Does life end after 35?
kzhu.net
kzhu.net
What I try to keep conscious of is knowing what's reported in the media and what isn't, which are often 2 completely different worlds. On TechCrunch, "kid genius makes $100m" is the story they want. It fits this age-old narrative of a child prodigy reaching success in half the time it takes a "normally smart" person to, like Mozart, Einstein.
And that media draws in huge amounts of young people hoping to fit that narrative. But what's not reported are the companies that are typically working on much harder and more boring problems -- problems that require an understanding by people who've been in industries for years. Look at any CrunchBase newsletter about the day's fundraising and acquisitions, and you'll find yourself surprised at how many medical/B2B/etc companies are being bought for $100m+. These aren't companies started by 22yo grads, but by people with extensive industry experience. And the (startup) media doesn't really give a damn about them.
That's not, in any way, to devalue startups started by younger people. There's little-to-no barrier to starting social apps and the like. They have their place in society and have shown to be successful, so I don't blame a fresh grad who wants to try his/her hand at it. But there is a whole world of other startups and companies that are working in more complicated and boring industries that could not have been started by people in their early 20s.
Experience still matters, as unsexy as it is.
Absolutely. I think what really makes the difference is whether people also carry the youthful mindset of always being ready to spot problems, and do something about it.
I have seen plenty of people with more experience than I have, who have lost the sense that they can actively make things better. It's the people who have experience, and still feel they can shape the world around them, who make things happen.
I don't think that's a particularly youthful mindset. Indeed, much of the trend of Silicon Valley right now is the opposite: spot places where you can apply a "social something" even if there's no real underlying problem.
As a practical matter, people who are young tend to lack the experience to know what are the actual problems of the world. Does a 22 year old know what are the things that would, say, improve the efficiency of Intel's designers by 2x? What are the bottlenecks in their workflow or the roadblocks they deal with? They have no idea. Most actual problems, the hard ones, are encountered in contexts that young people have no experience with.
I posit that the youth worship in Silicon Valley has nothing to do with their aptitude for "problem solving." Rather, it has to do with the fact that: 1) advertising is the bedrock of Silicon Valley 2.0; and 2) The 18-25 demographic has long been key to the advertising industry. Who knows better than young 20-somethings what will sell to other young 20-somethings?
A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists. It came to me because I've been in the software industry for nearly two decades and have seen the same problems, over and over. I'm solving a real problem that I understand really well, with a straightforward monetization strategy from obvious customers. It's not something that could be knocked off in a weekend by a couple of dudes at a weekend hackathon.
The experience to see substantial problems and the patience to work on them comes with time. Don't worry about getting old.
That all said, my 40s have been the best creative period of my life, by far. I feel like all the things I learned and experienced in my first 40 years were just setting me up for what I can do today.
This is such a key point. Sometimes it takes years, if not decades, of experience to even know that the problem exists. Put another way, if the problem can be solved by a 22-year-old with no experience in the field, there's a good chance they've misunderstood the problem.
I've never looked forward to a product launch as much as this.
Fortisip (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)
I'd never heard of Fortisip but from what I can tell it and ensure are both considerably more expensive than regular food, and actually more expensive than eating out.
Recommended daily calories are 2000 for adults.
One week of soylent is $65. 48 bottles of Ensure Plus is about $80. 6 bottles of Ensure Plus would be 2100 calories.
Looking at the nutritional info if I drank 6 bottles of Ensure Plus each day I would be ingesting 360% of the recommended amount of Manganese and only 60% of the recommended amount of sodium. The rest of the listed nutrients would be at about 150%.
I don't think Ensure Plus is a substitute good for Soylent. It's a supplement not a food replacement and it's formulated and priced as such.
Most nutrients with recommended amounts are healthy at higher than recommended amounts within fairly wide bounds, but the usually-listed recommended amount for Sodium is much higher than is minimally necessary, and is actually the upper limit recommended for about half the US population. So, actually, I'm not surprised that something intended as a broadly-usable food replacement would go over on most nutrients and under on Sodium.
http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssodium/
Nutrition isn't one-size-fits-all.
You are wrong.
(http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/ensure-plus-retai...)
> For interim sole-source nutrition.
edit: removed unnecessarily grumpy sentence.
> [about use of word "interim"] Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
> [about safety of Soylent for sole use nutrition] I have no idea whether Soylent is actually safe as a permanent sole-source nutrition solution
This is an amazing sentence. It's fucking mind-boggling the amount of cognitive dissonance that the Soylent marketing guys have created. They deserve the funding for that alone. Like, God-Tier troll and God-Tier marketers.
Soylent is prepared food. It's a substitute for cheap restaurants like Taco Bell or Subway, not cooking rice and beans at home.
But it happens the other way too, in that many young inventors tackle problems because "they didn't realize they were 'impossible'". More knowledgeable folk can do this too, but it requires a certain... disrespect for authority. Like Einstein's flexibility with time and space (though he was young then; he didn't make breakthroughs in later life, possibly because he himself became an authority).
Fortune favours the delusional.
There are a couple of other factors to consider. First, there are problems that can be solved with new tech that couldn't be solved with old tech. The web opened up a huge front of new solutions over the past 10-20 years. Mobile is opening up another wave of solutions.
And finally, consider the "aspirin or vitamin" question. Vitamins are tempting, but aspirin sells better. Me, I'm working in more or less the monitoring space for configuration management. My key competition isn't other monitoring tools, it's the DevOps movement and automation tools like Chef and Puppet. When people have enterprise configuration management suck, those are the recommended solutions. But they're vitamins being sold as aspirin. Simply getting to where there's organizational buy-in to go to DevOps or to automate what was once manual is a whole fresh sort of pain. My competitive advantage is a near-painless dose of aspirin - immediate relief without having to change the whole model.
Ain't no college kid coming up with that.
I'm as creative and as smart as I was then, I don't think that has changed. But I'm wiser now -- about Computer Science, about systems -- and I have that perspective, which has made all the difference.
Agreed. Wrote my first novel in my 40s.
If you want to make money money money you probably shouldn't be spending your time deriving Maxwell's equations for nonlinear media. If you want to do algorithm design but spend all your time doing HPC you are not heading in the right direction. If keep justifying your continued sojourn into a `temporary` field due to the emotion baggage established by time investment (`experience`) it might prevent you from making risky but rewarding choices.
There is something to be said about he dangers of staying in your comfort zone - which is certainly the case for 8 years of university education.
If what we value is not in the direction established by our experience then we may find that experience is a shackle for our dreams and a guide down a path of misery.
To be fair the largest demographic of startup founders is in the 30-39 age bracket. While successful twenty-somethings with big exits is something the press likes to cover, they are very much outliers.
But, we both agree it is not the 20 something demographic. 2 unsoirced opinions on the internet - that agree - have to be correct.
Speaking as a 40 year old who is an early-stage startup founder , I'll say that your clock isn't necessarily close to running out. But, I will also add that time is one thing that you can never get back. I'm not real big on indulging in regret, but if I regret anything about my younger years, it is not being more aggressive and doing the startup thing sooner.
If you have a good idea, and you're 20-something, I'd advise you to go for it. If it doesn't work, well, you probably get another "at bat" or two in your life. If you wait too long, you eventually do start running into limitations, whether it is health issues, or additional commitments you may take on, in terms of raising a family or whatever, etc.
Experience is absolutely helpful, and I'm not sure I'd tell anybody to found a startup just for the sake of doing it, but if you legitimately have something in mind, you're passionate about it, and there seems to be a real shot at succeeding, I say take a crack at it now.
I regret not being more aggressive when I was younger. But that doesn't mean I regret the things that I have done. I've still learned from everything I've done in life and still have good memories. So while I regret not being more aggressive before, that doesn't mean I'd necessarily want to trade one set of memories for another.
And adding to that, I think I would have just been full of hot air if I was more aggressive at a younger age. Some people can do it and be authentic. I don't think I was one of those people. And I don't think I'm simply rationalizing.
Yep, that's the infuriating, "catch 22" aspect of the whole thing. There are things you want to do at a certain age, in some regards, but you can't for whatever reason, but then when those reasons change, you've lost that time for good.
I feel the same way to a point... I couldn't have founded the startup I've founded, when I was 25, because I didn't have the technical knowledge, the business knowledge, the general maturity, etc. But the flip-side is, I'm getting older and I kinda look at this attempt as probably my last "at bat" with a chance of really living out the most exuberant of my hopes & dreams for life. I feel like if I fail now, I am probably done with big dreams. There just isn't enough time left on the clock, and I won't have the energy and drive and passion to start over from scratch.
Most of my ideas and entrepreneurial thoughts as I got older tended towards the more complex rather than the opposite. I never, in a million years, would have thought of Instagram. Not in my mental framework. In fact, I probably would have discounted it as a dumb idea. This is to say that there can be value in approaching entrepreneurship from ignorance (not meant as a pejorative). I would say that most of the things I've done that did well are things that, in retrospect, I jumped into with such utter ignorance of the reality of doing that thing that I probably would not have attempted it had I known. That's what I mean when I say that there's value in ignorance.
Now, a little bit about the programming business. Being a programmer is like being a supermodel. Once you reach a certain age, if there isn't something particularly special about you your career prospects can and often do change. In certain circles (SV being a good example) older programmers have a hard time finding work. It is a young man's world. I know many who moved out of the profession or relocated for this very reason. The issue of age discrimination has been discussed many times on HN. It is real. Keep that in mind as you go forward.
There's also another issue. Thirty years ago one could be an entrepreneur and, later in life, go get a job somewhere if needed. Today, things can be brutally different. With entrepreneurs generally plastering their lives all over the internet there is no dumbing-down your resume. No way. Which means that your life, your achievements and struggles will follow you forever. If, as you get older, for whatever reason, you decide you'd like to get off the entrepreneurial train and just get a job for a while it could be tough. People google your right away. In certain domains you'll run into FUD. Middle managers will not want to hire you because they are afraid you might be after their job (after all, you are very capable). Small to mid business owners will be afraid that you might want a job with them to learn about their business and later go off and launch a competing business. I did not realize this was going on until I had a chance conversation with a recruiter who was telling me about one of his customers who simply could not get hired to save his life due to his very public entrepreneurial profile. Obviously someone eventually hired him. Apparently it took a tremendous amount of work and time.
You are 35. Nothing to worry about so long as you don't stop learning. Just be smart about it all.
Edit: I'm 39, and I'm finally hitting my stride. I'm a far better programmer now than I was even 5 years ago.
I grew up relatively sheltered in New England, and moved to NYC to teach as soon as I graduated from college. I spent my 20s teaching in the city and bicycling around North America in the summers.
At 29, I moved to Alaska. I spent my 30's climbing mountains, doing mountain rescue work, and continuing to teach.
I just turned 40, and I feel like this decade is about building some things that last. I feel like I came into more serious hacking at just the right time in my life. I now have the experience to know exactly what I want to build, and I have the long-term mindset needed to build important things. After having stood in front of NYC public school classrooms, bicycled around the continent, faced bears in the wild, and dropped out of helicopters onto steep mountains, dealing with servers and such is just another satisfying challenge to play with.
Life is wonderful if you keep right on living.
It looks better and saves so much time..
But I think a bald guy with a shaved head also demonstrates a certain attitude "My hair had issues. I dealt with it. Next!"
2) If you are like me and don't like exercise much (nor the time investment) but can no longer deny its benefits, do what I'm doing and do HIIT spin cycle 3 times a week for 25 minutes. It totally works. Feel free to google it, there's a lot of interesting research at this point.
You'll not only feel stronger and look healthier, you'll also burn a lot of energy. And as you get older, maintaing strength and flexibility guards against aches, pains and injury.
Easier said than done, but I speak from experience.
I'm 33 (soon to be 34), and fitter than I ever was in my 20s, with more energy.
Difference? Eating differently (low carbs, high protein), and exercising 3 times a week.
I also stopped smoking a year ago.
Quality of sleep is also way up there now.
It all helps - really does. Just doesn't stop aging :-)
There's a little bit of magic-numberism that goes on, I suppose: people have ideas about what age means and they'll use it for a proxy (you'll worry about much younger people being annoying or stupid, they'll suspect you'll be staid or weird). But for the most part, everybody who's looking is still basically looking for the right connection.
The only practical effects I've seen are around two clocks:
* the family clock: some people are more anxious to have kids before they get too much older, some people have decided the window is done (which changes who they can pair up with).
* the midlife crisis clock: people start trying harder to see if they can make their life exactly what they want, or insert something they wished they had when they were younger.
These might be the same clock, though. And they have been known to strike well before the 40s. :) YMMV.
I was talking to a much younger female friend of mine once, about this subject, and she confirmed something another female friend had told me, which is that women often find older guys more attractive. Apparently you look more "distinguished" as you age. Now there is, obviously, a point of diminishing returns that comes along eventually. But I keep hearing women tell me that a 24 year old woman (for example) will have no objection to dating a 40 year old man.
Being self conscious about this point, I've asked a number of other women (including random women sitting next to me on airplanes, etc., who theoretically have no reason to be dishonest) and time and time again I've been told that this effect is real.
Another female friend also admitted that some women do consider that factor that older men tend to be further along in their careers, and correspondingly have more money, status, power, prestige, etc. OTOH, she was one of the few who said she would not date a guy who was more than about 6 or 7 years older than her, at most. shrug
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_burn_centers_in_the_Uni...
"Life is wonderful if you keep right on living."
Love this.
In my most productive periods, I get into this cycle where I climb a mountain right at my limit, scare myself just the right amount, and think to myself, "Man, I don't ever want to climb a mountain again."
Then I go home and work on fun technical stuff right at my current limits. I work at that for a while, until I want nothing more to do with computers, and just want to be outside. Then I head off into the mountains.
It's a good cycle. :)
https://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/What-do-people-in-Silic...
Some of the companies and founders' ages compiled from the answers:
- Zynga: 41
- LinkedIn: 36
- Salesforce: 35
- Intel: 41, 39
- Qualcomm: 52, 50
- Juniper Networks: 42
- Wikipedia: 35
- Pandora: 35
- GigaOm: 39
- Zipcar: 42
- TechCrunch: 35
- Craigslist: 42
- Netflix: 37
And once you get stuck, it can be more productive to leave the computer and get some sleep, eat, walk, take a shower, etc. The best ideas or solutions come to you when you're doing something else.
To me, saying you work 60-80 hours means you're either doing something very simple, or you're not doing much at all.
"The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders [of companies that have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees] was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five."
http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educatio...
In tech, you constantly need to keep up to date on the latest technologies, read publications and go to conferences, because experience gets stale very fast. It's also easier (than in fields like medicine or law) for junior techies to get up to speed in experience, because they can skip the decades of now obsolete tech and fast forward to roughly where you are at. This is fine. It can be fun and it's definitely rewarding.
Then by your early thirties, three things change at the same time: you get promoted to a busier, more responsible position, you have small kids, and you get fat. The (waking) time you have for yourself shrinks from 8-10 hrs to about an hour if you're lucky. You can use that hour to study and keep up to date, to do something about that gut and exercise, or you're so tired you just want to relax. Pick one.
In my opinion, this is why middle aged people seem so lazy and boring.
And there's other things, like how at 30 I had totally lost the ability to squat down unaided - I had to prop myself up with a hand, and now I like to drop down and sit in squat position just because I enjoy the feeling of my newfound strength and mobility... I don't dare think about how drained I'd be from just short amounts of playtime with my son if I didn't exercise regularly.
Exercise is an answer to too little time, not a problem.
The big difference is for the last 8 years I've put in 3-5 hours of hard exercise (powerlifting) every week before work. I wish I had more time, both for exercise and projects, but these days I can pull all nighters and walk into the gym 7am the following morning and set new personal records a couple of times a week, and keep my energy up all day, whereas at 30 I was worn down to the point where I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without my knees hurting, and would collapse on the sofa in the evening and not have energy for anything.
Now I am in better shape than most of the kids half my age at my gym, and have early 20's body builders talking about how deep I can squat.
And I go home after work, play with my son, and put in time on my projects after he's in bed.
Sure, I had downtime when my son was smaller, but kids are not an excuse for all that long - when he was younger, I put projects aside and my only "me time" was focused on keeping fit, and I feel it paid off. Now, every day, he can do more stuff for himself, and wants to, and every new achievement means more energy left over for me.
Why? Better diet (Paleo) and daily exercise. Bodyweight and Pilates, in my case, but I'm planning to try powerlifting at some point. (I remain convinced that mind-body exercise like T'ai Chi, Pilates or yoga are one of the best body hacks out there. )
For some additional "Old Guy" inspiration, here's Joe Pilates, the inventor of Pilates, at 51 and 82. He, erm, doesn't exactly look it: http://www.vivianzapanta.com/look-at-joseph-pilates-age-51-a...
People sort into two bins: Those who make choices, and those who make excuses.
I think it's often the people who think that they should have already won the prize that end up in the latter category. So they spend their time rationalizing why they haven't gotten there, or what is holding them back.
I've realized that there's no prize to win, there's no time limit, and that I can learn new things far more quickly than I could when I was younger. Instead of making excuses, or living in awe of past accomplishments, I just do new things. I take new notes. I learn new languages. I got a keyboard last month, and I started studying music theory and writing some compositions, and I play along with my baby on my knee, trying to play in whatever key it sounds like she's banging her hands on.
Some people complain that chores are hard with a baby. I challenge myself to do the chores one-handed with her held on my hip when she needs to be held. She loves the experience, I get extra exercise, and the chores get done, and I spend time with her, and it's kind of fun to figure out how to do certain things that you expect to have 2 hands for with only one.
I'm no superman, and I don't try to be. I do get to slow down, but I do it without regret.
I try to spend the time that other people take regretting the things that they can't or didn't do to do the things I want to do.
The morning is the best time to take care of the body. I am a cyclist and I love nothing more than to wake up early (well, somewhat early) and getting in an hour-of-power before breakfast, coffee, and work. I start the day off right and by the end of the day, I feel naturally tired instead of run down (there is a difference).
I'm not saying exercise is bad, and I do try and keep up with it, but am I the only one that has to think, "I can't exercise now or else I'll be too tired to code later."?
The right exercise regiment is important. There's no need to push yourself hard the first three months if you're starting out. Try a couch to 5k run routine over six months.
In the world where App Academy and the like are churning out iPhone developers, Ruby on Rails programmers, and Javascript (uh, what's the word for person who works in JS?.... ) advocates in eight to twelve weeks doesn't make those sound like skills to hone to get your long-term stability.
Personally, I keep being surprised by how much value there is in just remembering how tech worked in the 1990s and even the early 2000s - Windows and OSX and Linux have changed a lot and iOS and Android seem completely new - but a lot of platform decisions evolved gradually in the changing technical context, and throwback behaviors can seem completely mysterious to someone who's first programming environment was XCode - there's still DOS behaviors hidden in some of these places! I wouldn't be surprised if ye olde mainframe experts had some even subtler knowledge about how-things-really-work-under-there than I do.
My personal theory is that it's all about ensuring continued personal and professional growth. I know plenty of people who stoped those in their 20s and seem "old". I also know plenty of people in their 60s and 70s who didn't stop them and I find myself surprised regularly when I remember the number of years they've been alive.
Basically just supporting digitalsushi's point with anecdotal evidence.
Anyone who is glamorizing hipster practices over genuine experience should go out and build a few embedded systems, a car, or a pacemaker, or a dialysis machine, control system for a nuclear reactor, or a better routing algorithm etc. If you are busy building <insert yet another MVC site here> and refusing to look and learn from other software domains, you will likely never work on any technically meaty projects ever and soon fall victim to age related discrimination.
Building great things requires experience. Its not about impatience, and that thing about 'fail quick, fail fast' - 'quick iterations'. Some of the most significant work happens only at a slow steady pace. With proper planning, fore though about quality/stability of systems you are trying to build. Most importantly its about the seriousness and the impact of the problems you are trying to solve.
This takes time and with it you will age.
Not sure this is the best path to happiness.
By contrast, the only people I've found it worthwhile comparing myself with, on any sort of regular basis, are me yesterday, last week and last year. Am I stronger this year than I was last; do I know how to do more? And that, while being a highly individual focused way of doing things, seems to work fairly well. I don't get a crushing sense of not being as good as others or not measuring up to my potential; if I think I'm not as good as I should be at something, then I just get better at that for tomorrow.
Of course one can argue that wanting to leave a positive memory is just as selfish as wanting to leave a negative one, but that would seem to me to be arguing in the same sense that wanting to donate to charity is an act of selfishness.
A few days back, I remember there was a story posted here about a fisher man living the good life, and having the best of time with family, friends and leisure. Only that later another fisher man helped by a business guy started working extra hours, sets up his own company, establishes a monopoly and employs the first fisher man. Soon the first guy sees though he didn't want any of it, he is now a part of that very system.
For philosophical sort of happiness to work, we all need to go into some sort of equilibrium without ever breaking a few rules that are necessary to preserve the equilibrium. That is neither possible, nor good for the larger fate of our society.
One other thing I took away is that the author seemed that if you didn't make a big world impact no matter your age then you didn't succeed. I get into that mindset every once in awhile and feel rather down about it. Then I realize I'm raising my family, and while I may never be remembered for that amazing startup, I will be remembered by the ones that in the end truly matter.
Now, I wouldn't argue that someone in their 50s (or older) is prima facie better than someone younger. Just that they're not automatically worse.
p.s. You could argue that "too much experience" can be a bad thing, and blind someone to innovation. Although that's a good point I'd argue that the issue isn't too much experience, instead it's usually too narrow experience and/or too little ability to process it effectively.
So in that environment, you can imagine how someone in his twilight years might have an easier time succeeding because people are more willing to listen to him. For the exception of people like Knuth, Lamport, Stallman, Pike, Thompson, etc. most of us in tech have our ears tuned to a much younger population. It might change as our industry gets older.
Since then I finally realized my dream to travel around the world professionally as a developer, participated in multiple startups, wrote a well-received book, found the woman of my dreams, and changed possibly hundreds of lives.
Post-35 rocks!
One the key differentiators is whether or not people are willing to continue learning. People who learn continue to be useful, people who stop learning eventually aren't. (useful that is)
For me, it's easy to think "I am a failure" compared to these people, especially as the years pass and the number of successes I know increases, but I'm not "one of them". This is a severe error of conflating my external success with internal value.
I prefer to recall the old Taoist saying, "Work is done, then forgotten."
It's not the comparison that's sad, letting it define your worth is.
It's something I struggle with, almost 30 still struggling through my degree and working on minor projects. But personally when I look back a few years painfully grinding through life addicted to meth it makes today's small successes feel like a billion dollars.
So yeah, you might not see it while in your 20s but nothing feels better than the combination of intelligence and experience. That is, the result of learning how to learn.
It's taking a lot of effort on my side to sit down and relax and realize that everyone on the planet has some achievements to show. Not just the "young". The best case for that is just browsing through Kickstarter projects. Yeah, sure, we're used to seeing people in the early 20s "changing the way everything works" but we also see the veterans coming back to make yet another shift.
When I got to be around 35 I realized that if you want to be in a rock band, you need to be ok with working a lot for no money and spending your weekends in a van and those are things I just didn't want to do anymore and probably most people in their 30s have a tapering off tolerance for such things.
But for stuff involving computers? They age much faster than we do and will never judge us by our ages.
Or maybe it's a bunch of 22-year-olds who just want to hang out with people their own age.
The concept in the 60's at least was partly due to change in culture between the young "hippies" vs. the older "man". People were realizing in a big way that "the man" was lying to us... Vietnam War, etc.
Things haven't changed much in that regard, but the corporate/govt media "alliance" has become more sophisticated in dispersing/distracting such anger.
I'm coming to understand that everyone is unique, one's career/life progress is no better than another's. Thanks for the refreshing perspective OP.
End of the day, focus on building strong relationships and you'll find that business gets easier. Don't be a 2D person.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-su...
Colonel Sanders started franchising of KFC at 65.
I started programming relatively late (at age 26), after becoming unemployed during the recession, for a govt agency in a small town in Florida. But now, at my current age of 30, I have a very lucrative job working for a major movie studio in LA as a software engineer. I have a lot of ambition at 30 than I ever did at 20 and that has been motivated by my failures. I might of missed my "startup years" and hacker culture in general but I'm definitely on track for big things. I hope to soon finally settle down and raise a family as well.
I hope you will be among the exception.
years ago i set myself an ambitious goal of being a self-made millionaire by the time i'm 30, and a billionaire by 40. it's crazy talk to most people, but it was a goal i set for myself. obviously, it doesn't seem that plausible now - it's really more of a fantasy than anything at this moment but still... i find myself feeling old and having wasted many years of my life.
this blog post lifted my spirits a little. i feel that if i begin working really hard now and make the next few decades of my life extremely, exceptionally and extraordinarily productive, i can probably still achieve enough to make up for the last few unproductive years of my life.
Increasingly I try to look at success as a more fluid notion. I feel it has many dimensions that constantly evolve with my changing world view and life. It can be valuable to set goals but I think it's just as important not to be myopic to the rest of the world at their expense.
I feel a lot of it comes down to attitude. My grandpa would still have been a happy man had he not had the opportunity to pioneer medical science. Prior to his 60s, his curiosity and willingness explore meant he had a fulfilling life. He wasn't expecting and waiting for a big success. He was focused on what he was able to do and made sure he did it to the best of his abilities.
These are some quick thoughts on a bus and I apologise if it seem like I'm being preachy. I'm only 29 and very much still figuring it all out. I dare say I will be doing that until I die. Please share your thoughts, especially if they run counter to what I've written.
Age is a number not a limitation.
If you connect with this idea, you may want to check out the book The Inner Game of Tennis: http://www.amazon.com/The-Inner-Game-Tennis-Performance/dp/0...
That made me feel a bit more realistic about life. :-)
I'm 36 and things only seem to be getting better for me, and I know things are only going to get way better. My greatest achievements are ahead of me, not behind me.
Sounds cheesy but it's all in your outlook. Good on you gramps for teaching us yet another lesson in that.
So, it really depends on what's the meaning of "successful" to you :)
For me, sure daycare, toys, and food aren't putting me in the poorhouse, but there is no way I can bankroll everything I think my kids deserve.
Context: in Italy you are supposed to own a house vs renting one. Everything in the society and regulations is organized towards owning it vs renting.
There's others that do it the other way too. It just depends upon your's and your other half's choice.
There are way worse countries to raise a child in (economically speaking). I was raised there with a brother and a sister just with my father's (lower middle class) salary, and I had a fantastic childhood.
Two, for beter or worse, govts subsidize families to the detriment of the single. When the wife and kid arrive, you'll get a ~$500 a month tax break, enough to pay for another bedroom and diapers. The total cost is much less than I'd imagined, especially if you avoid buying all the junk thats expected.
Toys are nice too, but we're totally covered. This kid won't know boredom until he's 60.
Now I'm making a solid living, we're finishing paying off our permanent home, and we're expecting our 8th child. (By the way, I'm also 36. We didn't wait exactly because we knew that our time to build a family was limited while our time to make money was less so.)
PATENT TROLL! ALERT APPLE, SOMEONE'S TRYING TO GET IN THEIR MARKET!!! WE DON'T APPROVE OF INNOVATION AND PATENTS HERE ON HN
If he had been allowed to do research from his early 20s wouldn't it still have been possible for him to be just as successful at it? Maybe his 30s would have been his heavy hitting decade?
In general maybe we all get about a decade of heavy hitting and it just happens earlier or later for some? :P
>My grandpa had no choice but to wait a long time for his opportunity. It's likely he would have achieved even more had be moved to the West.
These are still unpolished thoughts. I want to explore more fully in a future post.
->Chinese politics hampered innovation
->If you plan to change the world in Academia expect to do it in your 50s
Of course not. C'mon.
Quite an annoying headline.
I noticed that older engineers seemed to bifurcate into two groups: the ones who were curious about everything, and the ones who stayed in their box.
The ones who were curious about everything remained great engineers. They tinkered with new technologies, read books about software project management, wrote cool little programs in unusual languages like Haskell or Scheme, etc. These guys were invariably great engineers, and their experience was just icing on the cake.
The ones who stayed in their niche of writing x86 assembly, COBOL applications for mainframes or writing the same class of network drivers for Linux for fifteen years were usually awful.
I don't doubt that there is actual ageism out there. However, when I did interviews I never cared. However, I also noticed that the "lazy engineers" hadn't really done anything in their career to expand their skill set beyond the minimum their employers required them to do, and I could see why they were not employable. The older "curious, passionate" engineers I hired worked out awesome.
There will always be people who remain curious throughout their lives, as there will always be people who stay close to what they know because they believe it to be safe.