starlord

Yep, good idea. Will try to search for them through the weekend and see if I can summarise them in. single thread perhaps... Should help personally as well I guess

Haha. I understand that "Life is unfair, get used to it" and you just gotta wing it with sink or swim mentality in such adverse situations...

Frankly I was just looking for if anyone has a better defined strategy for this situation as I can't really figure out one with enough confidence...

I will agree with this. I would prefer to find a fit rather than fit in.

And this does not mean being obstinate, but rather pursuing only what I find interesting rather than what most people find interesting.

I am glad it is working out great for you. In fact this scenario is more or less what I have in mind when I think about going back to college for higher studies. Never could let go of the first love of life (yeah it wasn't a girl, it was Physics :| )

I graduated a little earlier when MIT OCW was the only online resource of good quality, and did try to learn enough about a lot of things. Suffered slightly lower grades, but came as a well equipped generalist to pursue almost anything... But real world mechanics have left much to be desired frankly from the nice picture painted all through school and college of how life would be. And while this option is really enticing for me, the other comment on how writing generic grant proposals can be an equally soul-sucking exercise does bring in an element of doubt...

But thanks for sharing this. If you don't mind sharing, what university are you at or you would recommend for Physics/quantum-computing-related programs?

Ok, let me rephrase. With enough experiences I have become cognizant of the fact that I don't always have to be in "happy" mode. In fact just like any piece of harmony, I appreciate all the high notes and low notes life throws at me now with more or less similar outlook.

What I am looking for though is being more content with what I am doing with the time I have here in this lifetime. I believe there could be much better ways of progressing through life than what I am doing right now, hence seeking advice to better refine that pursuit towards perhaps a few more high notes than low notes in life :)

I think part from the dog, the lists overlap fairly well more or less. I don't own a dog, but like playing with them whenever i get the chance. Also loved ones are fewer than I would have liked. Trying to help out enough people and yes it does help a lot, but also takes up a lot of time. There's always a tradeoff I guess. :)

While your last response statement is quite on point with what i feel i should do as well, but it's quite difficult to execute unfortunately. Have tried delegation, but the results have been not upto the mark and personal ego has taken a hit as a result quite often :|

:) Always suspected that the British tv got the grim reality right rather than the hopeful American ones I have watched more often.

But on a serious note, thanks for sharing this. I sort of had forgotten about this part while my mind was painting a more rosy picture of that career option.

I understand from where you are coming from. But the very point that it takes a lot of effort to be "extrovertable" is an issue. I have tried this and on the weekends where i "extroverted" myself, I feel pretty exhausted by Sunday night and dread the Monday mornings.

Perhaps, I might lie in that "unhappy everywhere" group... but I think I was pretty happy in college around the bunch of other like-minded friends. It's just that those happiness activity metrics might not best match with society's generally accepted metrics. But now that I am more aligned to general things "happy" people do, I usually find myself more aloof and unhappy along with usually tired feeling with all the "extroversion". Have practiced enough for years (especially being a founder of a company now), but it's still pretty tiring :(

Also mostly the happiness experienced in such situations is often temporary and bonds formed are feeble, as I can't keep up the "extroversion" for too long and soon become boring for a lot of people, so I am actually trying to move away from that now :)

I agree and I am skeptical on college front as well, hence seeking advice on how it turned out for others who might have wandered on similar trajectories in life.

It's just that due to various financial constraints and a myopic view of world, I never really considered research as a career. But now as I have become more aware of how world works, i find that to be a bad move in me 20s.

I like learning, problem-solving and in general building new stuff, and this doesn't always intersect with best financial outcomes except in research-as-a-career option I believe.

But, yes thanks for your advice. Already working on this a bit.

:) I like washing utensils, it's very peaceful watching the stream of water clean them away... But it's temporary. I was looking for more of a longer-term over-arching stuff.

:) I will take the risk of passing an unsolicited advice: Explore all but do engage deeply in at least a few of your interests. Leads to a much more fulfilling(in hindsight) college life in midst of all the distractions you shall encounter ahead.

As I mentioned in the other comment I think it's easier to be honest when you are in a position of power (economically or socially) as you can probably absorb the repercussions without too much of a harm. Like probably only telling the positive stats when raising money is much more beneficially. It's always great to have some friend to ground you back again in truth, but it's very rare to find such folks. Most people are way more comfortable in ignorance rather than hearing/telling the real truth... so just to even have amicable relationships with most people you have gotta lie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well, I think it's easier to be honest when you are in a position of power (economically or socially) as you can probably absorb the repercussions without too much of a harm

While I was on the same page when I was fresh out of college and actually did believe this... I am sorry but I have learned otherwise only after stumbling through all the really uncomfortable life experiences from working in a large "regulated" bank, to working in a funky tech startup with "great" founders, to starting my own company and pitching to "great" investors, to even the personal relationships and even the other seemingly "ideal" relationships. Being too truthful only leaves you feeling more lonely. Almost all the hustles are based on lies anyways... I do personally believe that if one has had to struggle enough in life and wasn't blessed with enough privilege/guidance/network, moving forward in life without some lies is almost an impossibility. (Basing this on candid conversations with some of the "successful" people I have had the chance to interact with at times...) So I am pretty sure, there enough people here who lie often, but aren't comfortable admitting it yet. I just try not to lie to myself at least, hence was looking for opinions if someone did feel the same and how they dealt with it.

Thanks a lot for this! I will be reaching out to you.

I understand. I have had a few of these experiences in life where I still end up working and missing out on the "vacation" part. I need to move away from these partially-toxic vacations...

I guess, you are correct in quite a few observations. I shall talk to a psychologist soon. Thanks!

Balanced life sounds great, but is damn difficult to maintain with consistency... work almost always wins. I might take up the idea in sometime, when i perhaps get back to normal and have more time at hand.

Could you please share which meetups in India?

This... doesn't really help me right now, but resonates a lot with my current understanding of the world.

This sounds good, helpful and a little relaxing. Thanks! I shall add "Going Hands Off" to next skill to acquire list :)

Depends on what you want to achieve out of the next few years of your life.

As in any other choice in life, you have both pros and cons in both the choices.

As also pointed out in other answers, it would hold true that doing your own startup will be the easiest now, as this choice will only get harder as you grow older and your responsibilities/obligations increase. This would definitely give you a good overall growth in many areas.

If you want to develop skill-sets in a particular domain, then I would suggest to go join a big corp where you can learn some best practices, get mentors and maybe even find interesting folks for you own startup at some point later in life. Also a somewhat middle path can be achieved by joining an early stage startup where you can find the above mentioned things in the team, and the pace of growth will be faster as well.

Will share my personal experience as well, maybe it might help. (Though take it with a pinch of salt, as it's not purely objective for me anymore.) I had a good chance to do a startup right out of college with a few friends and some ready funding/accelerators acceptances, but I took the option to go with a big corp. After about an year, I really regretted that decision. I have been wishing to go back and change that... So I left the big corp job after about 2 years, and have been working in core founding team of a startup for 2 years. Learning pace is much quicker in startup, but be clear in what you want out of the time you give to the organisation you will work for be it your own or someone else's.

Big points of regret for me: 1. I had a good team with me then (damn difficult to find this), 2. I was quite passionate about the problem we were working on (again not as easy to develop as it sounds). 3. Seed funding was readily available, so finances would also have been taken care of while working there (as you grow this starts becoming a concern as your burn rate increases...)

Also, I would suggest you to watch both Paul Graham's lecture (L3) and Dustin Moskovitz's advice (L1) @ http://startupclass.samaltman.com/ to also maybe get some more perspectives.

Hope it helps. All the best!

One good way to start would be to add the url/details in this post as well. Next, as suggested in other comments Reddit is nice, then Quora is also big hangout for many of your target audience (at least in India). Would probably need more details on the product to suggest anything more specific. If you are willing to spend some money, make a fb page and get some fb ads with product details, beta tester incentives and target to specific universities/colleges/companies perhaps...

I was just wondering how did you deal with other senior team members that still stayed back. Hope there was no bad blood. I am curious as it seems you leaving would have been a big blow to them and they could have reacted a little adversely maybe out of self-interest...

Thanks for addressing my concerns point wise! I have been a little worried about the stock option move ever since I have come to know about it. It has been the only sort of red flag as of yet about the leadership, but I will keep your words in mind and see if there is a trend. You have given very actionable advice. I guess talking to them about this should be my first step in any scenario I proceed with.

Yes I believe the autonomy part is important and helps you learn stuff about managing expectations of all stakeholders in a product, getting work done in a distributed manner from other engineers is also an added skill (which IMHO is bloody frustrating to learn). Also I have learned a lot on maintainability and the cons of technical debts. But when something that excites you most is the joy of learning or building something new, the problem here becomes an ever growing chunk of time that goes into maintaining, supervising or corrective processes rather than creation process. Perhaps this would be true for most places... It's just that for quite sometime when you wake up in the morning and start wishing it was a holiday... something needs to be done I guess. Thanks for sharing your experiences though. It helps to know I am not alone in a dilemma over such a situation...

Thanks for sharing your experience. I hadn't read the post by Ryan. Thanks. This does look really encouraging and helpful at this point.

Nice.

If you have also used NetLogo, how different/difficult was it as compared to that.

I had used NetLogo a few years back in college to study tax evasion behaviour from agent based models, it worked out quite well to match IRS figures with similar policy variables with not much time spent in coding up the logic. But a major problem I faced then was dealing with a few matrix operations, for which I had to write out a lot of code. So I figure it would be fun to replicate it in python now, hence the question to gauge difficulty in porting that code to python...