managers. The first is the kind that has figured out (or thinks they've figured out) how to get decent enough code out of inexperienced or just plain bad engineers. The second is the kind that realizes that they don't have to work nearly so hard or jump through so many procedural hoops if they just hire people that know what they're doing to begin with.
What's more, those experienced people tend to have extensive contacts and make it easy to hire their friends.
That said, I'm happy to let you spend the time, money, and energy training and managing junior engineers, while dealing with their subpar work output.
You certainly have an active imagination, so I'm sure the next things you make up would be just as interesting.
Flatline3, you're wrong in pretty much every particular about how I work and how my company works.
It's certainly possible to mentor younger developers well and at low organizational cost. It depends a lot on your process. In particular, I think pair programming, frequent commits, good unit tests, and collective code ownership together make it entirely safe to hire somebody younger, and you get substantial benefits.
I also think it's shortsighted to say, "Hey, let the shitty shops train junior developers." Great senior developers have to come from somewhere, and I think they'll never get great working at places that don't have their acts at least somewhat together. I benefited a lot from people taking a chance on me when I was younger, and I think I have a professional obligation to return the favor.
As for documentation, I'm not sure quite what to say. The best person to document code is the person that's writing it. The best person to document things that aren't code is a technical writer, not an engineer.
That said, I hate ageism. Always have. However, as I get older, I find it more annoying that 22 year olds think they are "old." I'm 35 and Know I'm not old so 13 years my junior as old is just silly. Certainly 22 year olds can be mature. Old... no.
No. Caused me to raise my eyebrows too.
Ageism cuts both ways, and it's never an excuse for winning an argument or evaluating a person. You evaluate people on their merits or you pass over valuable people and pay the price for it.
Older people can be full of hubris too, using appeals to experience and authority arguments to shortcut rational thinking.
Using the I'm more experienced than you argument is the same as people saying you insist on C++ cause that is what your comfortable and experienced with, and you'll cost the company millions in lost productivity.
All other things being equal, I'll always pick the older engineer with more experience and maturity than the young engineer without.
Just as a nice case study...
I was "old" when SOAP got popular (late twenties early thirties). Most of my (age) peer group seemed to agree with me in that it seemed over complicated and messy. We were, of course, old stick-in-the-muds who couldn't adapt to the new technology :-)
It was the "young" developers who jumped on it more than anybody else that I saw - the everything-in-xml crowd.
Ten years on, of course, the "young" crowd are now seen as "old".
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose :-)
Ageism cuts both ways, and it's never an excuse for winning an argument or evaluating a person. You evaluate people on their merits or you pass over valuable people and pay the price for it.
Amen. Young and old both have stick-in-the-mud types. It's just that the young folk haven't had the time to demonstrate whether they are stick-in-the-mud types. You don't want to hire them whatever their age.
Using node.js (or whatever) doesn't make you cool, hip, and open to new ideas. I can guarantee that, if this forum is still around in ten years time, there will be somebody complaining about this old fker who wants to do everything in node.js :-)
In the same way (not industry-related) I've observed that people who are 50+ years are seen as "elderly". That was 60 or 65 some 15 years ago.
Yet, there seems to be quite a bit of this on here.
As far as I know, nothing ever happened because of that.
However, what we're talking about is experience. Those with little experience are not members of a protected class.
This happens _a lot_.
Woman are this, women are that, we don't want to hire women because they are XYZ. People don't say it as much explicitly anymore, but I see it in their attitudes.
Every woman is different, as is every 18 year old. We should not have pre-conceived notions about what they are like, we should have a hiring process that is a meritocracy where we will let anyone prove to us they have what it takes. Just because you haven't met a young person who would make a good engineer at your company doesn't mean they don't exist. Young people, like women, have often not been aware or been encouraged to seek opportunities in engineering.
In some ways, yes. But just mundane everyday life teaches you a lot -- the hundreds of coworkers you've interacted with, the stories you've swapped about dealing with projects and bosses and clients and customers, your romantic relationships, etc. You pick up on the patterns of failure and success and, above all, good judgment, that can't really be learned any other way.
> plenty of people with widsom well beyond their years
Things like raw coding/product talent, pure drive -- sure. You can have these at any age. But wisdom beyond one's years? I wish it were true, but I don't think it is.
Running a whole product team, dealing with employees, stakeholders, deciding what to invest resources in, etc. -- that's where maturity and experience really provide their value, so you don't make all the really costly novice mistakes. Intelligence is very helpful, but it isn't a substitute.
Yes. Those are some of the experiences I'm talking about. Take a safe job, don't date, don't interact much: you'll have a lot less raw material to turn into wisdom.
> But wisdom beyond one's years?
I have seen it. It's easiest to spot in people who've experienced early struggle or tragedy. It's not true for all of them (or even many of them), but they definitely have the raw material.
I ran all over the world with a backpack before I realized that everything is relative and my adventurous experiences weren't necessarily any more valuable than a friend's who stuck around and built a family (which I'm finally doing now myself too).
Yes, there are. But not in the sense you want to mean. There are plenty of kids who have lived through great hardship, who have had to learn survival and coping skills which one would only expect of someone much older. Pampered, middle class American white kids don't have that kind of wisdom, never will.
What you are referring is cocky people who take their limited experience as some greater truth when all they are really doing is revealing how little they know.
Wisdom comes from experience. Experience requires you both to have done things in your life and to have had the time to reflect on those events. That comes with age.
... and with having those experiences, and with having the ability to reflect and learn from them.
I agree with William. I know some folk in their twenties who have done more (and reflected on what they've done and learned from it) that some folk I know that are my age (40s).
Wisdom comes from having experiences and the ability to learn from them. While that's roughly correlated with age there are:
* plenty of older folk who don't have many experiences, or don't have a good ability to learn from them
* plenty of younger folk who push themselves - or get pushed - to have a bunch of experience and learn those lessons very well.
I know people in their 20s who are wiser than people I know in their 60s. And vice versa. Personally I vastly prefer to look at people first rather than make assumptions based on age.
Thanks, I know what I'm referring to. As I explained elsewhere in the thread (and before you posted), some of the people with wisdom beyond their years are indeed the people who had to learn coping skills early.
Also, wisdom definitely does not come with age. I have met unwise retirees because they assiduously did not think about their experiences.
True. But they, in my experience anyway, they still end up way wiser at 30 than they were at 20 :-)
Do you find your self progressing after each year, or every few years, and never taking a wrong turn? As an extreme example I can imagine someone having a bad drug problem in their 30s during which they're worse off in every way than in their 20s, and only come out of it in their 40s. I think for most people improvement and regression are more subtle and happen in many dimensions. Strict progress is illusory. I think it's too easy to get caught up in your present values and discount the wisdom of your younger self just because you care about your present self more than your past self.
It's also fairly obvious with older people that their minds just don't work like they did when they were in their 30s. Are they really wiser, do they really have more total knowledge than at their prime? What's the ratio of those who are and those who aren't? I also like to point out that a lot of important knowledge and wisdom can be found in books alone without experience. It's easy to forget this fact among all humans regardless of age: other people (including your past selves) may be privy to information you are not privy to.
But neither of those invalidate the original point -- that you can have age without wisdom, but not wisdom without age.
So, what mistakes am I and others here making? What made your perspective change, and why are you sure your current perspective is less wrong? I've given some reasons for why I believe what I believe, how about you?
This is very much in line with the whole "there's no speed limit to learning" and the commonly accepted fact that working in a startup will make you mature much faster than most other positions you might hold.
I can relate to a lot of the points the article makes. When I was 14 I knew just as much as I know know in certain areas but I was never taken seriously because I was 'just a kid'.
On the flip side, it means an equally applied 25 year old will be just that much wiser than the 18 year old.
However, I don't know how much that matters. I'm 24, and when I was 17-18, I was KILLING IT as a band manager and show promoter. I sold $80,000 worth of tickets in 3 years for my own bands, and for anyone that's wondering: getting shows at good venues is borderline impossible, getting people to pay to see them another miracle.
I've done things since that people may call "more significant" but they weren't. That was the hardest thing I've ever done and my most significant accomplishment. And I couldn't do it again if I started today.
Young people are constantly told that they're young and inexperienced and don't know much about life, all of which is true. However, this has a huge negative effect on their self-confidence and sense of self-worth. I'm starting a company, and the words I fear most at a negotiation are "You're still young. What do you know about business?"[1] Not a lot of people say those words out loud, but most people at least hint at them. Those words hurt. If someone points out your shitty business practices or poor hacking skills as reasons to not do business with you, you can at least go back home and fix those problems. If someone says they're not going to do business with you because you're 22, then that's that. I don't know how prevalent this phenomenon is in Western countries, but I feel ageism is a huge thing in India.
You don't realize this unless you try to do things that people your age are not expected to do. Here's an anecdote: a friend -- let's call him P -- once interviewed for a senior-level position at a software company. P loves software and electronics and has deep practical knowledge about both. Not surprisingly, he did very well at the interview. According to the HR guys, he was exactly the kind of person they were looking for. So there he is post-interview, talking with one of the HR people about things he has built, when someone reading his resume notices his age for presumably the first time. Long story short, they swear at him for 15 minutes for wasting their time and tell him to GTFO of the building. All because he is 21 at the time.
This sort of stuff starts to get to you after a while, which is why posts like this one are useful. It's true that age is an indicator of wisdom, but as a young person you need not let that get to you. No matter what older people tell you, you need not let your age be a limiting factor in your success. That, I think, is the essence of this post.
PS: I'm not passing a moral judgement on society here. I don't mean to say that the Indian society should coddle young people. I'm just stating facts and sharing some of my feelings.
--
[1] I deal with very small business in what is often called the "unorganized" sector. People in other industries may have different stories to tell.
Further, the wisdom people gain with age includes what is not possible and what is foolish. History is filled with stories where being a little foolhardy has changed our world. This is why mentor relationships can be so valuable. I recommend everyone commit time to them, they often pay great dividends to both parties.
But let me put it in a simple analogy, hackernews readers itself amount to a very tiny minority of people worldwide. higher education, same story.
now does either one amount to wisdom or experience? imho, the answer is no. if you look at the world right now, it looks more like the average guy gets more stupid with each day passing.
Point 2: I, too, was a wunderkind -- and part of me regrets it. By age 12 I was hacking around the Freenets; by age 14 I'd tested out of high school; by age 16 I'd left home and was working for a well-known architectural institute; by age 18 I was running its computer department and my 3D visualisations and been featured on PBS and NHK, and exhibited around the world. But I was so busy being a wunderkind that I never took the time to be an actual kid. I was enormously serious: didn't goof off, didn't party, didn't kiss a girl until I was damn near 20. I wish I'd gotten an earlier start on all that. Honestly, there's plenty of time in life to rack up accomplishments, but youth is something that you only have once, and my advice to other wunderkind is to exploit the hell out of being young while you still can.
(Not that I would've listened to such advice myself...)
I fell in with the cool crowd, cut more school than I attended, graduated with a grade .01 points above failing (I'd become an expert at doing the minimum), learned about recreational drugs and spent years in a drug-induced fog.
Later in life I decided to start applying myself and join the work force in IT and found myself utterly unprepared. Work was never hard, naturally, but it took me a long time to get up to speed on the normal, expected social interactions between co-workers.
In summation, while I like who I am and what I do now, I'm often plagued with pangs of regret at having wasted away all that time to rack up accomplishments and get something done with my life. There's still time, naturally, and I don't have a pressing need in life for anything more than I have, and things just move generally slower with a family involved.
My advice to you: put the last section of your article out of your mind. You've achieved some pretty amazing things, focus on that, and keep shipping. Comparing yourself to others is a path to insanity, there will always be someone who has accomplished more, done it faster, made it look easier, etc. And one more thing-- you're never too young to do anything, but keep in mind that with age comes experience. There are people out there (like the ones you mentioned), who have been where you are before, have faced similar challenges, and overcome them. No matter how early you start, you'll always have more experience the older you get, so continue to seek out the advice and mentorship of those who have walked the path before you.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=U...
I'm not saying he's right or wrong, or I'm right or wrong - I'm not sure there is a 'right' or 'wrong' to be found, but I'm very curious about what his perspective will be 30 years from now.
Grandpa's eyes at age 33, can't read your blog comfortably, as a result. :p
-webkit-text-size-adjust [1][2], is just NOT cool
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1831922/how-to-prevent-us...
Here's a workaround: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftheindustry.cc%...
PS didn't mean to be harsh, I really appreciate it when others take the time to tell me that sort of thing, as it helps one to improve, but maybe you see it differently.
In high school I had a few "clients" for websites and such as well, as I'd learn PHP by that stage, along with the usual XHTML and CSS - almost just like Jared. It's not the same though.
In the professional space, there is SO many more factors that you're just not ready for until you've worked for a company or two.
That being said, there are exceptional people out there, and they shouldn't be judged by their age. Soon I think there will be more of them. We really just have to remember that no matter how old or "wise" we supposedly get, we're no better than anyone else. We all deserve a chance sometimes.
""" Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. We are all part of the same compost heap.
Wow. A WC3 specification has never made me feel so old.
If a coworker is belligerent to an 18 year old, they are assholes. To a 35 year old (at least to me), the first thing I think of is that I have no idea what their home life is like.
People endure crazy life experiences. I am working with them on a problem that results in revenue for both of us. Just because we're making money, doesn't mean that they're dealing with problems of personal identity, cancer, financial ruin, etc.
Age matters, kid. It fucking sucks. It's cool that you're punk rock about this. But you will achieve more & achieve faster when you realize that age really does matter.
(p.s.- age is not a way to measure wisdom, but it is a wisdom indicator)
I'm sorry, but I don't care what your home life is when you're at work. You're there to do your job, and communicating with your coworkers without being an ass is part of that. It sucks that <insert bad thing here>, but your job should not be affected by that.
If we're out at a pub in a non-professional setting, that's different; feel free to pour out your soul. But when we're on the clock, just do your job.
I say this having had a very, very close friend die on the morning of my first real world product launch. I had been up all night hammering out every last detail when I got the call from my mom, around 7am. At that moment I knew that the right thing to do was to finish what I had to do, and go home and mourn on my own time; it was what was fair to my coworkers, working right along with me, and to myself. It wasn't their problem, and if I had lashed out at them it would've done nothing but impede our progress. Sometimes you have to step up and do what needs to be done.
I would feel that I had failed my staff if any of them thought that our product was so fragile that delaying launch by a week so they could mourn would cause irrevocable damage.
To be honest, young people are very talented, they haven't been moulded into a certain shape or way yet, and I tend to get the feeling they think more out of the box.
That being said, with age comes wisdom, you start to learn more and more, what works, and what doesn't work.
You either have talent, or you don't, sure experience is good. But people evolve in different ways, some faster than others. Even though you're younger than your competition, you still might have more experience, or you just might be 10x better. I've only been turned down once for a fulltime job at Philips, when I was 18. They liked my work but wanted someone older. I could fully understand that, and wasn't too bothered by it. Just go on, stay focused and you'll get very far. Your work and socializing skills are key, not your age.
What happens when "old" folk like me and @wpetrie say it? :-)
I am wiser than I was in my 20s, but I know people in their 20s who have become wiser faster than I did. They had more stuff happen to them (through hard work, or good luck, or bad luck) - and learned from it well.
Among my circle of friends back in High School, I can think of only a select few who I can confide with these thoughts. It’s so difficult trying to find someone that really understands these kinds of struggles- the dismissive remarks, the attitude of negativity and failure, etc that people give when they find out your ‘age’.
Thank You for sharing your post with HN. To know that someone else is out there who truly understands these trials and struggles makes me feel just a bit less lonely – to know that I’m not the only one who feels that way about entrepreneurship. Your post was inspiring and for all the articles I’ve read on HN, yours makes everything worth it.
I'll skip the amusement part which you'll realize as you become older and just give you a little warning on this one:
But then we’ll have those amazing experiences where we meet ‘adults’ that understand this and they treat us like equals.
Be aware that there's not a small number of people who will not hesitate to take advantage of young eagerness. Especially in the startup scene.
Learn to distinguish between people who treat you well because they respect you, and people who treat you well because you're running half their business for an intern-salary. It's more common than you, at your age, think.
I appreciate the lesson and understand that wisdom also comes with age. I don't dismiss that - in fact I realize and acknowledge that. That's why people have mentors, people with decades of life experience to learn from.
"Learn to distinguish between people who treat you well because they respect you, and people who treat you well because you're running half their business for an intern-salary."
Perhaps that is something you did not learn in your youth, but you should know that does not mean that those of similar youth age don't realize that. Personally, this was a point I exploited when I ran my business. Having interns that were years older than me doing work for me. Quite "amusing", as you point out, now that I think back...
Nevertheless, I think your advice is true. Lots of people out to take advantage of young people. This is not new, though and anyone with the level of experience in business having done work previously in youth years would know this.
The pattern that I've noticed is most people will speak similar to you. Those that don't and truly appreciate it were once young entrepreneurs themselves and experienced their levels of 'success' so they understand it. Though perhaps I just choose to surround myself with mentors of that particular quality.
Here's something I learned: It takes years--several years--to come close to mastering anything of sufficient complexity to be worth mastering. That is just not possible when you're young. We've all had to deal with that.
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once. But I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
Be water, my friend.
Magnus Carlsen [1] became the highest rated chess player in the world at 19. This means that either it is possible to master very complex subjects while young, or chess is not very complex.
I don't understand why people, including the author, are completely disregarding experience here. I agree with the author's points that a young person, even a teen, could bring a lot to the table and has his own qualities, one of which is not great experience. But that doesn't disqualify him for any job, given a hunger to learn and a passion for his work. But to suggest that "the only difference is in music taste"--well, if you measure any one young person against any one older one, you could get that result, but I'd be hard pressed to expect the same when comparing you with yourself 10 years down.
I don't know what to think. It's great what he achieved, and I respect that. However, I think he might wake up one day and start asking himself, what did I do? Was my youth fun? Did I go out with people and do what kids usually do or did I just try to accomplish things and get my career somewhere?
When I hear someone being "only 17", or "only 20", or whatever, and wanting to be an entrepreneur, I don't rule them out because they are too young and have too few experience. I worry that they might miss out on living their life.
It's not until your 20s does one's frontal cortex (or lobes) of the brain fully develop. Until this occurs one physically lacks the ability to control higher-order functioning. This could range from long term planning, motivation, and inhibition towards behavior.
When you're young you're somewhat crazy and brash. This allows one to take chances, push the envelope, and reach breakthroughs.
With that said it works both ways. The youth lack the ability fully reason, plan, and in SOME cases think logically through a problem (in the sense of understanding the repercussions of their actions).
How can you write about start-ups without ever having lived through a downturn? Sure, you can read about it, but the proper level of skepticism bordering on cynicism is impossible if all you've ever seen is the fat years.
Some knowledge you can only gain through experience, no matter how smart you think you are.
If you want, I'll get back on this thread in 15 years and tell you if you were right or not regarding additional accumulation of "deep knowledge" (whatever that vaguely-formed concept should represent).
>> "Are you 18? I would be surprised if you weren't."
At least to me, this comes across as sort of an arrogant comment that I really wouldn't expect on Hacker News. This whole "wisdom with age" is a lot of unfalsifiable nonsense the way I see it. Any sort of experiment I could propose would be shot down with "Oh, don't worry about it. There's just something magic about getting older, and well, you really can't say anything to challenge that.
On the other hand, novel writing is by and large a middle age and older persons' game. There are a handful of great novels from people in their twenties, but most of those authors go on to write even greater works later in life.
There are advantages and disadvantages to youth. Trying to pretend that everyone is equal and it is all a matter of how hard you try is one of the great fallacies of our era.
Age automatically restricts your opportunities. I have gotten a number of serious job offers from reputable companies, and none of them were aware of my age. While a lot of people in the startup industry are not age-biased, I have a feeling that if my age were advertised on my profiles, these opportunities would not have been extended to me. When I asked around for a summer internship this past summer, my boss said he had not realized how old I was, at first, when he extended the offer. I have found that it is much more difficult to prove your worth as an engineer when you are underage and self-taught. This is why you need to work on personal projects, and finish them.
Also, while I have not experienced this firsthand, some people are not as nice as you would like to think. If they realize you are "just a kid", they might feel it appropriate to lowball you or cheat work out of you. It's despicable, but I'm sure it happens.
The advice in the article suggests that you attend conferences. I would generalize this. Network with your local community, as well as the global community that you come in contact with at conferences. Hailing from the wonderful land of Philadelphia, I am an active member and occasional speaker in PhillyCocoa, the Philadelphia CocoaHeads chapter. I also was a member of Venturef0rth this summer, a rising incubator space. I plan to attend a hackathon when I have time (I'm missing one at UPenn as I speak :p ). At these places and more, I have met a slew of awesome people, from whom I have learned innumerable things.
That's not to downplay conferences, either, as an attendee of The Last HOPE, DEFCON 19, Google I/O '12, HOPE9 and others. The thing about conferences is that they do cost money (including travel and lodging), and not everyone can afford to attend them.
And because it's relevant, today I am turning 16.
Here's the deal. As you get older, more and more people fall into mediocrity. Age is a number - it's also a responsibility. You will meet 40 year olds who you'll think - what the fuck did you do with your life? And you'll meet 40 year olds who you'll wish that - at some moment of divine clarity - you'll be half as smart as. The second hand counts with stunning accuracy. Don't judge yourself against the mediocre. Look at the people who rose to the top. Some were smart at 18 and drifted off of that cleverness for quite some time until it caught up to them. Others rose above. Rise above.
I think the big thing is that most people don't have that interesting a life until after college, and many of those immediately get a relatively boring job.
Starting to get noticed and do interesting things at a younger age just came natural to me, so in a lot of ways I never considered it an achievement until recently.
but i would never have someone so young as my partner, or even hire him for any critical job
he have so little too loose at this young age ... its too risky to make business with him
People (I) start to rely on their experience and while this can allow you to do things more effectively, because you have them in your working memory, etc.
However, when I look back to the things I used to do when I was eleven, I felt like there were no border. I was able to understand concepts instantly, just read things and I knew it.
Sometimes I think a wunderkind is just someone whose hobbies are related to school wisdom. When I look back to every teacher was constantly calling me professor just because I read the stuff in the math books, read other books, liked to watch the educational program (which I our class watched again in high school) one can just think so.
On the flip side I didn't learn a lot of the things with other hobbies did. Sometimes a wunderkind is someone with lots of hobbies and having basics skills everywhere seems like a good countermeasure to relying on experience you made in a certain field.
Well, my life wasn't that good though. I was that kind of geek that got beaten up by others for good marks and so stopped going to school for a long time (but decided to still get my finals at a later, just learning on my own doing the necessary tests). Still, when I look back to that time when everyone called me professor things changed. I think I made a lot of different experiences because of it though. These days I don't give the impression of a creepy geek anymore, because my social skills were forced to develop quite nicely.
Basically why I want to write this is because I know there are a lot of people who are outsiders and stay like that all their life. I know how it is when they say you have a high IQ and you try to be super nice, because you may find it nice to be a geek around some people, but feel strange around others. But hey being a geek means being smart, so one can just spend a nice time doing something social, looking what others do, how they react and also self reflect on your self. Even if non-geeks might behave differently, they are also just people like you. I think most geeks tend do focus on themselves and when they are shy they try their best to look good and then (correctly) come to the conclusion one shouldn't try to be different and just accept oneself. However what they sometimes forget is that one usually can learn most by just listening. Completely focus on someone else. One doesn't need to fear looking like a creep, if you just listen and people are even going to like you for it!
About the rest of this article: I don't know, but it looks like something that is going to bore one in the long run. Yeah startups are exciting and I am working for one too. It's great fun to actually do thing, but first off I don't really need a job to do something great and really wouldn't consider creating a successful company the greatest thing ever. It was done over and over and all you get is money, which seems like something rather boring if you are not a poor person or just addicted to it, which also won't make you happy.
So question: Do you really consider creating something like tumblr a great goal? I mean, if you take away all the hype then it's just a blog and the ability to like other blog posts. I wouldn't really call that something great, amazing and influential (not in the way I think most people want to be influential I guess). It's no revolutionary great thing and isn't more likely to save lives than to destroy them.
Of course I'd be happy and proud of myself, if I created tumblr, twitter or Facebook and see how it is successful, but at least I wouldn't feel like I had done something great with my life. If you do that's great, go for it!
Speaking about tumblr, I'd feel like a lot these "average" (that sounds really bad, sorry) people did more with writing a simple blog post and while I would find it super awesome that they did it with my software it just feels wrong to act like I'd really have contributed a lot by creating tumblr. There were easy to use blogs before that and hey, who says things actually didn't make it harder or something even better could have happened.
So before you go on, I urge you to think about what exactly makes you great about what you plan, else you risk to feel like you have wasted your time. When you are in your early twenties, you'll know what I mean. ;)