Hah, I'm 19 and relate to this sentiment far too well, except just thinking back on the last 4-5 years.
I just spent the last 3 months away from the internet, and it was ridiculously mind-clearing. Burning Man turned into chasing a girl around the West Coast, turned into coming back to NYC and quitting my job so I can do more of what I want.
I still haven't really gotten back into Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook like I was before I left.
I'm not sure how I feel that mental clarity and this 'new idea ADD' are related. But I definitely feel more centered now. Reflection is key, and you're doing that. I think that's the first step toward doing what you want to do.
[edit] I think what I'm trying to say is, eliminate distractions, reflect, and follow your gut.
Luckily, business isn't a field where only the young make an impact: Colonel Sanders started KFC at 65, Henry Ford started Ford Motor Company at 34...most entrepreneurs aren't 25.
Also, consider architecture: most architects don't hit their prime until 50. But yeah, life is short, so don't waste too much time.
I could have written this, except that I can already see 30 a ways back there in the rear view mirror.
I have just two things that I think are very important to say about this.
1) Don't worry about the fact that you're 30. That line about artists in their 30s or 40s is BS. There is no magical age at which you have to have produced your magnum opus. Never let the desire to "do something great" prevent you from doing the work. In fact, that's most likely what is keeping you FROM doing your great work. As someone who suffers from the same "idea addiction," I can say that one of the reasons people like us always chase new ideas is that we are trying to have our great moment, and are always afraid that if we buckle down and commit to one of our ideas, it might not be that Great Work, and we'll end up missing the next great idea when it comes along. So, we are always looking for the Best Possible Thing, and we don't get down to the work that really has to happen.
2) Even superstars have to do the dishes. We hear so much about the famous artists, businessmen, inventors, musicians, whatever, but all we hear about are their glories. It's boring to talk about all the days of the long grind, just plugging away to make the donuts. For every eureka moment, there are hundreds of hours of everyday work.
I'm 40 years old, and I've produced, in my estimation, one "amazing art." It's a magazine I started and ran for eight years. In retrospect, I feel like it was a non-stop party, but if I really think about it, the only reason it succeeded was that I had no choice but to slug it out and put in the 90-hour weeks of boring copy editing, ad sales, bookkeeping, etc. It's because at the time, it was the ONLY IDEA I HAD.
Now that I have dozens of ideas at any given time, ironically, I get none of them done.
Don't try to create a Great Work. Pick something you enjoy and have fun making, and just make the hell out of it. If you're lucky, it might even be "amazing art."
i think that the personal value of art is making it and the importance it has to you. you can't hand down the judgment of how "good" your art is to somebody else, or in fact judge it at all. the only thing it will lead to is making yourself feel bad. the beauty is in making, not wanting.
I've had this same problem and I finally put a stop to it this year. I actually took one of my abandoned projects and used the code for a new venture.
I always had this problem when I worked a corporate job. Mostly because I wasn't hungry for success. I always had that steady paycheck coming in and I could abandon my new project when I ran into the slightest difficulty.
I quit last year with 2+ years salary and I've been working on the same two projects since.
"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life.
I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention.
At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow.
If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.
At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.
May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."
For the record he did live to 88, which is a bit more than double my age (almost triple the original poster's age).
I don't think he believed he would live to 150, but saying that expressed his feeling of something that was beyond his reach but which animated every moment of his life and his art.
What I take from the quote is that existence shouldn't be a bell curve, with half or more of your life as an inevitable decline, but that your youth can be a foundation upon which to build knowledge and wisdom. You should end up smarter after many years, shouldn't you?
To be able to look back and smile at one's bravado, knowing that you can do so much more now, with less effort and rush, and that if you continue striving, you'll do even more in the future. To deeply and truly understand your craft.
That's what I'd want, a real life worth living, not to be the tech equivalent of a child star.
If you find that you are declining mentally after 30 or 40, you are either doing something wrong or are genetically extremely unlucky.
Exercise, a good diet, proper sleep, combined with plenty of intellectual and social interactions seem to be enough to keep you from measurably losing any mental faculties well into your 70s or 80s (and even 90+ if genetically lucky).
It actually is inevitable, as even you admit when we begin to reach our 70s/80s ;). If we don't die of something else, all of us will die of Alzheimer's. Simple fact of universal amyloid plaque buildup. http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...
Also technically incorrect on the mental decline as well - our brains do start to irrevocably decline at around age 30. Our myelin sheaths fully develop in the early 20s, and from there, we have a few golden years until it's all downhill :D http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090320092111.ht...
>>Today I need to get serious. No, drastic. Like a heroin addict going to rehab. This is my intervention. No more new ideas, no more domain names, no more client work, no more hypotheticals, no more I’ll do it tomorrow, no more wasted time. ”By the way, what have you ever done that’s so great?” I’ll have to get back to you.
<<
You can still have lots of new ideas but no matter how many ideas you have you should have one and only one project that you are committed to at a time and make sure you finish it no matter how long it takes.
One must realize that most ideas have a very similar chance of succeeding (slim to none) no matter how great they may seem at first and that one of the best ways to increase the chances for an idea to succeed is to commit to it.
Meanwhile, while you are working on your main idea you will probably realize that a lot of the pieces you are building (at least in software) you will be able to re-use for some of your other ideas.
Art is an extremely general and subjective term. I have seen code that is artful. I have seen paintings that are artful. No artist can lay claim to what is art in a field they may be unfamiliar with.
I've seen code that's poetic and artful. Computer science, like any science, has artistic elements to it, especially when economy of motion is utilized.
Money isn't art. To quote Robert Graves: "If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money."
I turn 30 in 5 months and can completely identify with how you've felt. I too have the dozens of domain names for long-abandoned web applications for some idea that I thought was a radical spike of insight at the time.
It's a vicious cycle. I get the idea. I register the domain name, already imagining a brilliant fully-featured yet astonishingly-easy-to-use product. I start cranking out code. But it takes some time. I realized some problems I thought were easy are harder. That takes more time. I realize a certain problem is exceptionally hard and will take me longer than I thought, so I hack together something that works for now. I realize yet another problem will take me longer than I thought, and a few weeks pass and I begin to feel my web application is just a series of hacks. If we're using the art analogy, rather than the beautiful and crisp design I envisioned, my canvas is filled with ugly smears and smudges that doesn't look anything like what's in my mind.
And it's always a lot easier to just throw out the canvas and start something new, than to tediously work out improving those smears and smudges.
So, perhaps one hopeful anecdote I can share: earlier this year I did start a project that I've finally been able to focus on. The only difference with this one vs. the others
is that I saw a tangible return relatively early on. Two months after I worked on it, I made $72. That's basically a laughable number, except it's the first tangible return on the dozens of web applications I've started and abandoned for the past 5 years. From then on, there's been a mostly-positive correlation between "hours put into project" and "dollars earned," which has completely shifted my mentality.
I've begun to take pride in those smears and smudges, knowing I'm already succeeding to some degree and it could be especially rewarding if I continue. I have no idea if this would work for you, or anyone else, but like others have said, this is a process. Everyone designs and creates at their own pace, and age seemed pretty meaningless to me. In fact it's now that I'm older, instead of 5 years ago, that I can begin to appreciate my limitations and have the patience to work with them, instead of ignoring the fact that they exist.
And above all, be proud that in a world where many are content to maintain and manage (literally and figuratively), you have the desire and the ability to create and produce. Best of luck.
It's worth remembering that web applications come a long way from conception to what the general public will see. Facebook is barely a hallmark of what Zuck was programming by himself.
If you have a great idea the early adopters will recognize that. The general public won't. However those early adopters might give you enough money to keep developing so that 5 years from now the general public might be paying too.
Keep doing things. Be lazy. Try to do less. Figure out how you can reduce and write less code. Ask yourself again and again "Do I REALLY need this part?"
Your process sounds a lot like mine, honestly. Keep going, it works.
I think what's missing (for many of the people with trails of broken dreams, including me) is the ability to rally support for what you're doing. The best test of a good idea is whether others rally behind it. It's a crucial skill for makers.
Like you, and and I'm sure many of us, I also have plenty of projects I've conceived up, purchased domain names, and cranked out a bit of code for, only to let it languish in non-use never to be heard from again.
This is healthy, it helps to weed out the bad ideas, or at least the ideas that might be promising but for which you don't actually have the passion for bringing to fruition, let alone maintaining for years should it actually gain a little bit of traction.
The projects of mine that have stuck around despite my rather fickle nature are the ones that really hit close to home -- projects for which I clearly have a need and even more, a passion to keep alive. My current project, BracketPal[1], is such a project. I'm a pretty hardcore beach volleyball player, and after playing in many volleyball leagues, both bar/casual and competitive leagues, I've found the average quality of league websites to be offensively dismal. So it started as a nugget of "I need to make this, because I just can't handle getting my schedule emailed to me in a spreadsheet anymore", to my first paying customers' leagues starting up their indoor volleyball and kickball leagues this coming January.
Before that, in 2005 I was obsessed with running my World of Warcraft guild to an unhealthy degree, and so I started up and launched my guild hosting system in 2006 and it's still around.
In both cases, I would not have managed to create a quality product if I didn't have a passion, nay, obsession about these particular fields.
So I strongly believe that it's a good thing to cook up a bunch of half-baked ideas. If you lose interest in them before launching, great, you've found a project you shouldn't be doing anyway, it's time to move onto another project - one you might have a bit more serious passion for.
In your case, it's absolutely great getting that first payment, that first evidence that what you've created is being used and appreciated by people, even if it iss only $72. It all starts with those first few dollars. And once you've made something that you're receiving praise and money from your customers, it becomes a highly addictive drug, except that getting your "fix" requires you improving your software and keeping your customers happy.
[1] BracketPal is my sports league management system and I'm crazy excited about it! You can find it shamelessly linked right here: http://www.bracketpal.com
BracketPal is awesome! I'm so glad you made that! That's inspiring to see people scratch their own itch this way. There's a lot of itch scratching that's geared more towards businesses and other stuff that is definitely a niche but yours is in an area where I haven't seen anyone go. It's cool to know that your tiny little project which you may think is insignificant and probably won't get covered by TechCrunch or anyone is still useful enough to people that they'd pay. That gives me hope. Good for you, man.
I've been there too and I like that you mention that you feel like you web app is just a series of hacks. I feel that way too and I'm sure others do as well so why do you think that is? In my case it's probably because we see so many other successful people launching and we start thinking of all the things that could go wrong and that just makes us want to start over.
I'll give you an example. I've had this VPS over at Webbynode for months now just sitting there. It was originally going to be one app but now I just set it up as another last night. (writeapp.me in case you're curious). So I set up my LAMP stack, uploaded whatever part of the app I had to far (which isn't much) and proceeded to install a mail server. Well it went well except I screwed something up and I can't access the web interface for it. That one little thing, not having my mail server work perfectly made me think about starting over with a fresh Ubuntu install. Crazy! I think your idea of what it will become when it's finished has a lot to do with this stuff.
Ambition isn't everything to life. Being kind to others, surrounding yourself with friends and family, and seeking out new and fun experiences are all important and more permanent for your happiness.
However, if you have truly figured yourself out and creating something is vital to your happiness (which is probably true given you are on ycombinator), by golly, understand yourself and reengineer your environment so that you can realize your full potential.
Our society is kind of structured so you are thrown into a pipeline to water and tend to dreams that have already taken root; so if you want to realize your own dream, you need to really step outside the box and plant your own seeds.
May I suggest that you try approaching your ideas from a slightly different perspective: pick those that stem from a personal pain point, that way, you'll be personally vested.
Whilst it's exciting to come up with novel ideas, nothing's more spurring than fixing and making your own life better.
To illustrate, here are some projects that I've embarked on, which scratched a personal pain point and went on to be incidentally well liked by others enough to even pay for:
Customers were frequently asking how to do something and nothing beats sharing a webpage with step-by-step screenshots. Later I found Dropbox to be a great medium so I integrated with that.
Whilst reading long articles, I'd want to select some text, mark it out and jump back between them easily.
Whilst these are not runway successes with millions of dollars of profit, it certainly helps you build up the stamina to successfully ship and launch projects.
Most nobel prize winners, even in theoretical physics, do their nobel-winning work after 40[1] So don't worry about that.
Also: focus on doing what you love, not doing great things. Trying to do things just because everyone else thinks they're great just makes you a real-life karma whore.
I used to have this affliction, but it's reasonably easy to overcome once you realize that you've got it. You just have to pick an idea and not shift attention to anything else until you've followed it through to some kind of conclusion.
I feel like the internet creates a distortion here. Sites like HN make us feel like everyone is out there creating like crazy and doing all this amazing stuff. The reality is a very small minority of people are doing this.
Most people don't create much of anything. At least, anything they could have a major break through on. Most people have day jobs and will always have day jobs. Most people come home from work and watch TV.
It takes serious discipline to take an idea through to success. If I had to guess, discipline is a very important trait for startup success. Maybe you'll never be that disciplined, or maybe it's something you can work on. I can say for sure I am much more disciplined now (at the ripe age of 34) than in my 20s. Yet I still question if I have what it takes to truly do a startup.
To the OP: I think you should just relax and enjoy yourself, let nature take over. Not every idea has to be worth a million dollars. My current project and the one just before it basically have no chance of ever making me any money. I did them because I enjoyed them. I think that is more important and more likely to lead you in a direction you want to go.
I mean, I feel pretty good when I take the trash out on the right day and finish a book - he's setting a pretty high bar if he's assume everyone has to make a startup, let alone succeed at it.
Arguments based on "most people" are not compelling to me. To me, the correct standard to measure my performance against is my potential. And I know I fall far short. I feel I should have accomplished more by now, I could have. I know others have.
I too feel the call of new ideas all the time, and have the same lack of discipline. I've brought precious few of my ideas to state that could possibly be called "done", and none to the glorious state I had imagined. I'm not even talking about making money, just making good stuff for people to enjoy. Perhaps the biggest difference between me and the author is that I'm still only 20 and still in school. To accomplish half the things I want to before I die, I'll have to grow a ton more self-discipline, and sometimes I wonder if I can do it.
To tell me and people like me "relax, other people are lazy too" is not that helpful. It's true, "most people" never fully realize their potential. They have all kinds of bad habits and issues. When have other people's mistakes been an excuse for mine?
I'm not saying "relax, other people are lazy too". That's the other extreme.
Not all of us are Jeff Bezos or John Carmack. But we're not all Homer Simpsons either. There's a healthy, realistic middle ground in there somewhere.
If you feel you are a Bezos, then by all means go for it. I'm sure many on HN feel they are that and many are probably correct, too. But I'm also not sure it's healthy to cut ourselves down and hate on ourselves because we might not be living up to an unrealistic standard.
> I feel I should have accomplished more by now, I could have.
Perhaps the I could have is the little lie we tell ourselves to soften the blow to our ego. Something to think about.
The problem with living inside your own head is that unlike everyone else, you judge yourself by what you think you could be rather than what you are. It's a sort of self deception at play.
> The problem with living inside your own head is that unlike everyone else, you judge yourself by what you think you could be rather than what you are. It's a sort of self deception at play.
I really like what you said here. When I think about my more "well-adjusted" friends, I see that they have a solid set of criteria to compare their achievements against: a decent job, an apartment, having friends. It amounts to a basic societal checklist that they can succeed against.
Living in your own head is like extending the goal every time you reach it. It's like having a carrot attached to a stick that moves with you.
I have this conversation with my wife occasionally.
Those moving goalposts are the difference between 'doing ok' and 'making progress'.
I had a solid job, benefits, place of my own to live, friends, and a spouse at 25. I went stir-crazy though - at that point, you've 'succeeded', what is left to do? What's next?
To muddy the metaphor a little - once you've mastered the 30yard field goal, why keep kicking it? Back up and try the 40, 50, etc. That said, I do think it's important to remember that you have mastered the 30, and that failure at the 80 isn't 'failure' in anybody but your own eyes.
The 'blow to our ego' here is the realization that maybe you're not as awesome as you think that you are, and all of the "I could haves" are really lies, because you couldn't have. At least that's my interpretation of that comment.
I don't know. The idea that you had the skill to do something amazing, but not the discipline to follow through seems to imply that you couldn't do it.
For example, say you see discipline and skill as the two ingredients need to do something amazing. It's easy to say "I had the skill, but not the discipline, I could have done it." But is that really any different than saying, "I had the discipline, but not the skill, I could have done it." Discipline is probably just as difficult as the raw development skills to master, yet it's really easy to convince ourselves that it's just a matter of 'doing it.'
Maybe it's more that I could have gained the skill if I'd worked harder. I fully realize that discipline is harder than raw development skills to learn, and that it's the critical ingredient in any major venture. I understand that, but when I have to really work to finish something I tend to fall down. Which is why it makes me feel horrible.
I think the point is more like, "Don't worry so much, you're not the only fool on HN who hasn't yet mustered a billion-dollar exit".
In a community with a notable amount of awesome people, sometimes it starts to feel like everyone else is experiencing nothing but resounding success, which makes your modest successes feel like abject failures. This can be... demoralizing. Remembering the wild successes are the exception, not the rule, is an important piece of perspective.
I turned 30 today, and I've find myself with a followed trail of crap. I spent 8 years while in high-school/college/grad school working on a game engine that I threw away. I spent a year working endlessly during graduate studies on a computer algebra system for college algebra students to provide step by step instructions. I spent a couple of years in a mathematics graduate program only to drop out and do a start-up. I was homeless for about a year while studying math (living in the CS department). When the start-up turned profitable, I got bored and left.
Now, I look back at all the crap I've made, and I look forward to the things I'm going to make. The things I make each year get better. They get faster, more scalable, better, more beautiful.
The key (I hope) is that no matter what, you don't give up on what you want to do. As I age, I'm getting more comfortable with that.
* 8 years experience designing and producing a game engine, accruing knowledge of dos/donts
> {homeless for a year...}
* Practical experience living/working with extreme resource constraints
> {Developed startup, quit}
* Have produced profitable ventures from nothing -> profit, and in the process realized what really motivates me.
Please don't sell yourself short (not just @mathgladiator, but anybody reading this). The expression "It's the journey, not the destination" can be applicable to both the past and the future.
I was a GTA, and I lived in one of the small compute labs at k-state. Sometimes in my car. Sometimes, I'd go out to fields (deer can be pricks btw) and just sleep under the stars. Or, I'd go up the roof (usually locked, but not always).
I'm turning 32 in March and I gotta say it's been all uphill the last 2 years. Trust me it really means nothing, don't let a number scare you.
When I was in my late teens/20s I was way into the electronica act Underworld. I remember reading how their 20s/30s were spent doing a failed synth pop act (Fruer I think the name was). I son't think they wrote that classic Trainspoyting track "Born Slippy") until they were in their 40s. Maybe it sounds silly but that always stuck with me. I think the current tech startup scene puts an emphasis on youth that is turning into vanity a little. Don't let it get you down.. negative thoughts and fear are infinitely more crippling than any birthday. Keep it up and focus!
I'm turning 32 in March and I gotta say it's been all uphill the last 2 years. Trust me it really means nothing, don't let a number scare you.
When I was in my late teens/20s I was way into the electronica act Underworld. I remember reading how their 20s/30s were spent doing a failed synth pop act (Fruer I think the name was). I son't think they wrote that classic Trainspoyting track "Born Slippy") until they were in their 40s. Maybe it sounds silly but that always stuck with me. I think the current tech startup scene puts an emphasis on youth that is turning into vanity a little. Don't let it get you down.. negative thoughts and fear are infinitely more crippling than any birthday. Keep it up and focus!
Marriage. Heh. It has the potential to seriously screw up your life, or be great. I can't advise entering into it on the basis of "I've put it off long enough."
I would interpret it as "don't put your life on hold". Life is all relative, so when you compare stuff, you compare it to what you know. Getting married and having my daughter (currently 1yr) has given me something amazing to compare everything else I do to.
So, I'm still just as hungry to create "the next big thing" but if it doesn't happen, fine, I already got the top prize.
I guess the irony is that my pursuit of "the next big thing" is so that one day I can spend more time with my wife and daughter, but actually it's currently having the exact opposite effect...
Because life is finite and relentless. Because it's better to take opportunity before it's gone forever. Because some things take two, and if you don't go all in in time the other will move on, n'er to return. Because better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Because procreation is awesome. Because not procreating, ever, is (for most) an emotional black hole. Because your business doesn't give a damn about you, but your spouse always will.
Because my daughter lying in front of me pestering me to play a game is the best thing ever, better than any technological or business success - and I'd best get to playing that game now.
And (game now over) because, when she's just 3 months old, having a doctor wonder why you're still alive and whether you will be a week hence, the indescribable melancholy will be about her and her mother, not about whether a project was finished.
That sounds counter-productive. If you need good ideas, you better allow yourself to keep the ideas flowing (I suppose I believe there's something random about the quality of ideas, so to have a good one, you need to allow lots of 'em).
What might be interesting is to look into something called "mental contrasting": it says you shouldn't just revel in a new idea, because envisioning the outcome gives you a good part of the gratification of actually achieving it. Instead, you should still allow yourself the envisioning, but afterwards contrast that with how far you are now.
154 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadI just spent the last 3 months away from the internet, and it was ridiculously mind-clearing. Burning Man turned into chasing a girl around the West Coast, turned into coming back to NYC and quitting my job so I can do more of what I want.
I still haven't really gotten back into Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook like I was before I left.
I'm not sure how I feel that mental clarity and this 'new idea ADD' are related. But I definitely feel more centered now. Reflection is key, and you're doing that. I think that's the first step toward doing what you want to do.
[edit] I think what I'm trying to say is, eliminate distractions, reflect, and follow your gut.
The cool thing about being 19 is you could fuck up totally for, like, five years and still be young enough to start completely over.
Bravo on learning to focus, bravo on chasing a girl around the West Coast, and bravo on following your gut.
Keep it up, the 40-year-old you will thank 19-year-old you for it one day.
Self reflection, criticism, and being able to detach yourself from things that control our though and behavior.
Also, consider architecture: most architects don't hit their prime until 50. But yeah, life is short, so don't waste too much time.
I could have written this, except that I can already see 30 a ways back there in the rear view mirror.
I have just two things that I think are very important to say about this.
1) Don't worry about the fact that you're 30. That line about artists in their 30s or 40s is BS. There is no magical age at which you have to have produced your magnum opus. Never let the desire to "do something great" prevent you from doing the work. In fact, that's most likely what is keeping you FROM doing your great work. As someone who suffers from the same "idea addiction," I can say that one of the reasons people like us always chase new ideas is that we are trying to have our great moment, and are always afraid that if we buckle down and commit to one of our ideas, it might not be that Great Work, and we'll end up missing the next great idea when it comes along. So, we are always looking for the Best Possible Thing, and we don't get down to the work that really has to happen.
2) Even superstars have to do the dishes. We hear so much about the famous artists, businessmen, inventors, musicians, whatever, but all we hear about are their glories. It's boring to talk about all the days of the long grind, just plugging away to make the donuts. For every eureka moment, there are hundreds of hours of everyday work. I'm 40 years old, and I've produced, in my estimation, one "amazing art." It's a magazine I started and ran for eight years. In retrospect, I feel like it was a non-stop party, but if I really think about it, the only reason it succeeded was that I had no choice but to slug it out and put in the 90-hour weeks of boring copy editing, ad sales, bookkeeping, etc. It's because at the time, it was the ONLY IDEA I HAD. Now that I have dozens of ideas at any given time, ironically, I get none of them done. Don't try to create a Great Work. Pick something you enjoy and have fun making, and just make the hell out of it. If you're lucky, it might even be "amazing art."
I always had this problem when I worked a corporate job. Mostly because I wasn't hungry for success. I always had that steady paycheck coming in and I could abandon my new project when I ran into the slightest difficulty.
I quit last year with 2+ years salary and I've been working on the same two projects since.
edit: I'm being voted down? I was dead serious, a co-founder could help keep him on track, as could he them.
But that judgement is unfair, because one of the characteristics of a truism is that it's often true.
I find encouragement in the quote by the painter of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa", Katsushika Hokusai:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai
"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life.
I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention.
At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow.
If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.
At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.
May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."
Which is exactly the reason we're so rushed ;).
I don't think he believed he would live to 150, but saying that expressed his feeling of something that was beyond his reach but which animated every moment of his life and his art.
What I take from the quote is that existence shouldn't be a bell curve, with half or more of your life as an inevitable decline, but that your youth can be a foundation upon which to build knowledge and wisdom. You should end up smarter after many years, shouldn't you?
To be able to look back and smile at one's bravado, knowing that you can do so much more now, with less effort and rush, and that if you continue striving, you'll do even more in the future. To deeply and truly understand your craft.
That's what I'd want, a real life worth living, not to be the tech equivalent of a child star.
Yes, except for the pesky problem where your mind weakens and often falls apart entirely after not that many decades.
If you find that you are declining mentally after 30 or 40, you are either doing something wrong or are genetically extremely unlucky.
Exercise, a good diet, proper sleep, combined with plenty of intellectual and social interactions seem to be enough to keep you from measurably losing any mental faculties well into your 70s or 80s (and even 90+ if genetically lucky).
Also technically incorrect on the mental decline as well - our brains do start to irrevocably decline at around age 30. Our myelin sheaths fully develop in the early 20s, and from there, we have a few golden years until it's all downhill :D http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090320092111.ht...
You can still have lots of new ideas but no matter how many ideas you have you should have one and only one project that you are committed to at a time and make sure you finish it no matter how long it takes.
One must realize that most ideas have a very similar chance of succeeding (slim to none) no matter how great they may seem at first and that one of the best ways to increase the chances for an idea to succeed is to commit to it.
Meanwhile, while you are working on your main idea you will probably realize that a lot of the pieces you are building (at least in software) you will be able to re-use for some of your other ideas.
Money isn't art. To quote Robert Graves: "If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money."
It's a vicious cycle. I get the idea. I register the domain name, already imagining a brilliant fully-featured yet astonishingly-easy-to-use product. I start cranking out code. But it takes some time. I realized some problems I thought were easy are harder. That takes more time. I realize a certain problem is exceptionally hard and will take me longer than I thought, so I hack together something that works for now. I realize yet another problem will take me longer than I thought, and a few weeks pass and I begin to feel my web application is just a series of hacks. If we're using the art analogy, rather than the beautiful and crisp design I envisioned, my canvas is filled with ugly smears and smudges that doesn't look anything like what's in my mind.
And it's always a lot easier to just throw out the canvas and start something new, than to tediously work out improving those smears and smudges.
So, perhaps one hopeful anecdote I can share: earlier this year I did start a project that I've finally been able to focus on. The only difference with this one vs. the others is that I saw a tangible return relatively early on. Two months after I worked on it, I made $72. That's basically a laughable number, except it's the first tangible return on the dozens of web applications I've started and abandoned for the past 5 years. From then on, there's been a mostly-positive correlation between "hours put into project" and "dollars earned," which has completely shifted my mentality.
I've begun to take pride in those smears and smudges, knowing I'm already succeeding to some degree and it could be especially rewarding if I continue. I have no idea if this would work for you, or anyone else, but like others have said, this is a process. Everyone designs and creates at their own pace, and age seemed pretty meaningless to me. In fact it's now that I'm older, instead of 5 years ago, that I can begin to appreciate my limitations and have the patience to work with them, instead of ignoring the fact that they exist.
And above all, be proud that in a world where many are content to maintain and manage (literally and figuratively), you have the desire and the ability to create and produce. Best of luck.
If you have a great idea the early adopters will recognize that. The general public won't. However those early adopters might give you enough money to keep developing so that 5 years from now the general public might be paying too.
Keep doing things. Be lazy. Try to do less. Figure out how you can reduce and write less code. Ask yourself again and again "Do I REALLY need this part?"
Your process sounds a lot like mine, honestly. Keep going, it works.
This is healthy, it helps to weed out the bad ideas, or at least the ideas that might be promising but for which you don't actually have the passion for bringing to fruition, let alone maintaining for years should it actually gain a little bit of traction.
The projects of mine that have stuck around despite my rather fickle nature are the ones that really hit close to home -- projects for which I clearly have a need and even more, a passion to keep alive. My current project, BracketPal[1], is such a project. I'm a pretty hardcore beach volleyball player, and after playing in many volleyball leagues, both bar/casual and competitive leagues, I've found the average quality of league websites to be offensively dismal. So it started as a nugget of "I need to make this, because I just can't handle getting my schedule emailed to me in a spreadsheet anymore", to my first paying customers' leagues starting up their indoor volleyball and kickball leagues this coming January.
Before that, in 2005 I was obsessed with running my World of Warcraft guild to an unhealthy degree, and so I started up and launched my guild hosting system in 2006 and it's still around.
In both cases, I would not have managed to create a quality product if I didn't have a passion, nay, obsession about these particular fields.
So I strongly believe that it's a good thing to cook up a bunch of half-baked ideas. If you lose interest in them before launching, great, you've found a project you shouldn't be doing anyway, it's time to move onto another project - one you might have a bit more serious passion for.
In your case, it's absolutely great getting that first payment, that first evidence that what you've created is being used and appreciated by people, even if it iss only $72. It all starts with those first few dollars. And once you've made something that you're receiving praise and money from your customers, it becomes a highly addictive drug, except that getting your "fix" requires you improving your software and keeping your customers happy.
[1] BracketPal is my sports league management system and I'm crazy excited about it! You can find it shamelessly linked right here: http://www.bracketpal.com
I'll give you an example. I've had this VPS over at Webbynode for months now just sitting there. It was originally going to be one app but now I just set it up as another last night. (writeapp.me in case you're curious). So I set up my LAMP stack, uploaded whatever part of the app I had to far (which isn't much) and proceeded to install a mail server. Well it went well except I screwed something up and I can't access the web interface for it. That one little thing, not having my mail server work perfectly made me think about starting over with a fresh Ubuntu install. Crazy! I think your idea of what it will become when it's finished has a lot to do with this stuff.
However, if you have truly figured yourself out and creating something is vital to your happiness (which is probably true given you are on ycombinator), by golly, understand yourself and reengineer your environment so that you can realize your full potential.
Our society is kind of structured so you are thrown into a pipeline to water and tend to dreams that have already taken root; so if you want to realize your own dream, you need to really step outside the box and plant your own seeds.
My 2 cents...
At age 30 you're just getting started.
http://www.laboratory-journal.com/news/scientific-news/study...
Whilst it's exciting to come up with novel ideas, nothing's more spurring than fixing and making your own life better.
To illustrate, here are some projects that I've embarked on, which scratched a personal pain point and went on to be incidentally well liked by others enough to even pay for:
http://freshlog.com
I had to submit bug reports with attached screenshots in Basecamp (later Pivotal Tracker and Fogbugz), which involves many steps, so I made this.
http://screendocs.com
Customers were frequently asking how to do something and nothing beats sharing a webpage with step-by-step screenshots. Later I found Dropbox to be a great medium so I integrated with that.
http://handpick.me
I felt that Facebook was a little too noisy and public to share personal links with my family and friends, so I made this.
http://letsrecap.com
Whilst reading long articles, I'd want to select some text, mark it out and jump back between them easily.
Whilst these are not runway successes with millions of dollars of profit, it certainly helps you build up the stamina to successfully ship and launch projects.
You made my fiancee squeal with joy.
Lol, I got it for my wife, she loved it too!
Also: focus on doing what you love, not doing great things. Trying to do things just because everyone else thinks they're great just makes you a real-life karma whore.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=age...
Most people don't create much of anything. At least, anything they could have a major break through on. Most people have day jobs and will always have day jobs. Most people come home from work and watch TV.
It takes serious discipline to take an idea through to success. If I had to guess, discipline is a very important trait for startup success. Maybe you'll never be that disciplined, or maybe it's something you can work on. I can say for sure I am much more disciplined now (at the ripe age of 34) than in my 20s. Yet I still question if I have what it takes to truly do a startup.
To the OP: I think you should just relax and enjoy yourself, let nature take over. Not every idea has to be worth a million dollars. My current project and the one just before it basically have no chance of ever making me any money. I did them because I enjoyed them. I think that is more important and more likely to lead you in a direction you want to go.
I too feel the call of new ideas all the time, and have the same lack of discipline. I've brought precious few of my ideas to state that could possibly be called "done", and none to the glorious state I had imagined. I'm not even talking about making money, just making good stuff for people to enjoy. Perhaps the biggest difference between me and the author is that I'm still only 20 and still in school. To accomplish half the things I want to before I die, I'll have to grow a ton more self-discipline, and sometimes I wonder if I can do it.
To tell me and people like me "relax, other people are lazy too" is not that helpful. It's true, "most people" never fully realize their potential. They have all kinds of bad habits and issues. When have other people's mistakes been an excuse for mine?
Not all of us are Jeff Bezos or John Carmack. But we're not all Homer Simpsons either. There's a healthy, realistic middle ground in there somewhere.
If you feel you are a Bezos, then by all means go for it. I'm sure many on HN feel they are that and many are probably correct, too. But I'm also not sure it's healthy to cut ourselves down and hate on ourselves because we might not be living up to an unrealistic standard.
Perhaps the I could have is the little lie we tell ourselves to soften the blow to our ego. Something to think about.
The problem with living inside your own head is that unlike everyone else, you judge yourself by what you think you could be rather than what you are. It's a sort of self deception at play.
I really like what you said here. When I think about my more "well-adjusted" friends, I see that they have a solid set of criteria to compare their achievements against: a decent job, an apartment, having friends. It amounts to a basic societal checklist that they can succeed against.
Living in your own head is like extending the goal every time you reach it. It's like having a carrot attached to a stick that moves with you.
Those moving goalposts are the difference between 'doing ok' and 'making progress'.
I had a solid job, benefits, place of my own to live, friends, and a spouse at 25. I went stir-crazy though - at that point, you've 'succeeded', what is left to do? What's next?
To muddy the metaphor a little - once you've mastered the 30yard field goal, why keep kicking it? Back up and try the 40, 50, etc. That said, I do think it's important to remember that you have mastered the 30, and that failure at the 80 isn't 'failure' in anybody but your own eyes.
I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about, and I'm pretty sure that's not what's happening. It's not helping my ego.
For example, say you see discipline and skill as the two ingredients need to do something amazing. It's easy to say "I had the skill, but not the discipline, I could have done it." But is that really any different than saying, "I had the discipline, but not the skill, I could have done it." Discipline is probably just as difficult as the raw development skills to master, yet it's really easy to convince ourselves that it's just a matter of 'doing it.'
In a community with a notable amount of awesome people, sometimes it starts to feel like everyone else is experiencing nothing but resounding success, which makes your modest successes feel like abject failures. This can be... demoralizing. Remembering the wild successes are the exception, not the rule, is an important piece of perspective.
Now, I look back at all the crap I've made, and I look forward to the things I'm going to make. The things I make each year get better. They get faster, more scalable, better, more beautiful.
The key (I hope) is that no matter what, you don't give up on what you want to do. As I age, I'm getting more comfortable with that.
* 8 years experience designing and producing a game engine, accruing knowledge of dos/donts
> {homeless for a year...}
* Practical experience living/working with extreme resource constraints
> {Developed startup, quit}
* Have produced profitable ventures from nothing -> profit, and in the process realized what really motivates me.
Please don't sell yourself short (not just @mathgladiator, but anybody reading this). The expression "It's the journey, not the destination" can be applicable to both the past and the future.
Keep on keepin' on.
How'd you manage to do that?
When I was in my late teens/20s I was way into the electronica act Underworld. I remember reading how their 20s/30s were spent doing a failed synth pop act (Fruer I think the name was). I son't think they wrote that classic Trainspoyting track "Born Slippy") until they were in their 40s. Maybe it sounds silly but that always stuck with me. I think the current tech startup scene puts an emphasis on youth that is turning into vanity a little. Don't let it get you down.. negative thoughts and fear are infinitely more crippling than any birthday. Keep it up and focus!
When I was in my late teens/20s I was way into the electronica act Underworld. I remember reading how their 20s/30s were spent doing a failed synth pop act (Fruer I think the name was). I son't think they wrote that classic Trainspoyting track "Born Slippy") until they were in their 40s. Maybe it sounds silly but that always stuck with me. I think the current tech startup scene puts an emphasis on youth that is turning into vanity a little. Don't let it get you down.. negative thoughts and fear are infinitely more crippling than any birthday. Keep it up and focus!
Comes down to one thing: PICK SOMETHING AND DO IT.
And don't put off marriage.
Why not? Elucidation on this point would be appreciated.
So, I'm still just as hungry to create "the next big thing" but if it doesn't happen, fine, I already got the top prize.
I guess the irony is that my pursuit of "the next big thing" is so that one day I can spend more time with my wife and daughter, but actually it's currently having the exact opposite effect...
Because my daughter lying in front of me pestering me to play a game is the best thing ever, better than any technological or business success - and I'd best get to playing that game now.
And (game now over) because, when she's just 3 months old, having a doctor wonder why you're still alive and whether you will be a week hence, the indescribable melancholy will be about her and her mother, not about whether a project was finished.
That sounds counter-productive. If you need good ideas, you better allow yourself to keep the ideas flowing (I suppose I believe there's something random about the quality of ideas, so to have a good one, you need to allow lots of 'em).
What might be interesting is to look into something called "mental contrasting": it says you shouldn't just revel in a new idea, because envisioning the outcome gives you a good part of the gratification of actually achieving it. Instead, you should still allow yourself the envisioning, but afterwards contrast that with how far you are now.