Ask HN: Do I give up now?

No doubt, most successful people I know are lucky, but those are not the people I admire the most. I admire the unlucky who persevered and overcame. They have the battle scars and experience to know what doesn't work, when to ask for help, and when to muscle through tough situations. They didn't accidentally get born into wealthy family with a paid-for college degree, or join MENSA.

That all being said, don't spend your whole youth trying to grow up, it just sort of happens. Enjoy your youth and make sure you are constantly learning and meeting new people.

There is a huge difference between making a little money from a website and running a business. It's maybe not your project, maybe the way you communicate on it or the way you plan to make money on it.

There are lots of ways to run a business and lots to fail one. Take your time and check point by point what went wrong with your project:

- Did your project fill someone's need? - Did you have an exact idea of how you would earn money? - Was your communication effective enough (did you reach your target)?

My thoughts is that you're still young, do not lose hope at 25, try to find what were your weakness. Keep it up :)

Use the time you're saving to have a life. Travel, date, cultivate hobbies. Talk to people who aren't in the same bubble you're in. Gain knowledge about the rest of the world.

To be honest, you just haven't been coding long enough to be really good at it. 10 years is nowhere near enough. It took me 20. Been doing it since I was 9, now I'm 31. It really took til my late twenties to find a stride. But it's not time spent behind the screen that's the metric to move. You have to know what and why you're doing it and for who. There's a bigger economic ecosystem coding fits inside that, if you don't understand, it's easy to spin your wheels for a long time until you figure it out.

Paradoxically, it's not time spent coding that makes you the best coder. It's all the rest of it.

You don't have to stay inside the prison you built for yourself. All it takes to leave that prison is to go outside. My advice, go to the bar. Talk to whoever you find next to you. Do it again tomorrow. As many times as it takes to make you sane again. Maybe make some real friends.

I traveled. It's a hollow joy. I found myself opening up my laptop and going through tutorials in the middle of paradise. Now I bring my laptop to the bar. If there's someone to chat with, I'll close the lid and chat. If not I'll make some progress on whatever project I have.

At 25 you have lots of at bats to succeed with a startup/business.

I wouldn't say you're stuck in a day job as a programmer.

That's why they call it work. Look around few people are making what you make and are able to support themselves, travel, save for a house, nest egg for a family. So be thankful you have the skills to pay the bills.

I would work on the work life balance. Focus on your day job during the day, learn what you can and advance. Save money for runway and funding your startup when you do come up with your next idea.

A mastermind would be a great idea. To bounce your ideas off of and decide what to put time in to.

Don't work 16 hour days non-stop, balance your time for family/friends. Use funds from your day job to pay developers and maybe a VA to handle some of the time you'd normally put in.

If you haven't already listen to the StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com. They have great advice for lots of topics you mentioned.

Reach out to people in the community. Rob has the micropreneur academy which might be a nice way to meet up with like minded people to bounce ideas off of/get advice.

Lots of people are where you are later in life. Make the most of your youth and have a life work balance.

Good luck with your next venture.

You're not in your own prison. Your programming job (presumably) pays well - that's more than a lot of other people have to go on. Take that vacation, clear your head, come home, start putting money aside to bootstrap a busines venture. Take your time working out what it should be. Then make the leap.

That paragraph might sound judgmental initially, but personally I don't think there's anything wrong with being driven by the desire to make a lot of money, or prove something (whether to yourself or to others - it sounds more like to yourself in your case). But I think you need to really nail down your motivations in order to decide what your goal is -- for instance, what's your objection to having a day job? If you weren't working on side projects too, would you really be taking trips? Some people don't get as much out of traveling as others, that's OK, don't feel like you have to do it because everyone else is. You want to build a business, but that's vague: what's the part of it do you really want to do? Does it depend on the type of business?

Figure out the details of what you want and why you want it, so you can keep yourself sane and remember why you're doing it, then get back to the how.

Being smart and being lucky aren't something you need to worry about. Being better tomorrow than you are today should be the goal. Even if it's just a small thing.

Ask yourself what you want in the next 5 years, and focus on that. It sounds like you want to focus on relationships and travel. Focus less on the ideas and the business stuff, those don't matter in the long run. Focus on life.

Today, I walked into work knowing I was going to quit, because I don't see the success. I failed at that, because I know the idea is good and I like the people, and for me to cut the cord early would fuck everyone else at the moment. I'm making a decision that means I'm unhappy for the moment, but I'm doing it for other people's safety.

I'm also suffering from the issue of having left a place I love and everyone I care for, for a place I don't fit in and can't connect with anyone. My social life is dead and it's not something I've been able to change in the valley.

I'm thinking about leaving tech, as a profession, because professionally it turns everything I love into a thing to loath. And going back to the slower pace of living, without fear of failure or success, just living intentionally and taking every day and every moment for what it is.

1. Take it easy. Relax. Rest. Take a break. 100% break for maybe 2 weeks. If you can't afford it, change your job, work enough to pay your bills and relax with all the extra time (provided you don't live in an expensive city). Find a way to GET AWAY from the computer/tech. The break will help you think clearer.

2. Change your definition of 'success'. Something more like 'doing what you like and getting paid to do it'.

3. Improve your skills. Nothing to show for it? I hope not. Either way, find ways to improve your skills. Code reviews, open source, etc.

4. Work for someone else. Many people started their own business FIRST by working for someone else. After 9 months to a year they felt confident enough to do their own thing. I'd suggest you follow in their footsteps. Support someone else's business that will pay you.

Good luck in your endeavors.

The key is to keep trying and keep learning until you're successful. Just because some people made it big at your age doesn't mean there isn't room at the table for people who make it happen later. I should know: I didn't really come of age until I was 35 years old.

What doesn't kill you just makes you stronger -- and increases your chances of success.

Good luck to you.

I had always wanted and expected to achieve great things. I think this is a natural and healthy desire. But when I looked back on the last 10 years I realized I wanted to be a political figure (when I was left wing) then a famous scientist, then a famous scientist in another field, etc. The only common thread was the desire to be great and to have a big (positive) impact on the world.

To let go of this required me to realize that a small probability of having a big impact on the world was not better than the certainty of having a small impact. Once I was open to making a small impact, it became very easy to see the value in my work, and to focus on enjoying the fortunate position of having an easy job that paid well.

Can you take a vacation? My selfish fantasy advice: Go somewhere sunny and sit on a beach for a while. Take your laptop with and code there too if you want, but don't push yourself. Just take a break and relax. Meet people. Have fun. You are young. Everything is ahead of you.

Sorry. Possibly too much wine.

Stick to 8 hours a day. Work for a couple of years as an employee and build up some savings. Then start something on the side or try again with some savings.

Others have more or less alluded to this, but it's worth stating it explicitly: 15-25 probably aren't going to be anywhere near the best years of your life.

Also, at least you've got a marketable skill. Think of all the college graduates who don't even have that going for them, plus a pile of student loan debt to boot.

If you've been at work every day for that long, a: cut back the hours and b: go disconnect. Take a week or a month or whatever, and just don't connect to the Internet. (It gets easier after ~3 days.) Reflect on things.

Another trick I've used is to go consulting for a bit. Work on somebody else's stuff, deal with their problems, collect cash. Importantly: Get a job where you're not shouldering the cognitive burden of their business (so, not a CTO role, or Lead Technical Architect Designer Whatever). Look for a more 9-5 thing.

Eventually you'll start feeling the urge to go do your own thing and switch back.

A lot of people seem to be pointing out that I'm still young and that there are lots people in similar positions to me who have been failing for a long time.

I know I'm still young, and I know it's not easy to build a successful startup, but I think that's missing the point. I am still relatively young, but I won't be as young in 10 years. And what if I keep failing for another 10 years? Or even another 10 after that? Do I really want to spend 20, or 30, years of my life in a job I don't enjoy that much for a dream that may never happen?

Don't get me wrong. All I really want from life is to build something I'm proud of. I don't care much for cars, houses and holidays. They're nice, but I'd give up any chance of having them if I could build something that fills me with passion everyday I wake up. It's just, I can't guarantee that the time I put into having those things will actually get me anywhere. I mean, I've already gambled 10 years unsuccessfully so far.

I really relate to what nacrikt said:

> I'm thinking about leaving tech, as a profession, because professionally it turns everything I love into a thing to loath. And going back to the slower pace of living, without fear of failure or success, just living intentionally and taking every day and every moment for what it is.

After 10 years of nothing, I feel like cutting my loses and living life a little slower for a while might not be so bad.

You're considering "giving up" after 10 years? You have no fucking idea. No offense, but you're just spoiled by a culture of instant gratification. In most societies and in most of history, it took generational timespans to go from nothing to wealth. People moved to the towns at 15 as laborers (often worse off than peasants) so their kids could join the working class and their grandkids would have a shot at joining guilds so their great-great-grandkids would be wealthy merchants and their fourth-great-grandkids (whom they'd never live to see) just might join the gentry or the lowest edge of nobility.

It's not your fault. The crime of the pseudo-meritocracy that exists now is that (a) well over 90% of the people who have knock-out success by age 25 had parental lift, but (b) society does a damn good job of making sure that it looks like they earned it. It makes rapid ascension look not just possible, but normal. It's not: not even fucking close.

You feel like a failure because you're comparing yourself to people who have all sorts of ridiculous, but also invisible, advantages. You shouldn't beat yourself up that you can't compete with the kids who close $5 million seed rounds fresh out of Stanford. That's like trying to compete with a cheetah in the 100m dash: you just weren't born with it.

When I was 15 me and my friend started a little hosting website. It was really fun. I learnt to program, and we even made a little bit of money. In the excitement I began to learn about business, startups and programming. I thought it was going to be so easy to make money.

It sounds like you didn't fail. Not making money is failing. Having to turn off the lights is failing. You learned how to program and turned a profit on your first project. That sounds like success (albeit minor) to me.

Because for the last 10 years I've worked 16-18 hours a day, every day, with absolutely nothing to show from it.

Yeah, you should probably change that. That's unsustainable. You sound burned out. I'd be worse off than you are if I worked that much.

You need to exercise, you need a social life, you need things in your life that aren't work, and you need some damn down time. Don't just "book that holiday" (it's not a bad idea, but it's not enough). Stop working hard and start working smart. If it's not important, don't do it. If it is important, you probably want to be well-rested when you do it, which rules out 120-hour weeks.

Because 10 years later I'm suck in a day job as a programmer.

Well, if you drop back to an 8-hour day, you'll hate it a lot less. Give yourself a break. Most people don't hate being in day jobs because most people don't work so hard as to make themselves miserable. They show up at 9:00, leave around 5:30, socialize a bit at work, and once they've been at the job for a year or two, they figure out a way to work mainly on the parts of the job that they enjoy. You should try it.

And for a dirty secret: you can probably get away with 2-3 hours per day of actual work at most day jobs. I don't advise slacking to that extreme. It's bad for your career to fuck around, and even though you probably won't get fired, people will notice and not like you and it'll make your life unpleasant. But you're literally working an order of magnitude more, right now, than the minimum not to get fired.

Also, stop reading Techcrunch because the 25-year-olds whose startups turned into unicorns or thestrals or chimeras or whatever the fuck mythological creature they are using to describe hot-shit companies had so much parental lift (and luck) that it's useless to make a comparison.

You mention being stuck "as a programmer". Do you not like programming? If you don't like it, then stop doing it. T...

You should reframe your perspective. Instead of "failing for 10 years", you should look at all the knowledge and skills you've acquired during this time. That alone is already better than the majority of the population, and I bet lots of people would kill to be in your position. And you're only 25.

Also, it doesn't surprise me that you didn't succeed, despite your effort. The odds are simply against you [3]. Failing is the expected outcome. What is wrong is your expectation of success, just because you spent 10 years trying hard. Sorry to say, but that's not how it works [4].

You should take a serious look at your professional career, and consider other options. Building your own business is not the only way to cultivate a successful career, build a strong network, and learn to be a better professional. And remember that many successful entrepreneurs started after 30 (or 40, or 50), so that option always exist. Different challenges, but still doable.

You mentioned that you like to read. Here's some references that I wish I had when I was 25:

[1] The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now http://smile.amazon.com/The-Defining-Decade-Twenties-Matter-...

[2] Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) http://smile.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected-Ac...

[3] The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup http://smile.amazon.com/Founders-Dilemmas-Anticipating-Found...

[4] The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator http://smile.amazon.com/Launch-Pad-Inside-Combinator/dp/1591...

[5] This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording http://smile.amazon.com/This-Water-Original-Wallace-Recordin...

(all are clean links; no affiliate)