
What I would do if I was 18 now - yeasayer
https://levels.io/eighteen/
======
RikNieu
I like how some of the comments here completely ignore who Pieter Levels is.
"Some blogger", LOL. I suggest you check out what he's created before simply
poo-poing his advice.

Regarding said advice, here's my take; his post is about exactly what the
title said - what HE would do if HE was 18 right now.

From my reading of him, he's an extremely independent, entrepreneurial-type
who would not be interested in being employed by others(hence him suggesting
you skip college). You need a fancy degree to get fancy corporate jobs, not to
start lifestyle businesses.

Regarding learning how to code as soon as possible - I think that's good
advice for most people who want to make things. Sure, you won't get that job
at FB or Dropbox, but I have a feeling Pieter knows himself well enough to not
even consider those as options.

Building an income. Yes, simply "producing" a business making $5K pm is, shall
we say... optimistic. But it's still good advice for independent-minded
people. It's a target to reach for. A prompt to at least attempt that goal.
It's better advice than "get an unpaid intern position for a year."

Move and travel. That's easier for young people from rich countries, which,
well, would apply to an 18 year old Pieter too. If I had been young and
unattached with a currency advantage like that, yeah, I'd be out traveling
too! Life experiences can teach you a lot about yourself.

Save and invest. Solid advice. You may disagree with his assumptions and math,
but how many 18-year-olds even think of saving and investing money, never mind
the amounts he suggests?

Follow your passions. Yeah, that's a bit pie-in-the-sky for me too, but to his
credit, he does say that that would follow after you've accomplished his
earlier advice(Build a business with a lot of income, ect.)

I enjoyed his post. And I suspect you'd enjoy it more too if you took the time
to know more about the man who wrote it.

------
ianai
People forget how much more free time and freedom there is at college. Yes,
there are deadlines and schedules but you’re given opportunities that the
usual 40 hr/wk job won’t afford. You could take student loans out to buy
yourself dumb things, for sure, but you can also take student loans out for
really good things, too. The rest of your life that won’t so easily be the
case. I would love to have the time flexibility I had at college now that I’m
“in the industry”.

~~~
StudentStuff
School is a different kind of challenge from work. One provides clearly
delineated tasks, coworkers and employers who are apt to help you complete
said tasks in a timely manner, and pay for doing said work.

School, comparatively is $2k to $6k a quarter (depending on which public
univeristy you go to in Seattle), and while some classes have vague goals,
most lump everything into a handful of tests or a two dozen page paper, with
80 % of your grade riding on that. Study groups at community colleges, 2nd
tier universities (say UW's satellite campuses), and even at major colleges
are few and far between, with many professors discouraging them from forming.

I've proactively contacted every professor prior to taking their course since
I re-entered college, and while it has definitely helped me screen some truly
awful professors, what my parents describe as their college experience is
nothing like what I or my friends has gone through.

If I didn't need a damn receipt to get a decent job in Seattle, I wouldn't
have gone back to school. Even with a half decent Github, it seems a CompSci
degree is mandatory unless your okay with throwing $40k+ in potential yearly
earnings out the window for the next decade.

~~~
tzekid
As a student I've always put my projects before school | uni, because from
what I've read and been told experience and the `soft skills` are more
important than a degree.

And shouldn't the experience gathered from side projects, eg., documented (or
simply hosted) on github account more than a degree?

~~~
StudentStuff
Seems almost entirely to be a matter of networking and having a degree of some
sort to get into decently high paying jobs here in Seattle. Otherwise you end
up at a small or mid-sized company, significantly underpaid and wasting your
days with their shenanigans.

------
tbabb
Who are all these people who "didn't learn anything" from university? What
were they spending their time doing? I learned a ton about a wide variety of
fields from experts in those fields; it was extremely valuable. Did this guy
just goof off the whole time?

~~~
erikpukinskis
Ya, and when they say they never ask candidates about their education... OK,
so you've never needed to hire a statistician, or a mathematician, or a
lawyer, or a materials scientist... There aren't a ton of people walking
around who picked that stuff up on YouTube.

A lot of people pay programmers a lot of money to brute force problems someone
with a masters degree could solve in a week, and give you a correct O(n)
algorithm instead of the coder's buggy O(n^3) solution.

------
mozumder
> Happiness comes from intangibles, like experiences, relationships,
> activities, not stuff.

Experiences don't make you happy. It's one of the mistakes millennials make.
Vacations are exactly the same as buying shit - you're just buying more shit,
except your buying a pre-packaged consumer-friendly vacation. Taking a
vacation to south of France isn't going to make you happy. You'll be just as
angsty there as you are in your current place - don't need the south of France
or Machu Picchu to tell you your life is empty.

My advice: Create.

That's happiness right there.

If you want experiences that result in happiness, create some new experience.
You know you're doing it right if you actually make the news - when someone
ELSE gives a shit about your experience enough to report about it.

The actual process of creating something new is what makes you happy.

~~~
tyrw
I don't think there's much mileage is blanket statements of what "makes people
happy". I've traveled and thoroughly enjoyed it and it made me happy, and I
know people who I think honestly derive happiness from staying with the latest
fashions, etc. To each their own.

~~~
mozumder
The article already makes a blanket assertion that happiness doesn't derive
from stuff, which isn't true for a lot of people. Plenty of people derive
their happiness from material things.

------
betaby
> If you save that $3k/m over 20 years and put it into Vanguard ETFs (at 7%
> over 20 years), you’ll be 38 and have $1.5 million in the bank! Save $6k/m,
> and you’ll have $3 million at 38. Yes, I said that correctly. Save $1k/m and
> you’ll have $500k by 38.

Simply, no. No. That's not how it work. You can't find index returning 7% avg
on 20 year interval. Plus that gains are taxable in many contries, sometimes
heavily.

~~~
linkregister
A Roth IRA (a post-tax retirement account) in the United States will permit
untaxed capital gains. The maximum yearly contribution is $18,000.

The S&P 500 returns 7% average on most 20-year intervals. [1]

1\. [https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-
calculator/](https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/) ; I tried to find a
20-year interval less than 7%, I could only find a few terminating in the last
ten years. They were above 6.5%.

(not that I find most of what is in this essay plausible; that one quoted
excerpt is fine)

~~~
Fezzik
According to the IRS the maximim contribution to a Roth IRA is far less:
$5,500.

[https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/plan-participant-
employ...](https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/plan-participant-
employee/retirement-topics-ira-contribution-limits)

~~~
jlgaddis
Yep, though once you reach a certain age it goes up to $6,000/year.

The $18,000 number sounds familiar. I think that's the maximum annual
contributon to a 401(k) but don't quote me on that.

------
Willson50
It's easy everyone, just be successful.

------
andreyazimov
Don't waste your life on some shit. Learn! Learn! Learn! Develop skills! Learn
programming! Work with smart people and learn from them! Measure your progress
in KPI! Learn how to be useful for other people and solve their problems! Be
persistent and not give up easy!

------
factsaresacred
> This will probably learn you more about objectification and empathy.

'probably *teach you'.

Actually the lesson from going to strip-clubs is don't be a chump. In most
cases the one on the losing side of the transaction is the dude handing over
cash in exchange for literally nothing. Like paying to watch somebody eat a
burger.

> Age is a social construct.

Wut?

Agree with the learn to dance, write, code, love and socialize bit. Your 20's
should be an exercise in sucking less each day. Shit, your whole life should
be this.

------
zaptheimpaler
Demonstrates the easiest way to success. Just tell others how to be successful
- live a crazy life that seems awesome and blog/write about it! Pretend you
know something they don't so they stay hooked on your "personal brand". Voila!

~~~
tyrw
I've always wanted to write a "how to get rich" book in which I simply
describe how to write a "how to get rich" book. If done right it might
actually work, and if it did you really couldn't argue with the method.

~~~
tvmalsv
When I was looking to get rich quick back in the eighties, I saw several
methods that focused on teaching you how to get rich quick by selling people
information via classified ads. And, of course, you would find these products
by reading the classified ads.

Not really any different than today's video courses on how to get rich by
making instructional videos.

In both cases, for some people, it does indeed work :)

~~~
zaptheimpaler
Did it work for you, is the question :p

~~~
tvmalsv
Sadly, no. It's not that the ideas were invalid, I learned that I'm simply
lazy and unmotivated.

------
quuquuquu
>create a business that makes 5k usd per month

Ok, cool. How many people who legitimately set out to do that, actually
accomplish that?

>save 3k per month and invest it in ETFs, and you will have 1.5m by age 38

Ok, so if i'm making 5k USD per month, 1k goes to tax, and 1k as you say goes
to living, now I'm just barely at 3k. 20 years ago, the market was at a
relative nadir. Today it is at an apex, so you will need to time it correctly
to achieve 7% yearly gains (!), of which 2% will be lost to inflation.

Given that 0.7% of the world are millionaires, and just 4-5% of the USA are
millionaires, I have a sneaking suspicion that it is not so easy to just set
up this business and invest everything for 20 years, willy nilly, hey ho
presto I'm a millionaire.

Thesd numbers are further compounded by the fact that most money in this
country is "old money", which means that those who are rich currently
inherited their wealth rather than built a business that generated this wealth
for them.

So forgive me if I am a bit skeptical, but I really don't like to see business
advice overly simplified so that people will risk their time effort and money
to succeed, when failure rates are actually extremely high.

Day trading has a 95% chance of failure. A business has 90%.

If you don't have a product, a team, a funding runway, and aloof
competition... then you are going to lose all of your money as an 18 year old
startup founder.

~~~
ianai
I didn’t even make it that far. He lost me at telling people to skip college
and go to a coding boot camp. You might know how to code, but someone with a
degree will have a little more analytical breadth and depth from math, CS, and
even writing/communication courses.

~~~
quuquuquu
Yes, I do agree. Hiring is biased on aggregate towards people with CS degrees,
or at least the ability to do coding puzzles.

Shipping + getting shit done surprisingly is not that well respected (on
aggregate).

What's worse is that he's suggesting you bypass corporate employment all
together and just YOLO start a startup.

It's like saying "to be rich, first, make sure you have 5,000 a month coming
in. Then, here's how you spend it."

I am currently attempting to monetize one b2b site I have and one b2c. Both
have flaws and the going is tough. I am giving it a good effort but I'm not
getting the leads/traffic I need to scale revenue.

Even if I do succeed at making just 1k revenue per month, there's no guarantee
it will continue to exist even just 5 years from now.

5k per month, with 3k invested into a stock market that averages 7% per year?
That feels a bit pie in the sky to me.

But what do I know? I'm just some guy on the internet, not a SF-based
millionaire cofounder or digital nomad ^.^

~~~
ianai
5k/mo is pretty much rich from starting at 0. There’s many ways to aggregate
that to more money beyond that. It’s like saying find a way to pay all of your
bills and have 5k left over per month to be rich in the long run. Yeah, okay,
but that’s pretty much a tautology.

