Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
It's a constant, irrepressible gnawing in my chest. Every morning, I take tally of my age. Whenever I encounter a technical article, I immediately and compulsively investigate the author's age. If I'm behind — which I always am — I will lock myself in my room and force myself to work, even though I still end up on HN half the time. It's exhausting and terrifying, but I also don't want to loosen up. At my core, I am intensely ambitious. I have so many great ideas, and knowing that the main obstacle between them and me is only myself keeps me in an endless state of panic.
It's been getting better. For the first time in my life, my procrastination is starting to get tamed. I've been working hard on my first big project, and I expect it's going to be a great one. But I can't help but feel that if I had started in earnest at 25, at 21, at 19 — then maybe the list of accomplishments at the end of my life will be longer. Mentally, I've resigned to the fact that I've procrastinated away a decade of valuable time, and it just endlessly haunts me.
Does anybody else have this problem? How do you deal with it?
425 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadAs for the procrastination, an unexpected learning for me recently was the insight that I really need to start my day with a clear head, free of distractions. No email, no hackernews, no twitter. Sit down and get straight to work, get in the flow, do a few hours of really good work. Protect this time, eliminate all sources of interruption. I would guess I produce 2/3 of my work output in the first 1/3 of my work day, which makes me feel happy and relaxed for the rest of the day. Recommended reading: "Daily Rituals, how Artists Work", by Mason Curry.
Finally, don't forget that you are only young once. Party, do crazy and stupid things, that's your privilege. You can always work more (and get rich/famous) later in life. You'll just replace youthful energy with experience.
There are two truths I try to keep in mind whenever I start feeling this way:
1. There are countless people who are so much better at programming and so much more motivated than me, that I could work my entire life and never be as good as they are right now.
2. There are countless people who are so much worse at programming than me, that they could work their entire lives and never be as good as I am right now even if they were more highly motivated.
Its a continuum, a hill. Feel for the gradient, walk uphill.
Henry Ford was 40 when he finally won. Ray Croc was 52. (Colonel) Harland Sanders was 62, Jon Hamm (Don Draper) was 36, JK Rowling was 32, Thomas Siebel (Seibel Systems) was 41, Reid Hoffman was 35, Robert Noyce (Intel) was 40, Dave Duffield (Peoplesoft) was 46, John Pemberton (Coca-cola) was 55, Henry Kaiser was 63, and Charles Darwin was 50.
You've got plenty of time.
Coincidentally this was on the imgur fp http://imgur.com/gallery/OLB8s and the comments are mostly of people who worked hard and did what they wanted, and in their eyes, they're the success they wanted themselves to be and that they just never gave up and kept working on what they wanted to be.
But ya, procrastination is another issue entirely. It's a common problem. Here is my advice... accept that you can't do everything. (This is reality and it catches up with you soon enough anyway). Find out what is important and focus on that. Just that. Don't worry about what other people are doing. It has absolutely zero impact on what you are doing. In life, people will make more money than you. Others will make less. Some will be happier, some less happy. It doesn't matter. At all. It's you that you should be concerned about. Why are you chasing tech? What is the end game? That's the question.
Do one thing, or a few things, and do them well. If you aren't going to do that, then don't do these things and accept that you aren't going to do them and don't worry about it. Don't flit. There is a cost associated with switching tasks and that makes the whole thing harder.
What separates us from (other) animals, is our ability to alter our environment. Use your big brain to figure our some combination of the parameters in your life (work/environment/free time/etc.) that makes you happy and change your environment to optimize for that. Have the self esteem to follow your own path. Don't feel compelled to impress others or live up to some freakishly high standard.
For what it is worth, I've been programming longer than you've been alive and if I keep doing it another 30 years I doubt I will be acclaimed for my coding skills - and that doesn't bother me a bit.
Choose your own parameters for success (suggestions: joy, self-betterment, improving humanity's situation by your own standards. Money or fame is just a means to an end - focus on the end and not the means for maximum flexibility and quickest success) and then work out how to achieve them. Here's where your critical thinking skills (the most useful thing I learned at my top-10 university) come in handy.
Recall that skillsets are supposed to be tools towards achieving an end. Choose your own adventure, sharpen the tools you care about & think will be useful, and set out. Try not to be daunted when circumstances force a detour, a tool turns out to be less useful than anticipated, or your path (goals) literally change underneath you. That is living, and that is what we all must succeed at.
Thank you for writing this, it is very inspiring. I have heard so many times that good devs are young people that makes me wonder about my future even if I'm very passionated about my career. At this point in my life I think I will love programming in the next 30 years, I hope I could live from that as well.
Thank you for sharing.
This is definitely not advice, consider this a commiserating post.
Ten years ago, I started learning to play Go (the board game). At the time, I was obsessed with the game, and I was very sad that I didn't get to know/ learn the game earlier. I wanted to play Go professionally, and I thought that it was too late for me to ever be one of the top players in the world (context: I was 16 at the time, and to play Go professionally, you have to be really good. Most pro started playing when their age is in the single digit). 10 years passed by, and I'm not sure what changed, but that certainly doesn't seem to matter anymore. I still love the game, but now looking back, I don't feel dreadful that I didn't learn the game earlier. This might sound unrelated, but I'm sure that 10 years from now, we will look back and laugh at ourselves if we think this is too late to do X, Y or Z.
There are a saying (paraphrase by me) that goes along the line: when you're 20, you're mostly a product of your family, environment, upbringing, friends etc... but when you're 30, you're a product of yourself. That is to say that in our younger years, in a sense a lot of it comes down to "luck", you might stumble in something you like to do young enough that you get some success, got motivated, didn't waste time on video games (along with the usual notion of "luck" involving one's upbringing and family, obviously). Teenagers and young adults are mostly idiots, to no one fault, and only some of us were fortunate enough to skip that period. The world is choked full of distractions, and while I used to think that I have unlimited will power, I also thought that I was invulnerable, so well ...
Life is long, and one of the things I've realized is that almost no one runs full speed for their whole life. The few that do are probably thousands in a billion. I think it was Bill Gates that commented Jobs to be the rare one who has the fire his whole life. A lot of the people who are massively successful in their youth will slow down (it's stressful to be ambitious, after all). So well, if we want to catch up, I guess we already spent our shares of "relaxing time", and just have to look down and plow through things now. Just think about it as we doing things a bit backward. It's gonna work out fine (I hope!). We can't make up the last 10 years, and likely won't get to the top of the world. But I believe anything under that is still up for grab.
There are also the aspect that at least for me, it (work, ambition, success) is a really personal and emotional thing, and chance are our judgements right now are terrible (emotional == irrational) -- maybe a few years from now we would have realized that the "TV watching time" was us exhausting from work, and that we couldn't actually programming 14 hours a day anyway. Just to point out a seemingly irrational thing in your post, you're 26 now, and hoping that you would have started in earnest at ... 25 is a bit odd, isn't it? One year, while valuable, won't make that much of a difference.
Write your worry down. I don't know why, but as soon as I write things down, it feels like I'm taking it off my head. I guess now there is a reminder of my mistake on paper, and I don't have to constantly remind my self.
Also, booze helps, a bit of drunken state helps me sl...
I agree. I don't know how to say this without sounding completely pretentious, but it's kind of hard to talk about your innermost desires without any ego, so I guess here goes. All my life, in the back of my mind, I have had the ultimate goal of creating things that were better than anything else out there. Art? Games? Software? Music? It didn't — doesn't — really matter, as long as they would persist in history and influence other people. (Software is what I've chosen as my medium for the moment, but I expect it will change throughout my life.) While my day-to-day goals are obviously less lofty, this is the driving force behind my life and my career.
For me, to be happy with limited success and a more laid-back pace would be a kind of personal death.
Thank you for the long post. Some really great advice and observations, and I can relate to a lot of it for sure. "No one runs full speed for their whole life" is a great observation: many of the most prominent creators in the world only produced their best work during a fairly short span of time, and then languished shortly after. Maybe it's OK for that moment to come a little later. It can just be hard when it feels like everyone around you is hitting that peak at a younger age.
In regards to writing your worries down, I'm reminded of a recent This American Life story where they talked to a guy who created a website that would send you e-mails "from" your anxieties throughout the day[1]. Maybe it's worth a shot!
[1]: http://anxietybox.com (currently broken)
For some reason you then define something that would make you unhappy as 'happy' "For me, to be happy with limited success and a more laid-back pace would be a kind of personal death."
You mentioned you can't be happy with that, so it doesn't make sense to define that as happiness.
Optimising for happiness is going to be different for each person, and from your post, it seems it you should be optimising for creating things that will persist in history and influence people, because that is what you have mentioned will make you happy.
This used to be my main motivator– the idea that you can transcend death through legacy– until I learned about the heat death of the Universe. Turns out that nothing actually persists indefinitely. The Universe itself will eventually die out.
Optimizing for legacy at the expense of living well day to day can be a miserable existence.
It's as valid a path as any other, but you'll want to really look in the mirror and say "I choose to struggle and suffer and be frustrated and anxious in pursuit of this legacy (that will eventually fade into nothingness anyway), out of all the other options available to me."
Anyway, it also sounds like you're framing the problem too tightly here– it's not like your only options are great, painful success and limited success. It's possible to work on something you care about AND sleep well at night.
Indeed I think the way to a good life and a good death can and should be broken down into living good days, weeks, months, years.
Also there's the whole thing about how... people don't create great things by TRYING to create great things, they tend to create great things by following their curiosity and then allowing an opportunity to consume them completely.
The best way to achieve greatness, in a paradoxical sense, is to stop worrying about it and focus goddamn hard on a problem you desperately want solved, over everything else.
Just wanted to mention that that is simply not true. "Everyone around you" will probably not reach any sort of peak in their entire life and I bet for a lot of them, from their point of view, YOU are the one that reached that peak.
It's also curious that you say that "to be happy with limited success and a more laid-back pace would be a kind of personal death". So, even though you'd be happy that would be a personal death?. Think about that for a second and why you phrased it that way.
As for the original post, I was at some point where you are (to the point of panic attacks and worse) and I know it's not a nice place to be, but believe me it gets better, way better!. For me the answer wasn't to just try harder to "make it", it was realizing that all those ideas I had of what I wanted to be, success, etc were just wrong. I would even say now my definition of success is actually the inverse of what it was.
There are lots of people in their 30s and 40s working on their first startup/business idea. You're ahead of them.
Focus on where you're going.
26 is young, just make the most of your at bats, keep on top of your procrastination and 'make it happen'.
Don't look back, focus, go get it.
If you'd have started at 25 (that was a year ago), 21 you were enjoying university life, 19 you were a kid still.
26 is the perfect launching point, go get it.
Don't be afraid to fail. Push ahead and you'll see failure is temporary.
I think visiting sites like HN although interesting, don't help too much with this since you see everyday new projects and ideas, and it makes you feel like you are doing nothing with your time.
There are two things that I do that might help you though:
1. I only read NH when I'm not working (i.e. mornings or evenings). That means I can focus on my work rather than get involved with something else.
2. When I read about a new exciting technology, unless it's relevant to what I am working on at the moment, I bookmark the page, in case it becomes relevant in the future. In the process I realised a lot of it is trends. People on HN get excited about something and a year later they're excited about something new, and then the old gets criticised. So basically, I saved myself a few hours learning something that wasn't so important to know after all.
Edit: formatting
Your question made me smile. Are you having fun? I'm having lots of fun, and have had throughout my career. There was a time in my 20's where I felt exactly the way you do.
Don't sweat it. Live life, and it will come to you. Focus instead on making memories that will make you smile when you're 80.
And yet having kids is wonderful.
I joked to my friend it is like Stockholm Syndrome. You have no choice. You made your bed and must now live in it. Of course you are going to enjoy your kids, it is biologically wired into you and you also have to do it, regardless of how overwhelmed every other part of your life has become because of that one decision.
It has also become very trendy in the last decade or two to devote your entire life to your kids and to never leave them alone, to invade every aspect of their day to the detriment of a parent living their own lives. Extreme detriment. Constant parental involvement. Vicariously living life through your children. It's actually fairly distressing to see adults so subservient to their children. A very modern malaise, this was not how parents acted 20 years ago.
Never trust a parent telling you having kids is great.
I am personally undecided, but I'm deadly serious, never trust a parent saying having kids is great. It's quite literally like they're some sort of possessed zombie, everything they say is basically "HELP! HELP! This is AWFUL! All joy apart from worshipping my child has been DESTROYED!". And yet they all say "Oh, it's wonderful!" in the next breath.
You stuck your penis in someone (assuming you are male). That's all you did. And then did all the exact same things that billions of other parents do, feed, burp, clothe, ship 'em off to be educated by someone else. Statistically speaking, you're probably not a fantastic parent, just another average Dad. One of literally billions of parents.
So why are your kids 'better' than anything you've done? Almost anyone can do it. It is probably one of the least impressive achievements any human can do, yet a large amount of parents list it as a major lifetime achievement, often as their only achievement. It's another one of those 'zombie' phrases, there is nothing at all, absolutely nothing, remarkable about raising a child. It is one of the most ordinary, banal things, a human can do. And yet so many people are proud of doing it.
I simply can't understand, looking from this side of the mirror, not having kids. But can you understand just how utterly unremarkable and unimpressive it is having kids? From this side of the mirror?
I can sort of understand how you might not understand it if you have no idea what's involved in being a parent.
But you do seem to be ignoring some stuff:
i) The biological imperative. Not everyone has this, and it's important not to stigmatise people who just don't want to be parents. But it's strongly there for many people, so having children seems to be important.
ii) "You stuck your penis in someone (assuming you are male). That's all you did." well, it's not that easy. For some parents it's a lot more difficult than that; and a few adopting parents don't even have the stage involving biological gloop.
http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/2295.aspx?CategoryID=54
> Most couples (about 84 out of every 100) will get pregnant within a year if they have regular sex and don’t use contraception. However, women become less fertile as they get older. A recent study has found that couples having regular unprotected sex:
> aged 19-26 - 92% will conceive after one year and 98% after two years
> aged 35-39 - 82% will conceive after one year and 90% after two years
iii) For most parents it's a big step. They make a concious choice to stop contraception and to start trying for a child; or they start the adoption process. It's not like buying a car or changing job - both of which are pretty significant life changes for some people.
iv) Oxytocin
v) sleep deprivation and some form of domestic Stockholm Syndrome. You have to give up so much for a child, and your life totally changes in ways that you can't fully predict until it happens. So you kind of have to say how brilliant it is.
vi) The fresh perspective a child has will teach you about the world. You learn most when you teach someone else. Watching a child learn how to manipulate a toy or learn to read is enriching.
And so many people repeat this - that children radically change their lives, and that their children are the best thing they've ever done - that I'm surprised you haven't considered whether it might be more significant than just "You stuck your penis in someone".
(I don't know much about adoption but I do know some very kind, loving, great parents who adopted so I'm trying to be inclusive of their experiences.)
Absolutely. This is exactly how I and a whole lot of people remember feeling before having kids. This is part of the thing that makes it so remarkable: before having kids, I couldn't imagine myself being so enamored with it, and yet here I am, victim of some kind of strange brainwashing that turns out to make the incredible, incredible pain in the ass of it all worth it. And not merely worth it in a "this is tolerable" way, but worth it in a "omg I have to tell other people about this" way. It's ridiculous, I know. But it happens. I'm of the opinion that this delusion is inextricably linked to the survival of our species, because in your worst moments, it's what keeps you from letting the screaming little bastards die.
Call your parents, folks. Go check on the kids too, if you've got them. There's pretty much no higher human activity than either of those two things. As long as they keep happening, everything will be alright. The rest is just icing on the cake ..
You can say "So what, all you did was run 26 miles, lots of people do that, some even run hundreds, or walk cross country, what you did isn't that special."
Well, yeah, it's not, but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel good to look at your accomplishments and feel awe that you completed it.
It's like that with kids. You pass off the whole raising them with "feed, burp, clothe, ship 'em off to be educated by someone else" which is just sad and insulting. You gloss over the sleep deprivation, the worry that wake you up in the middle of the night, the laughter and tears of the kids, and parents teach kids more than you give them credit for.
Having kids is a totally subjective decision. There are plenty of parents who hate their children, who felt forced into having them by family or society, and end up making their kids' lives terrible (or, in some really extreme cases, murdering them). If you feel pressured into anything, it's probably a bad start.
I'm 32 and I have 3 kids, but I meant to have them. There was no accident, and certainly no regret. I had my first kid, my daughter, when I was 24.
Then again, I never had feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness. I just wanted to have kids while I was young enough to roughhouse with them if they wanted. I grew up with too many friends with OLD parents (who are now dead, generally) who couldn't do anything with us because their back was out or their knees were busted. It's a sad thing to see.
Now I have homework, bed time, bath kids and all the other stuff.
So when a non-parent friend says "We're going to see this amazing band for $$$ we'll be back at 3am" It is VERY tempting to say "Oh my life, my poor life, you guys are so lucky." Because you do feel a little bit like that. For a nano second. And because your mates don't want to hear "Well I HAVE KIDS AND THEY'RE AMAZING!!" so. There's that.
So you (the non-parent) hear part of the story. You are working (as I was a few years ago) on part of the information. It is a lot easier for us parents to talk 'my kids is amazing' at school drop off, or over a cup of tea at lunch time.
Re: "devote your entire life to your kids and to never leave them alone" that is a hard one, your kids NEED YOU. So you can't just drop them off at the park and go to the pub. Also, all your old friends don't want to play football with the kids, so your kids start to be your new friends. Which is weird.
Why not? I used to play in a park with other friends all the effing time after around 2nd grade or so.
I guess though, that the US has a far lower "implicit layer of support" though -- if anyone in our community saw kids going somewhere they weren't supposed to, they wouldn't bat an eyelid at hauling us up and taking us back to our homes. In th US if it's someone's else's kid, you automatically go into "NOT MY PROBLEM" mode :)
If your friends are doing nothing, and they aren't a single parent, it's their fault - because they would rather be with their kids, or doing something else. It doesn't take two people to watch/play with a kid.
I have one and it isn't so bad. I'm more productive at work because my time is more accounted for. Things are a bit hectic but it's not like I'm in some coal mine in Siberia. Life is mostly the same.
We can't do all night 5am ragers, but we can individually show up and go home around midnight. My wife still does happy hour once a week. I usually get some extra time on weekends to play some games.
A friend of ours still watches 2 movies/week in the movie theatre, because that's what she really enjoyed. Another goes to brunch every sunday, because it's a tradition with her friends.
Basically, you pick what you care about the most, and cut the things that don't matter as much to you.
This is one of the many incredible things I discovered when daughter was an infant, and even into her toddler years.
There were days where she was pretty awful, crying and not sleeping, and when she did sleep it wasn't more than an hour. I was upset and distressed, but not once did I ever blame her or get angry, which is a complete departure from my usual "someone has to pay for this" anger that I direct everywhere every day. I'm an incredibly selfish and somewhat unempathetic person.
I had a number of self-aware moments, where I was actively questioning why I wasn't angry at my baby, or at least tired of her, but my only answer was that looking at her, holding her, taking care her, filled me with such joy. And when I was distressed, I was distressed for her sake, concerned for her wellbeing. But never mad at her.
Also, about not having control and not having any time after becoming a parent. I struggled a lot with this myself until I read a passage in a book which shifted my perspective:
"In the past I used to look at my time as if it were divided into several parts. One part I reserved for Joey, another part was for Sue, another part to help with Ana, another part for household work. The time left over I considered my own. I could read, write, do research, go for walks. But now I try not to divide time into parts anymore. I consider my time with Joey and Sue as my own time. When I help Joey with his homework, I try to find ways of seeing his time as my own time. I go through his lesson with him, sharing his presence and finding ways to be interested in what we do during that time. The time for him becomes my own time. The remarkable thing is that now I have unlimited time for myself."
But none of that really matters. Don't plan for the next three years. Life is long, plan for that.
Many of the people I worked with in the '90s achieved a sort of fame like the fame the people you see achieve today. But when their achievements were superceded, they didn't go and do new amazing things. Instead they didn't do much at all, or did things that were completely tangential to their skill set, things they couldn't really excel at.
Part of the reason was that, having worked their way to huge XP, they couldn't start at 0 when they needed to restart the game. So they just didn't play. But we all start back at 0 when we do something new. We progress faster the second and further times around. We talk about learning from failure and doing better the second time around. These people couldn't learn from success.
So now I admire most the people who can achieve thing after thing, even if each of those things is not fame-worthy, not so much the people who have done a single thing, even if that thing gets a TechCrunch headline. The turtle, not the hare. I think the turtles do more good over their lifetimes than the hares, and that people who continue to be productive year in and year out are much, much happier.
My fears now are a different sort: do I still have time to accomplish the things I want to accomplish? Then I remind myself that I still have another 30 or 40 years of work left, as much in front of me as behind me. I encourage you to think that way: you have another 60 years of work left...what can you do over the course of 60 years? Pick a long-term goal (interstellar flight, artificial intelligence, peace on earth, whatever), break it into manageable projects, then start.
Let's think strategically: if your first project is curing aging and achieving immortality, then every other project after that is just a matter of time. Just sayin'.
Actually, if you "cure mortality" first, you will exacerbate all the other problems related to population overshot, environmental damage, wealth distributions, etc. Then elf-style immortality will find itself cured, at gunpoint, or in more gruesome ways.
On the other hand, you can accept that both of us (along with every human alive today) will die. Once you are free of that burden, you may identify a worthy project, push it as further as possible within your lifetime, and take the time to train some younger replacements that can take over later on.
And of course, I might be wrong, so you might end up enjoying amazingly extended lifecycle. I just don't think it is a good idea to count on it.
Why should I accept this? Humanity hasn't been improved by accepting that it was natural for people to die of smallpox, or be crippled by polio. The belief that such diseases could be eradicated was the first step in doing so.
Our limited lifespan is just another thing for us to defeat as a species. I like to imagine some far-off future where parents tell their children about our mortality in the same manner that we are told about diseases like smallpox.
Regarding immortality, you have to remember that every time a major death cause has been neutralized, the probability distribution reorganizes itself and other death causes raise to pick up the slack, even causes which used to be unknown/negligible a few decades ago. That's to say, every life that has been "saved" from smallpox, polio or whatever was not really saved - strictly speaking those people still died (or will eventually die) anyways of a different cause.
That's not to say that life expectancy cannot be extended, or that that is not a worthy goal in itself. But there is still the practical issue that the clock is ticking for every one of us. According to current data, I am expected to live another 40 years or so. During that time, the line can maybe pushed another 10 years, and combined with positive lifestyle changes, having won the genetic lottery in the form of my family having a track record of many long lived members, and a bit of luck too, I don't think it is unreasonable to think that I personally might make it to 100 years in a relatively dignified state. However, that's it, I will already be old and wasted by then, and the only hope I can think on how to extend that even further would be Deux ex Machina.
Now consider the scenario for a baby born today. Maybe those 100 years will give him plenty of time for science to progress and fix a lot of things during his own time... assuming no major threats raise caused by our increasingly industrialized lifestyles, which is doubtful. Maybe all the things considered he will live to see a time when 150 is the average, and he may be able to push it to 170 by being smart and having a lifestyle healthier than average... but that's it.
If I were extremely optimistic, which I find hard to be these days, I would say this trend will stagnate around the 300's due to the law of diminishing returns. So, our descendants might see a time when dying at mere 100 years old is a tragedy, but there is a world of difference from that and actual elf-style immortality (never age or die but by an act of violence that destroys your physical anchoring to this world).
Great comment. It alludes to 'iterating on yourself'. It's difficult when you feel like you're competing with others, rather than working to satisfy your own essential self.
There are so many moments in life where we have to start back at zero. I like to think about the Teddy Roosevelt "Man in the Arena" speech when I'm back at a "0":
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Random, but I think there's a correlation between "age > 30" and capitalization of folder names.
- Barack Obama
http://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/1cv2gr/payed_off_210...
Set manageable goals for yourself and strive to achieve those. Over time you'll hit those goals and be able to set yourself another. They can be short term goals (wake up every morning at 6:00) and long term (learn x language), but the main thing is that you focus on them and strive to achieving them rather than comparing yourself to others.
Through this one-year degree, I made it to a one-year internship, so I'll be commencing my first full-time programming job at 34. This will also be the first time in my life I haven't lived month to month, money wise.
The fact that at the age of 26 you have savings enough to actually stop working full-time and go indie already gives you more opportunity than nearly everyone on the planet, and you are by default successful than most people will be in their life. You are normalized to the high salary of a (I presume US-based) developer and have very realistically probably already made more money than I have in 10 years.
On an 'absolute scale of success', I have accomplished precisely nothing - no money saved, no full-time job, debts to pay. By my own metric of success, I wouldn't have changed a thing except for 'choosing myself' more often (yes, read some James Altucher :P)
This is not supposed to be a "you don't know how lucky you are" admonishment - because, for over five years before going back to school, I thought about it, but agonized that I was 'too old', and so instead took the grand option of doing -nothing- instead.
Procrastinating or choosing nothing is not a choice.
Now, (almost) out the other end, I can say I was never too old. However, I was indecisive, permanently going crazy inside my mind trying to think of "what I should do next". I would, and still do, read every single thing on new technology I can find, obsessively compare and try to make the 'best choice' on what I should be spending my time doing - terrified to waste any time, and by the same token wasting the most amount of time possible.
The hardest part for you is always to actually -choose something- (be that what technology to learn next, what course to enroll in, what to work on for the next hour or year) and actually stick at it. You -will- sometimes choose wrong. But it doesn't matter -at all- later if your choice is wrong. The most important thing is that you made a choice.
Some philosopher said it's about "climbing down from the realm of infinite possibilities and immersing yourself in work".
If this is all slightly OT, it's because I'm extending this metaphor basically to my current situation of choosing the next programming language to learn! And am, in fact procrastinating by writing this.
So to try and give some practical advice on actually taming this feeling and -working-, here's some random things I've found really useful on both removing that awful feeling and also actually being more productive:
- (think this is from James Altucher again...) Keep a notepad in front of your computer. Each day, write down three small things you will get done on the computer that day. They will invariably be too big and you will never complete one. Make them smaller and smaller until you actually do one. The sense of achievement will make you do the rest.
- Read 'The Power of Now' - yes it's Oprah-recommended (and I usually pride myself on reading difficult books) but it actually has practical advice for resolving the anxiety you feel right now about your past felt mistakes. Just ignore it when 'energy' is mentioned - goddamit I was with that book until that page.
- Actually withdraw forcefully from internet-based updates as much as possible - a developer in my old job told me that the more he advanced as a developer, the less he tried to withdraw from all extraneous technology, including not owning a phone, because the information overload was just too much, and overall detrimental. At the time I thought he was actually insane.
I haven't quite gone that far, but I have taken his advice in relation to internet updates - I am now cont...
As you, I haven't a background in CS, but with one difference (as I understand), I don't regret it. It allowed me to experience another life. Somehow I understand why so many people strive to be an actor, in the end is not just money and fame that motivates them - being able to play a doctor today, a policeman tomorrow and a politician the day after tomorrow is a huge privilege in life.
About your practical advices, I would just add one more. For the unfocus and indecisive people - as me - GTD may change their life. Read about it, you'll not regret it. If you ever want to implementate it you can try: https://github.com/we-build-dreams/hamster-gtd
Furthermore, in some ways you are ahead. Having a "normal" young life is a good thing. In some ways I pity young successes like Evan Spiegal: they never had the camaraderie and joy of e.g. scratching together some money with friends for some beer and steak for a BBQ. In a nutshell, success is about improving your life, not replacing it. One day you'll value the days when you had the ability to procrastinate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders
Who wants to read about a 50-60 yo professional CEO who just sold his Nth company doing some boring-as-ass Java enterprise thing? No one. Not in the TC crowd. There's nothing to fantasize about.
The teens gets print because they're absurd outliers; you don't hear about the 56 year old finding big success with his startup not because it doesn't happen, but because it happens regular enough to be too boring to mention.
http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/infographic-great-co...
Here's a nice list, and the age at which they got their big hit:
Paul Graham (31, Viaweb), Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp), Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp), Ev Williams (34, Twitter), Jack Dorsey (33, Square), Elon Musk (32, Tesla), Garrett Camp (30, Uber), Travis Kalanick (32, Uber), Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb), Reed Hastings (37, Netflix), Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon), Andrew Mason (29, Groupon), Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn), Jack Ma (35, Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon), Jerry Sanders (33, AMD), Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce), Peter Norton (39, Norton), Larry Ellison (33, Oracle), Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus), Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco), Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco), Gordon Moore (39, Intel), Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com), Scott Cook (31, Intuit), Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari), Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm), David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft), Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems), John McAfee (42, McAfee), Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec), Scott McNealy (28, Sun), Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay), Rich Barton (29 for Expedia, 38 for Zillow), Jim Clark (38 for SGI, and 49 for Netscape), Charles Wang (32, CA), David Packard (27, HP), John Warnock (42, Adobe), Robert Noyce (30 at Fairchild, 41 for Intel), Rod Canion (37, Compaq), Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia), Eli Harari (41, SanDisk), Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk), Al Shugart (48, Seagate), Finis Conner (34, Seagate), Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom), Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom), Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring), William Shockley (45, Shockley), John Walker (32, Autodesk), Halsey Minor (30, CNet), David Filo (28, Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp), David Hitz (28, NetApp), Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom), Tim Westergren (35, Pandora), Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify), Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye), Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick), Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek), Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor), Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials), Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments), Richard Egan (43, EMC), Hasso Plattner (28, SAP), Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks), Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com), Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com), Tom Anderson (33, MySpace), Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace), Caterina Fake (34, Flickr), Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr), Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper), Peter Thiel (37, Palantir), Jay Walker (42, priceline.com), Pony Ma (27, Tencent), Robin Li (32, Baidu), Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com), Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi), Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei), Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex), Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten), Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Zip2
$22 million at 28
There are other entrepreneurs on the list with smaller successes prior to their big hits (a lot of them in fact). In my post I included the text "the age at which they got their big hit" to cover that aspect.