I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
Likewise, I have been programming on and off since the age of 17. Unfortunately, I started out with C++. As soon as I hit pointers, I made up my mind that programming was only for people smarter than me. Somehow, I did get back into it a few years later, but I never really became proficient at it. Again, I was good at learning the basics, reading code, messing around with code snippets on the command line. But I never built anything of value.
I don't have too much time left. My 20ies are gone. This is my chance to turn the boat around, and realize my goals. So, this is meant as much for the rest of the world as it is meant for myself. Usually, I would have just signed up with yet another anonymous name. Not this time. I want to keep myself honest. I need to break out of my own little word (unfortunately, besides being a loser, I'm also a loner).
HN, here I am. My name is Stefan Kueng, I'm 30 years old, based in Switzerland. For better or for worse. This is my last chance to get my life back on track. If anyone else reads this, wish me good luck.
[EDIT] Thanks for your all your responses! I really appreciate it. I admit that my post probably was a bit too much drama. Actually, I have been wanting to say what I said for a long time. But I restrained myself, because I didn't want to decrease the signal-to-noise ratio on HN. But this time I felt I just had to. I'll probably not get to answer to everyone of you tonight. Just once again, a heartfelt thanks to you guys. HN really is a great community. And yes, I will consider all your advise. But I'm definitely going ahead with my plan to start building stuff - and eventually to start a business. I have long ago made up my mind that I have only one life. I could go the safe route and work a regular 9-to-5 job, perhaps start a family, and lead a long and happy life. Or I could bet everything on something that's far less likely to succeed. Even if I fail and the resulting stress cuts a few years off my life span, it will have been worth it. I have been wanting to start my own business for too long. I just can't let go of it.
275 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] threadIf during the course of working toward some arbitrary goal you enjoy yourself and learn something then you have accomplished something that is more important than most end results.
What you do for a living does not define you as a person. It's just the shortcut that others use to categorize other people into easy to quantify values for comparison. You can certainly through the course of your professional life enact change that touches the everyday lives of countless people. The majority of actions that change lives though are the plain, boring, and downright ordinary actions of the majority. The combined machinations of our every day lives and how we impact those directly connected to us are just as important as that next disruptive idea that shifts culture.
Live inspired and find joy in the things that really matter.
Dedicate at least one night a week to a project. When you get home from the day job, you start work on the project, and you keep at it for at least 6 hours. Make sure this night becomes a sacred obligation, you don't skip it for anything but weddings/funerals.
This helps ensure the project progresses on a weekly basis. It protects the time from family/friends/spouses who may not understand or accept that you are busy at random times, but can understand a scheduled obligation.
caveats: One night a week is usually too slow for any project, so don't use this as a crutch, you should still pour hours into whatever you do throughout the week out of passion - this is a safety valve for busy or passionless times.
It is a lot easier to pull this off with a group of like-minded people, try to get a couple other people (even remote) to join you in the endeavor.
Good luck!
Thanks for your kind advise. This is what I intend to do. If anyone else would like to join me, please let me know. My gmail id is kungs10.
But you should just try to achieve doing something that makes you happy.
Making boatloads of money, the next Google, or some other goal that 1/10000000 people would ever achieve is not the be all end all of it (if it's even a valid life goal).
I learned coding within the last 2 years or so, and before that I had felt quite as you did. I dabbled in Visual Basic at 14, but then I came upon this huge wall of C++. I couldn't grasp OOP and it's weird Cat cat = new Cat() for the life of me, and I though I just wasn't smart enough, so I stopped playing with it until recently. In the last year especially I got comfortable (and grew to love) the command line, git, vim and a bunch of technologies I thought I would never have the patience or diligence to wrap my head around. Really the last year has got me so far. You can do a lot in a year's worth of spare time, if you can find a practical project to motivate you.
I was an atheist until God appeared in 1996 like St. Paul and I quit my job at Ticketmaster, gave away everything and lived homeless. Nothing turned-up so I tried my dream of a business. I made a 3-axis milling machine -- mechanical, electrical and software.
"LoseThos" was not a self inflicted wound. It is like you tell someone to get rid of a dorky bike helmet or something.
----
God says...
4:21 Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.
4:22 And, behold, as Barak pursued Sisera, Jael came out to meet him, and said unto him, Come, and I will shew thee the man whom thou seekest. And when he came into her tent, behold, Sisera lay dead, and the nail was in his temples.
4:23 So God subdued on that day Jabin the king of Canaan before the children of Israel.
4:24 And the hand of the children of Israel prospered, and prevailed against Jabin the king of Canaan, until they had destroyed Jabin king of Canaan.
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My jobs have always been as meaningless as a Truman Show Movie job, thank's to the CIA. Fuck-it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller#Bankruptcy_a...
"By age 32, Fuller was bankrupt and jobless, living in low-income public housing in Chicago, Illinois. In 1922, Fuller's young daughter Alexandra died from complications from polio and spinal meningitis. Allegedly, he felt responsible and this caused him to drink frequently and to contemplate suicide for a while. He finally chose to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.""
You're a young man from Switzerland whose biggest problem (from what you say) is loneliness. Could be worse, don't you think?
Your life is hardly over, it hasn't even begun. Justin Bieber is 19 and has quite a few #1 albums already, should every 20-something singer feel bad about themselves as a result? You need a new yardstick to measure yourself by.
Happiness, whatever that means, peace, it comes from within. You can't succeed your way to it really, money and position will only marginally improve your internal world. Don't conflate the two. My advice is to more accurately attribute your ennui to "wasting your 20s" as in postponing life to when you "make it" - allow yourself to start living now the way you truly want to and enjoy yourself, time goes by fast. You can be happy no matter how things play out, at least happier than you are now, and try your darndest to make your mark all at the same time.
Edit For context : I'm 23 and have been hell bent on "startups" since I was 16 for various reasons. Sometimes I can't sleep because the ol' noggin won't shut off and thoughts fly at a million miles an hour, its a certain feeling that burns you from within. It is a good thing, ride it.
Maybe at a certain level, but for most people, money and position would provide both the resources and the freedom to live as they "truly want".
I was tempted to say that, too, but then it occurred to me that although he's in his twenties he might have recently been told he only had $X years to live by a doctor. If that's true, I wouldn't want to suggest he should spend them with C++. :-P
http://www.appleoutsider.com/2011/10/06/sj/
"And so more than ever, I find myself inspired. Steve’s untimely death reminds us we can never give up. He could have given up at any point in the seven years since his first cancer diagnosis, but he did not. The vast majority of Apple’s unprecedented resurgence took place while Steve Jobs stared death in the face. How many of us could have lasted this long at all, let alone accomplish all that he did along the way?
Ten years ago today, we still had not yet met the iPod. The last of Steve’s five decades on this Earth ended up being his most accomplished by far. Remember that whenever you think your best days are behind you. We can’t control when our lives begin, and we can’t really control when they end. All we have is what’s in between. Make it count."
Some of the best advice I ever got was "Never measure yourself by someone else's ruler."
Especially not Beiber's.
If you're not dead yet, you have all the time left.
I think of my age not as wasted but experienced, I have learned and observed things that only come with experience of time. Many creations of greatness can't come early because it takes experience to get there.
Here is one of many articles of folks who found success after middle age (which is still a number of years away for you, BTW):
http://www.arinanikitina.com/top-10-late-bloomers-why-age-do...
Make lemonade, sell it on the streets at weekends. Voila! You have a business, and realised your goals. Right?
I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that your goal has more to it than that. You need to understand your constraints, and where those constraints come from.
One constraint might be that the business needs to generate EUR x thousand per year, and the source of that constraint is probably your bills, rent/mortgage, etc. Another might be the location, or you might decide that actually that's a constraint you're happy to take away.
Either way, and it's by no means the only consideration, thinking through these can help you focus the direction your business goes in.
Oh, and good luck!
My advice would be, start something that will make you accountable to other people. I am a dreamer too and I am not a competitive type of guy. I just don't care if I lose something. But I was very committed to be good at soccer, only because it is a collective sport, so I would try to help my team win because of my friends that played with me, not because I wanted to win. Using your real name is actually a great first step. Now, make this promise to everyone you care about! Family, friends, everyone! Don't use the mind (escapist) trick to convince yourself that you will surprise everyone with your great project! Don't go on stealth mode. Promise you will achieve your goal and make yourself accountable for it!
Oh! And forget all about this "this is my last chance", "my 20ies are gone" and yada yada yada. As in glasner comment "It's not your last chance; it's your next chance." This is equivalent to me saying "OMG Mozart wrote a symponhy by the age of 8, I am already 33 and don't even know how to play an instrument! I am SUCH a loser!!" It is BS. I just can't use other people achievements as my parameter of success (neither the kind of achievement, much less the age of it).
Good luck!
Your career will be fine no matter what you do. Please take your health seriously.
His slight self-degrading humour strikes a chord with me as a soon-to-be-30-year-old who is still an utter failure (by "millionaire by 23, billionaire by 28" standards).
If you ask how to start a successful business, then I will give you advice on that. If you ask how to stop being a loser, then I will suggest that you are not a loser and you have some depression. In that case, what helped me was getting a diagnosis, reading books on psychological disorders, understanding CBT, and mindfulness meditation/vipassana.
And if you are both depressed and wanting to start a successful business, I suggest that the best place to start is in learning how to deal with your illness.
That sounds familiar. I had the same problem, and I know several others who have that problem too. None of them are losers, they just listen too much to their thoughts: "Every day, 95% of us have thoughts with depressive, anxious or obsessive content. So why isn't 95% of us mental patients? The explanation is simple: Everybody has crazy thoughts, but not everybody believes in them."[1] When fully realizing that, things change dramatically.
ACT has been very good to me. Let me recommend a book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Happiness-Trap-Based-revolutionary-m...
[1] "Tankevirus" by Hanne H. Brorson (unfortunately only available in Norwegian.)
I don't care what you want to call it; "depression", "desperation", "determination". All I can tell you is that if you are convinced (not "worried"; we all worry sometimes) that you're a "loser" or that this is your "last chance" to do something meaningful, that's not normal. If you were a friend of mine, I'd be hassling you to find a professional you could trust to work that stuff out.
Hey, either way: best of luck to you. Your career will be fine.
You are not your WORK (fuck pointers in C++)! Chances are that you're awesome at things you are refusing to acknowledge! Come here I'll give you a hug! (Then slap you!* ... because you're wasting time worrying about judging yourself instead of CREATING things and moving along!)
* Ok, I just slapped myself because I'm wasting time on HN! ;-P
Your life isn't going to get back on track until you start thinking better about yourself. The reason you're so self-absorbed right now is because you're constantly beating yourself up; its a full-time job. Once you can have a little self-esteem and equanimity again, its going to be a lot easier to think of others and work projects and be able to achieve your goals.
At the very least go on vacation, or move; its easier to get out of ruts if you're somewhere new and different, for neurological reasons. Go somewhere new and remake yourself closer to the person you want to be.
If you do nothing besides trying the same thing you've tried dozens or hundreds of times before, that's what's really worrying and dangerous. :-(
I run CPAP.com and work with several other businesses.
If you find yourself stuck on strategy or business operations stuff, please feel free to give me a skype (johnnywgoodman) or email (in profile).
Other than that, you don't have to be the best programmer ever to build something, just try to do your best and start creating something small and build on it.
30? pffff ;)
Finally, be careful what definition of success you accept. Dont pin your self-esteem on this new change. You don't want that kind of pressure. HN is replete with self-congratulatory blog posts and Super Important Business Talk that is sometimes more posturing than reality. Change because you want to (it sounds like you do), and work on yourself as hard as you do this endeavor. Even if you crash and burn, you will come out far, far ahead.
You damage yourself when you couple your self-worth with your accomplishments. It's a natural tendency in high-achievers, but that doesn't make it a great idea.
P.S. don't be hard on yourself for being a late bloomer. Just work your ass off at something that you like.
Actually, I already found someone. Right before posting this. It was my motivation to "come out" in the first place.
> Second, what's your plan? Start building stuff. Starting tomorrow morning.
Do you see the problem?
I'd read it. Talk about what you're building, and what struggles you're having.
Then, start with a really small bite-size idea, something that seems so trivial and implement it and get it done. Then slowly start building on that tiny idea and keep adding to it. This will help you show progress, will allow you to focus and get a feeling of accomplishment. Over time, which by the way,you have the rest of your life, you can build on that and figure out what you really want to do.
Hang in there.
There's no question that many of Steve Jobs' greatest innovations and ideas came late in his life. Many great people are late bloomers, and its by selection bias that you think most people achieve greatness at early age.
You should have an email address or something else so that we could reach out to you directly :)
(by the way, you live in one of the best countries in the world, that's gotta provide an added boost)
Visit NY for a week or two: https://secure.iqres0822.com/iqreservations/asp/IQHome.asp
We can save you from yourself.
Look at http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/690958main_p1237a1.jpg -- every dot in that image is a galaxy. Each galaxy has over 100 billion stars. Do whatever the heck you want in this world. It'll work out.
I visited SF, Chicago, NYC and Austin, TX all in the last year - each trip has made me more and more inspired.
I can also agree to this. I was more or less in the same boat (possibly a bit worse at times). I had my idea for a startup and decided to use it as an objective to get me moving forward again. The first step for me was going to London and checking out the startup scene there (Techhub). It in a way, it gave me a boost and energy to flesh out my ideas and plans.
Sometimes, a change of atmosphere helps give you the initial push that one needs to move forward.
Little over-dramatic there buddy. You're still incredibly young. You're very likely only about one third of the way through life.
That kind of over-dramatic, unrealistic thinking is not constructive.
However I had the great opportunity of having an awesome co-founder. He seems to be picking up where I left and finishes them off beautifully. Server side coding? check. Server side UI remake? check. Landing page details? check. I grew very interested in the fact that facing the same amount and type of work, why can he persist and why not me?
I think I had the answer this morning after quite of few months of introspection. The difference between me and him is that I look at how things were supposed to be, while he looks at how things could be. Let me make an example.
Remember the old story that half a glass of water can be both viewed as still a half remaining or a half missing, generating different moods? Well my tiny story is a twist to it. Say you were to fill a bigger glass with a tiny ink converter. Let's say it will take about 2hrs of mind-numbing work. After one hour with half a glass, I would look at the task and say, oh my, still a half to go. How grueling can this be? Then I'd feel frustrated and give up. Just like what I did to many of the tasks I started but never finished. My co-founder, I suspect, will look at the remaining work and say, oh my, only one more hour to go then I'll have this wonderful filled glass of water! That's why he stays up and working and never seems to have burn outs. I guess positive emotions never gives you burn outs. It is persisting under negative emotions gets you burn outs.
So I'm guessing the key is to catch yourself thinking in a bad way that is generating negative emotions, then turn the thinking in a better way that generates positive emotions.
I just realized this this morning. There should be a few points that I'm missing but I think I'll figure more out in the coming days/weeks. Meanwhile I am logging my thoughts and see if I can turn my emotions around and if that makes a (at least) personal difference. Hope it is useful for you.