
Does life end after 35? - hakkasan
http://kzhu.net/does-life-end-at-35.html
======
kyro
I often worry about whether my startup clock is running out. I'm closer to 30
than 20, finishing up graduate school, and for the most part feel young. But
other than the pediatrics ward, the only other time I start to feel my age is
when attending some of these startup events.

What I try to keep conscious of is knowing what's reported in the media and
what isn't, which are often 2 completely different worlds. On TechCrunch, "kid
genius makes $100m" is the story they want. It fits this age-old narrative of
a child prodigy reaching success in half the time it takes a "normally smart"
person to, like Mozart, Einstein.

And that media draws in huge amounts of young people hoping to fit that
narrative. But what's not reported are the companies that are typically
working on much harder and more boring problems -- problems that require an
understanding by people who've been in industries for years. Look at any
CrunchBase newsletter about the day's fundraising and acquisitions, and you'll
find yourself surprised at how many medical/B2B/etc companies are being bought
for $100m+. These aren't companies started by 22yo grads, but by people with
extensive industry experience. And the (startup) media doesn't really give a
damn about them.

That's not, in any way, to devalue startups started by younger people. There's
little-to-no barrier to starting social apps and the like. They have their
place in society and have shown to be successful, so I don't blame a fresh
grad who wants to try his/her hand at it. But there is a whole world of other
startups and companies that are working in more complicated and boring
industries that could not have been started by people in their early 20s.

Experience still matters, as unsexy as it is.

~~~
beat
I came up with the idea for my startup when I was 47. I don't expect it to be
able to make a living at it until I'm 49. Age? Pffth. Then again, I'm not
hacking together "Facebook for cats" and hoping for some zeitgeist to make it
magically successful while buckets of venture capital rain down on my head,
either.

A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they
wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists. It came to
me because I've been in the software industry for nearly two decades and have
seen the same problems, over and over. I'm solving a real problem that I
understand really well, with a straightforward monetization strategy from
obvious customers. It's not something that could be knocked off in a weekend
by a couple of dudes at a weekend hackathon.

The experience to see substantial problems and the patience to work on them
comes with time. Don't worry about getting old.

That all said, my 40s have been the best creative period of my life, by far. I
feel like all the things I learned and experienced in my first 40 years were
just setting me up for what I can do today.

~~~
elmuchoprez
"A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they
wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists."

This is such a key point. Sometimes it takes years, if not decades, of
experience to even know that the problem exists. Put another way, if the
problem can be solved by a 22-year-old with no experience in the field,
there's a good chance they've misunderstood the problem.

~~~
6ren
Yes, coming up with the problem is often the hard bit.

But it happens the other way too, in that many young inventors tackle problems
because "they didn't realize they were 'impossible'". More knowledgeable folk
can do this too, but it requires a certain... disrespect for authority. Like
Einstein's flexibility with time and space (though he was young then; he
didn't make breakthroughs in later life, possibly because he himself became an
authority).

Fortune favours the delusional.

~~~
beat
It's not a matter of "didn't realize it's impossible". The problem young
startup entrepreneurs have is _they don 't realize that valuable problems
exist_. Valuable problems tend to be industry-specific and narrowly defined,
so you need to be at least aware of the problems of an industry, and the
existing solutions/workarounds. Without industry experience at anything but
being a college student and reading HN, how are you going to find problems to
solve? That's why you see so many me-too social apps. You solve what you know,
and if your most extensive experience with computers is Facebook and Twitter,
that's your space for problems.

There are a couple of other factors to consider. First, there are problems
that can be solved with new tech that couldn't be solved with old tech. The
web opened up a huge front of new solutions over the past 10-20 years. Mobile
is opening up another wave of solutions.

And finally, consider the "aspirin or vitamin" question. Vitamins are
tempting, but aspirin sells better. Me, I'm working in more or less the
monitoring space for configuration management. My key competition isn't other
monitoring tools, it's the DevOps movement and automation tools like Chef and
Puppet. When people have enterprise configuration management suck, those are
the recommended solutions. But they're vitamins being sold as aspirin. Simply
getting to where there's organizational buy-in to go to DevOps or to automate
what was once manual is a whole fresh sort of pain. My competitive advantage
is a near-painless dose of aspirin - immediate relief without having to change
the whole model.

Ain't no college kid coming up with that.

------
japhyr
I turned 40 last year, and I am loving it. I miss the physical resilience of
being in my 20s, but I wouldn't trade where I am now to go back to my 20s.

I grew up relatively sheltered in New England, and moved to NYC to teach as
soon as I graduated from college. I spent my 20s teaching in the city and
bicycling around North America in the summers.

At 29, I moved to Alaska. I spent my 30's climbing mountains, doing mountain
rescue work, and continuing to teach.

I just turned 40, and I feel like this decade is about building some things
that last. I feel like I came into more serious hacking at just the right time
in my life. I now have the experience to know exactly what I want to build,
and I have the long-term mindset needed to build important things. After
having stood in front of NYC public school classrooms, bicycled around the
continent, faced bears in the wild, and dropped out of helicopters onto steep
mountains, dealing with servers and such is just another satisfying challenge
to play with.

Life is wonderful if you keep right on living.

~~~
nickthemagicman
You guys have trouble getting dates with attractive girls?

~~~
6cxs2hd6
Don't worry, you'll eventually grow out of this attitude. Your confidence will
increase. You won't have to say stuff like this in an effort to feel better
about yourself. Hang in there and good luck.

~~~
nickthemagicman
No I'm serious. Ha. Hows the dating scene in the 40s? I'm going to be there
soon. The 30's came on insanely fast.

~~~
wwweston
I don't think it's that different from 30s. In some ways, anything post-
college is similar in that your life doesn't revolve around an institution
full of single peers.

There's a little bit of magic-numberism that goes on, I suppose: people have
ideas about what age means and they'll use it for a proxy (you'll worry about
much younger people being annoying or stupid, they'll suspect you'll be staid
or weird). But for the most part, everybody who's looking is still basically
looking for the right connection.

The only practical effects I've seen are around two clocks:

* the family clock: some people are more anxious to have kids before they get too much older, some people have decided the window is done (which changes who they can pair up with).

* the midlife crisis clock: people start trying harder to see if they can make their life exactly what they want, or insert something they wished they had when they were younger.

These might be the same clock, though. And they have been known to strike well
before the 40s. :) YMMV.

------
wting
A similar question was asked on Quora recently:

[https://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/What-do-people-in-
Silic...](https://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/What-do-people-in-Silicon-
Valley-plan-to-do-once-they-hit-35-and-are-officially-over-the-hill)

Some of the companies and founders' ages compiled from the answers:

\- Zynga: 41

\- LinkedIn: 36

\- Salesforce: 35

\- Intel: 41, 39

\- Qualcomm: 52, 50

\- Juniper Networks: 42

\- Wikipedia: 35

\- Pandora: 35

\- GigaOm: 39

\- Zipcar: 42

\- TechCrunch: 35

\- Craigslist: 42

\- Netflix: 37

~~~
eliasmacpherson
I know that LinkedIn culturally didn't work crazy hours to get where they were
- does anyone know, are any others listed that started out as '9-5'
organizations?

~~~
api
I am skeptical of the 60-80 hours thing. It seems like more of a macho thing
than a real requirement. The problem is that when you workaholic yourself your
productivity per unit time drops, so you're spending more hours but doing as
much as you might do in shorter bursts of more focused time. In some cases
it's worse... you get total burnout.

~~~
johnjlocke
The 60-80 hours thing is how computer peeps express their machismo. If we were
jocks, we would do like 1000 pushups or something. If you need to spend that
much time getting it off the ground, you are doing it wrong.

~~~
mcv
I see more value in accomplishing stuff in as little hours as possible. It's
not about the hours, it's about what you get done.

And once you get stuck, it can be more productive to leave the computer and
get some sleep, eat, walk, take a shower, etc. The best ideas or solutions
come to you when you're doing something else.

To me, saying you work 60-80 hours means you're either doing something very
simple, or you're not doing much at all.

------
digitalsushi
35 seems like a nice round number for people to self-sort into two bins:
people that decided yes, it's time to stop trying, there will be no more
sunrises... and then the other set, who think this is just ridiculous and roll
their eyes that age has anything to do with it. And even if the second set is
wrong, and there is actually something about getting older that actually slows
us down or makes us worth less, it's a terrible idea to believe in it. I see
no value in thinking about it. How would anyone improve their life by deciding
some threshold has been passed? Sounds like a good way to speed up decay.

~~~
wobbleblob
Here's how I look at it. It's not the decimal number of years since your
birth, but the phase in your life that closes doors.

In tech, you constantly need to keep up to date on the latest technologies,
read publications and go to conferences, because experience gets stale very
fast. It's also easier (than in fields like medicine or law) for junior
techies to get up to speed in experience, because they can skip the decades of
now obsolete tech and fast forward to roughly where you are at. This is fine.
It can be fun and it's definitely rewarding.

Then by your early thirties, three things change at the same time: you get
promoted to a busier, more responsible position, you have small kids, and you
get fat. The (waking) time you have for yourself shrinks from 8-10 hrs to
about an hour if you're lucky. You can use that hour to study and keep up to
date, to do something about that gut and exercise, or you're so tired you just
want to relax. Pick one.

In my opinion, this is why middle aged people seem so lazy and boring.

~~~
vidarh
Or you prioritize exercise, and keep your energy levels up. I'm 38. My pace
now is higher than it was since I was 20, despite a 4 year old son.

The big difference is for the last 8 years I've put in 3-5 hours of hard
exercise (powerlifting) every week before work. I wish I had more time, both
for exercise and projects, but these days I can pull all nighters and walk
into the gym 7am the following morning and set new personal records a couple
of times a week, and keep my energy up all day, whereas at 30 I was worn down
to the point where I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without my knees
hurting, and would collapse on the sofa in the evening and not have energy for
anything.

Now I am in better shape than most of the kids half my age at my gym, and have
early 20's body builders talking about how deep I can squat.

And I go home after work, play with my son, and put in time on my projects
after he's in bed.

Sure, I had downtime when my son was smaller, but kids are not an excuse for
all that long - when he was younger, I put projects aside and my only "me
time" was focused on keeping fit, and I feel it paid off. Now, every day, he
can do more stuff for himself, and wants to, and every new achievement means
more energy left over for me.

~~~
philbarr
I've heard this before about exercise. But exercise really tires my brain out
- it feels like I can't think at all, like all my effort has gone and I'm just
lathargic.

I'm not saying exercise is bad, and I do try and keep up with it, but am I the
only one that has to think, "I can't exercise now or else I'll be too tired to
code later."?

~~~
nouveaux
If I had to guess, you're exercising too hard. Try 10% of what your routine is
and then put in some code. Increase it slowly.

The right exercise regiment is important. There's no need to push yourself
hard the first three months if you're starting out. Try a couch to 5k run
routine over six months.

------
kamaal
I'm working with a senior person off late. I'm in my late 20's. One of the
things that he warned me against is hipster trends. These can really derail a
good technically intensive career.

Anyone who is glamorizing hipster practices over genuine experience should go
out and build a few embedded systems, a car, or a pacemaker, or a dialysis
machine, control system for a nuclear reactor, or a better routing algorithm
etc. If you are busy building <insert yet another MVC site here> and refusing
to look and learn from other software domains, you will likely never work on
any technically meaty projects ever and soon fall victim to age related
discrimination.

Building great things requires experience. Its not about impatience, and that
thing about 'fail quick, fail fast' \- 'quick iterations'. Some of the most
significant work happens only at a slow steady pace. With proper planning,
fore though about quality/stability of systems you are trying to build. Most
importantly its about the seriousness and the impact of the problems you are
trying to solve.

This takes time and with it you will age.

------
scrrr
In the west everything is more focused on the individual. I have to succeed at
X. I deserve Y. I have to put my stamp on the world. etc. etc.

Not sure this is the best path to happiness.

~~~
hakkasan
I tried talking about this in an earlier draft of my article but found it to
be a deep rabbit hole. I'd like to explore this more fully in a future post. I
feel that will be more divisive in it's reception :-)

~~~
jusben1369
If you take this task you have to do an incredibly deep dive of China vs USA.
The US is the global leader primarily because of this focus on the individual
and individual achievement. European countries compare somewhat poorly as
they're _sort of_ focused on the individual but with huge dollops of
government support/intervention. China however is completely unapologetic in
its team driven focus and now has significant success to back up that this
method can work. I'd be interested in someone who can contrast/compare there.

~~~
dwaltrip
You have fallen into the trap a little ;) what does it mean to be a global
keader? What are the true goals? Scrrr's comment was discussing happiness.
Neither China nor the US do nationwide happiness surveys AFAIK.

------
quaffapint
I'm getting past 40 and I don't think the problem will necessarily be with me
in the coming years as much as it will with employer bias. While you can keep
up with the latest tech stuffs, some employers still don't want to pay for
your experience or see your age as a liability vs being able to run a youngin'
ragged.

One other thing I took away is that the author seemed that if you didn't make
a big world impact no matter your age then you didn't succeed. I get into that
mindset every once in awhile and feel rather down about it. Then I realize I'm
raising my family, and while I may never be remembered for that amazing
startup, I will be remembered by the ones that in the end truly matter.

~~~
hakkasan
Yes, the definition of success is something I want to explore more fully. The
media/tech portrayal of success is extremely 1 dimensional and results in a
great deal of dissatisfaction and anxiety. Personally, I think it has less to
do with big wins or press worthy outcomes and more about consistently applying
oneself in a manner that you can be proud of. You make sacrifices to fit all
the things that are important to you in life and that's fine. Let the public
have their judgements. Ultimately, you only have to answer to yourself.

------
6cxs2hd6
Top managers are traditionally drawn from the ranks of 50-somethings. Sure,
that's partly due to a retirement age of 65, and partly a function of
institutional ladder-climbing. But not just that. Someone in their 50s has a
few decades of experience. Almost every situation or problem reminds them of
something they've already seen or solved before. Intuition or gut instinct
draws on experience, therefore it improves with experience.

Now, I wouldn't argue that someone in their 50s (or older) is prima facie
better than someone younger. Just that they're not automatically worse.

p.s. You could argue that "too much experience" can be a bad thing, and blind
someone to innovation. Although that's a good point I'd argue that the issue
isn't too much experience, instead it's usually too narrow experience and/or
too little ability to process it effectively.

~~~
hakkasan
Yes, my grandpa actually said that when you are young you are freer creatively
and take greater risks. This doesn't always lead to better outcomes but it
gives you access to opportunities you wouldn't get later in life. Likewise, as
you've pointed out, when you are older, your experience opens a different set
of doors.

~~~
pjmorris
This echoes one of my favorite lines from Lawrence of Arabia, at the end, in
Damascus: Lawrence of Arabia: Prince Feisal: "There's nothing further here for
a warrior. We drive bargains. Old men's work. Young men make wars, and the
virtues of war are the virtues of young men. Courage and hope for the future.
Then old men make the peace. And the vices of peace are the vices of old men.
Mistrust and caution. It must be so."

------
hangonhn
China has the reverse of ageism: the Chinese tend to worship the old. A noted
Chinese thinker commented that in China, the praise is "He is young but acts
old." and in the West the praise is "He is old but acts young."

So in that environment, you can imagine how someone in his twilight years
might have an easier time succeeding because people are more willing to listen
to him. For the exception of people like Knuth, Lamport, Stallman, Pike,
Thompson, etc. most of us in tech have our ears tuned to a much younger
population. It might change as our industry gets older.

------
pydanny
My life finally kicked into gear when I was 38. NASA hired me.

Since then I finally realized my dream to travel around the world
professionally as a developer, participated in multiple startups, wrote a
well-received book, found the woman of my dreams, and changed possibly
hundreds of lives.

Post-35 rocks!

------
ChuckMcM
The key though from this story is this bit "Having only been allowed to
complete his undergraduate degree, he spent decades doing whatever research
and teaching came his way."

One the key differentiators is whether or not people are willing to continue
learning. People who learn continue to be useful, people who stop learning
eventually aren't. (useful that is)

~~~
hakkasan
Precisely. I think his continued application and exploration are the biggest
personal rewards. The opportunity that appeared was fortunate and the acclaim
a happy byproduct.

------
MattGrommes
I turned 35 a few months back and I've thought the past couple of years were
my best yet, with more best to come. I had kids early-ish (my daughter is
about to turn 12) and people would always say I missed fun stuff in my 20s.
The way I look at it is my kids will be out of the house in my mid-40s while
everybody else is getting older _and_ dealing with kids. I'm living in my
favorite city, doing kickass things at work, getting less afraid to do more
interesting/scary things all the time. I laugh in the faces of kids who think
life ends after 29.

------
pnathan
As I move towards 30 at a somewhat surprisingly fast rate, I find that my life
has changed. I don't _do_ stupid stuff like all-night coding sessions, because
it produces bad work and a lousy morning. It always did, but previously the
glory of the late night hack outweighed the lousyness of what I made. I've
seen things again and again. I'm also fairly positive I am getting smarter, or
at mentally more capable. I can conceptualize things today that simply were
mentally out of reach for the 20 y/o me. I have a tremendous focus on self-
improvement and learning, so I don't expect this to change a great deal in the
metanarrative, but I expect to learn new types of things as I move forward
with life and move away from learning certain kinds of details.

------
steven777400
Unfortunately, there are aspects to our culture that conflate personal value
with success; that is, your value as a human being is based on your success.
So it's easy to compare to the very visible milestones; Bill Gates and Mark
Zuckerberg, etc. Or to compare to people we know personally; the successful
start-up founder with a nice exit, the entrepreneur who got his lifestyle
business off the ground and now pays the bills with it.

For me, it's easy to think "I am a failure" compared to these people,
especially as the years pass and the number of successes I know increases, but
I'm not "one of them". This is a severe error of conflating my external
success with internal value.

I prefer to recall the old Taoist saying, "Work is done, then forgotten."

~~~
tluyben2
People actually compare themselves to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg? That
sounds rather sad to me to be honest.

~~~
foley
Aim for the stars, land on the moon.

It's not the comparison that's sad, letting it define your worth is.

It's something I struggle with, almost 30 still struggling through my degree
and working on minor projects. But personally when I look back a few years
painfully grinding through life addicted to meth it makes today's small
successes feel like a billion dollars.

------
Codhisattva
I'm almost fifty and I feel like I'm just hitting my stride. But then I felt
that as I approached 30 and 40 too.

So yeah, you might not see it while in your 20s but nothing feels better than
the combination of intelligence and experience. That is, the result of
learning how to learn.

------
antjanus
Awesome read. I feel like I struggle with that issue as well. As I'm
approaching my birthday next week, I keep thinking about the 18 year olds that
made multi-million dollar Apps, and those 20 year olds that revolutionized the
tech industry with one idea or another.

It's taking a lot of effort on my side to sit down and relax and realize that
everyone on the planet has some achievements to show. Not just the "young".
The best case for that is just browsing through Kickstarter projects. Yeah,
sure, we're used to seeing people in the early 20s "changing the way
everything works" but we also see the veterans coming back to make yet another
shift.

~~~
digitalsushi
I find it's easy to get over the million dollar teenager tech geniuses:
Whether it's true or not, I just convince myself that more people have made
more money by playing the lottery and winning. And then the
lucky/smart/people-there-first that get their millions are just lottery
winners and I forgive myself for being normal.

------
damon_c
I used to look at those "guitar player wanted (under 30 only)" ads on
craigslist when I was in my late 20s and be confused about why there was such
a hard line on the people's rock band aptitude.

When I got to be around 35 I realized that if you want to be in a rock band,
you need to be ok with working a lot for no money and spending your weekends
in a van and those are things I just didn't want to do anymore and probably
most people in their 30s have a tapering off tolerance for such things.

But for stuff involving computers? They age much faster than we do and will
never judge us by our ages.

~~~
elmuchoprez
"Never trust anyone over 30" is a bit of a rallying cry among musicians. It's
often attributed Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jerry Rubin and a few others during
the 1960's, but I'm not sure anyone really knows who said it first. I would
guess that people are actually referencing that whole movement when they put
it in the Craigslist ads rather than setting a hard and fast restriction.

Or maybe it's a bunch of 22-year-olds who just want to hang out with people
their own age.

~~~
typicalrunt
I wonder what kind of rationalization Bob Dylan, The Beatles, et al went
through once they reached 30 years of age. Do they move the goal posts to not
trusting anyone over 40? Or do they admit that they were youthful and wrong
and state that untrustworthy people, at any age, are the only people that
shouldn't be trusted.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Probably both.

The concept in the 60's at least was partly due to change in culture between
the young "hippies" vs. the older "man". People were realizing in a big way
that "the man" was lying to us... Vietnam War, etc.

Things haven't changed much in that regard, but the corporate/govt media
"alliance" has become more sophisticated in dispersing/distracting such anger.

------
BigChiefSmokem
Do this: stop comparing yourselves to Steve Jobs for a moment and go ask your
parents, spouse, good friends, and confidants if you are a person of value
(forget about "success"), and to give you some examples. This should clear it
all up for you.

------
everly
"Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75." Benjamin Franklin

~~~
david927
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song
still in them." Thoreau

------
nikatwork
"In 63 BC as a quaestor in Spain, Julius Caesar is said to have broken down
and wept in front of a statue of Alexander the Great, realizing that where
Alexander had conquered most of the known world at thirty, Caesar at that age
was merely seen as a dandy who had squandered his wife's fortunes as well as
his own."

------
jmsduran
Very inspiring article. Being 24, almost half-way to 30, these past few months
I've been thinking to myself "what have I really accomplished outside of work
and school"? I think this is due partly to the high expectations I set for
myself, but I also believe part of it is due to the current tech culture,
where it's easy for those new to the field to misinterpret that if they aren't
moving as fast as everyone else, they must be doing something wrong.

I'm coming to understand that everyone is unique, one's career/life progress
is no better than another's. Thanks for the refreshing perspective OP.

~~~
jganetsk
Half-way to 30 is 15.

~~~
jmsduran
Sorry, meant to imply half-way through my 20's.

------
AhtiK
As a flip side, life can also end tomorrow, for anyone of us.

------
nealabq
The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself. --Mary Schmich

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-
su...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-sunscreen-
column,0,4054576.column)

------
ascendantlogic
I'm 35. I've worked for a couple small companies and I am at a startup now. I
certainly hope my life doesn't end now. I certainly would love to get
something started but I feel I'm old enough where I understand the value of
family and sane time limits. Looking back I could see myself taking a shot in
the dark on something but I'm not necessarily disappointed that I didn't. I've
learned so much and continue to each day. If you want to be a billionaire by
25 you'll kill yourself. The odds are so astronomical it's almost funny. I say
spend your years learning what you can, then start something when you have
savvy and perspective. But that's just me.

------
talmir
I am 30 and my career is just taking off :) I do very much hope I have more
than five years in me

------
tmbsundar
Freud wrote his "Interpretation of Dreams" when he was 43.

Colonel Sanders started franchising of KFC at 65.

More at
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_bloomer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_bloomer)

------
selleck
Great reminder. I am turning 32 early next year and started teaching myself
programming this year. Sometimes doubt creeps up on me and makes me feel like
I am wasting my time, but stuff like this helps. Onward!

~~~
BigChiefSmokem
Yes, just keep going!

I started programming relatively late (at age 26), after becoming unemployed
during the recession, for a govt agency in a small town in Florida. But now,
at my current age of 30, I have a very lucrative job working for a major movie
studio in LA as a software engineer. I have a lot of ambition at 30 than I
ever did at 20 and that has been motivated by my failures. I might of missed
my "startup years" and hacker culture in general but I'm definitely on track
for big things. I hope to soon finally settle down and raise a family as well.

~~~
faizdev
Nice! I'm just starting out as a softie too, also due to the economy, did you
start out with the web too? What language, how long until you found the job
that kickstarted your career?

------
toblender
Age is just a number. What you do with yourself each day is what counts.

------
lelele
Life does not end after 35, but your energy levels and stamina will be lower
than in your younger years. Yes, even if you exercise and eat healthy (indeed,
you'll have to stay fit just to keep going). Moreover, with age (hopefully)
comes experience, and with experience may come a jaded view of society that
can kill your dreams on birth. Qohelet wisely stated that "For in much wisdom
is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow."

I hope you will be among the exception.

------
Toenex
For a start-up it's not age that matters but risk aversion. You need to be
happy/able to take on the risks, which are mainly financial. However, there
will typically be a relationship between age and risk with the most risk
averse period in your 30's and 40's when you are probably having kids. So if
you don't feel you succeeded in your 20's and early 30's, hang on in there
'cause you'll get another opportunity later in life.

------
gotrecruit
i'm 27 years old this year, and i graduated recently with a business undergrad
degree. i've tried my hand at doing a startup throughout my undergraduate
degree but failed, and if i'm being completely honest, i felt like i learned
very little from that experience as i was not a technical founder. at 28 next
year, i will be returning to school again for a computer science bachelor's
and frankly, this 35 year old threshold keeps coming up in my head.

years ago i set myself an ambitious goal of being a self-made millionaire by
the time i'm 30, and a billionaire by 40. it's crazy talk to most people, but
it was a goal i set for myself. obviously, it doesn't seem that plausible now
- it's really more of a fantasy than anything at this moment but still... i
find myself feeling old and having wasted many years of my life.

this blog post lifted my spirits a little. i feel that if i begin working
really hard now and make the next few decades of my life extremely,
exceptionally and extraordinarily productive, i can probably still achieve
enough to make up for the last few unproductive years of my life.

~~~
hakkasan
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I feel this definition of what it means
to be successful is something I need to address properly in a future post.
Much of my anxiety in the matter stemmed from setting similar ambitions to
your own. I don't think it was wrong of me to set these benchmarks, but today
I find myself questioning the "why" more and more.

Increasingly I try to look at success as a more fluid notion. I feel it has
many dimensions that constantly evolve with my changing world view and life.
It can be valuable to set goals but I think it's just as important not to be
myopic to the rest of the world at their expense.

I feel a lot of it comes down to attitude. My grandpa would still have been a
happy man had he not had the opportunity to pioneer medical science. Prior to
his 60s, his curiosity and willingness explore meant he had a fulfilling life.
He wasn't expecting and waiting for a big success. He was focused on what he
was able to do and made sure he did it to the best of his abilities.

These are some quick thoughts on a bus and I apologise if it seem like I'm
being preachy. I'm only 29 and very much still figuring it all out. I dare say
I will be doing that until I die. Please share your thoughts, especially if
they run counter to what I've written.

------
brothe2000
I'd like to think that if you have an open mind and are willing to "think
young", I think experience can provide you with a greater reach to build what
you want. Young people have a belief everything is possible but may not always
have the means. When you are older, you typically have more means but are too
grounded in reality of what's possible.

Age is a number not a limitation.

------
MichailP
Very nice article, it resonated with me. It seems that talented people have a
great burden, which comes in form of often asking yourself "have you done
enough with all the talents you have?". It seems to be quite common, and it
even made it to the Bible (I think it is called story about three servants).
Funny that money in that story is called talent :)

------
zaidf
_His advice to me: Don 't be in so much of a rush. Be easier on yourself._

If you connect with this idea, you may want to check out the book _The Inner
Game of Tennis_ : [http://www.amazon.com/The-Inner-Game-Tennis-
Performance/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Inner-Game-Tennis-
Performance/dp/0679778314)

~~~
hakkasan
Thanks! I'll look into that. I've been trying to explore this topic in other
domains recently. I find sports coaches have done a great deal of exploration
into the effects of personal attitude especially in managing one's emotional
reactions to outcomes.

------
sainib
Thanks for sharing and I always have this thought at the back of my mind. I am
36 and launched my first serious part-time(gotta pay bills) startup last Dec
after working on it for over a year. This was after 2 attempts half-ass ideas
with no solid business plan. This article definitely boosts morale.

------
themodelplumber
What a great article. I loved the Chinese idiom too (or whatever you call
those four-character things). It's funny, I was watching a video on this
today: [http://www.wimp.com/getfit/](http://www.wimp.com/getfit/)

That made me feel a bit more realistic about life. :-)

~~~
dfjorque
Those idioms are called "chengyu" (成语) and there are hundreds (or thousands)
of them. Some of them come from ancient Chinese stories and poems and are
pretty allegorical in nature; others, like (seemingly) the one mentioned in
the article, are self-explanatory (to a Chinese speaker).

------
anish_t
end after 35? i am touching 39 and getting ready to start my real startup. My
partners are all few years older than me. I never wanted to be in a job and
have been running my services company for the last 12 years. While the current
business is doing fine, past few years I had this increasing urge to break out
from the services mould and "create" something of our own. Couple of months
back I took the decision to take this plunge. We have structured our existing
business so that it would continue to run in the hands of my partners while I
am venturing out and doing our thing. So yes, to outsiders or even friends and
family it might feel a little late to start out afresh I am all loving it and
living every moment of it!

------
JeremyMorgan
Great story.

I'm 36 and things only seem to be getting better for me, and I know things are
only going to get way better. My greatest achievements are ahead of me, not
behind me.

Sounds cheesy but it's all in your outlook. Good on you gramps for teaching us
yet another lesson in that.

------
trumbitta2
I wish I could take this amazing advice for granted. I'm in my late thirties
(36) and still can't afford having a baby. As you may guess, one cannot wait
till his sixties for that...

So, it really depends on what's the meaning of "successful" to you :)

~~~
bippi
I know it is trite to say, "No one can afford having a kid." but it's really
the truth.

For me, sure daycare, toys, and food aren't putting me in the poorhouse, but
there is no way I can bankroll everything I think my kids deserve.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Disagree for two reasons. One, kids deserve little but a loving home and a few
educational toys. Giving them everything they want is recipe for building a
little monster.

Two, for beter or worse, govts subsidize families to the detriment of the
single. When the wife and kid arrive, you'll get a ~$500 a month tax break,
enough to pay for another bedroom and diapers. The total cost is much less
than I'd imagined, especially if you avoid buying all the junk thats expected.

~~~
bippi
I get where you're coming from, but I'm thinking like, college, multi-lingual
private schools, a dad that takes time off of work for the sake of time off of
work.

Toys are nice too, but we're totally covered. This kid won't know boredom
until he's 60.

------
pneumatics
If you're turning 30, you're entering your fourth decade, not your third.

------
segmondy
If you believe you can, you can. If you believe you can't, you can't.

~~~
johnjlocke
(this) === true;

------
gadders
In terms of start-ups, career etc I don't think it's impossible to do it in
your 40s, but I'd say you're more explicitly aware of the sacrifices involved
and typically have more to lose.

------
BuckRogers
"He recently Skyped me about co-patenting a new method of microwave cooking."

PATENT TROLL! ALERT APPLE, SOMEONE'S TRYING TO GET IN THEIR MARKET!!! WE DON'T
APPROVE OF INNOVATION AND PATENTS HERE ON HN

------
Imagenuity
People are too obsessed with age. What is the point of telling yourself you
CAN'T do something because an arbitrary counter reached an arbitrary point?
Useless beliefs are what will limit you.

------
dzink
The immigration process delayed the start of my startup and I'm sure many
others are facing that too. Started at 28 even though I'd been in the US since
I was 19.

------
StandardFuture
Actually, maybe I am being short-sighted ... but what I get out of this
article is that his grandfather WOULD (could) have been just as 'successful'
as he was in his 60s much earlier in life if World War II and Mao had not
ruined possibilities for his generation.

If he had been allowed to do research from his early 20s wouldn't it still
have been possible for him to be just as successful at it? Maybe his 30s would
have been his heavy hitting decade?

In general maybe we all get about a decade of heavy hitting and it just
happens earlier or later for some? :P

~~~
hobbes300
The point is that you can still be successful after your 30s.

~~~
StandardFuture
Sure, but the article does make this point as well:

>My grandpa had no choice but to wait a long time for his opportunity. It's
likely he would have achieved even more had be moved to the West.

------
mathattack
I like that wisdom and patience mattered a lot to him.

------
planetmcd
A good life, yes. After that its mostly just changing diapers, paying
mortgages , chatting about 401Ks, and dealing with loud music.

------
zhaphod
If that were the case I would be dead just about now. And I haven't even done
half the things I would like to before I die.

------
onebaddude
Add me to the list of people who sometimes feels this way. This is the most
inspirational commentary I've read on HN.

------
phaed
Thanks, I needed this reminder.

------
antimagic
Yes. On the other hand, I'm quite enjoying my existence as a zombie...

------
mark_sz
PG - he's a good example that life doesn't end after 35:)

~~~
gaius
"But I don't expect to convince anyone (over 25) to go out and learn Lisp"
<\--- [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

------
frozenport
Real Stories

->Chinese politics hampered innovation

->If you plan to change the world in Academia expect to do it in your 50s

------
dotcoma
Yeah. I'm dead.

------
AnthonBerg
No.

Of course not. C'mon.

Quite an annoying headline.

------
greenlander
I worked as a manager at a major semiconductor company in Silicon Valley for
many years. I interviewed thousands of candidates, many of who were older than
me.

I noticed that older engineers seemed to bifurcate into two groups: the ones
who were curious about everything, and the ones who stayed in their box.

The ones who were curious about everything remained great engineers. They
tinkered with new technologies, read books about software project management,
wrote cool little programs in unusual languages like Haskell or Scheme, etc.
These guys were invariably great engineers, and their experience was just
icing on the cake.

The ones who stayed in their niche of writing x86 assembly, COBOL applications
for mainframes or writing the same class of network drivers for Linux for
fifteen years were usually awful.

I don't doubt that there is actual ageism out there. However, when I did
interviews I never cared. However, I also noticed that the "lazy engineers"
hadn't really done anything in their career to expand their skill set beyond
the minimum their employers required them to do, and I could see why they were
not employable. The older "curious, passionate" engineers I hired worked out
awesome.

~~~
johnjlocke
The type of people you describe exist not only in the programming field, but
in every single walk of life. We simply notice more because our field changes
so quickly.

There will always be people who remain curious throughout their lives, as
there will always be people who stay close to what they know because they
believe it to be safe.

------
special
From the title I expected a wishy-washy, pseudo-inspirational blog post and
instead my entire concept of success was shaken up and realigned. Great post.

~~~
hakkasan
Thanks, that's kind of you to say. I admit, it's a bit "link-bait" but my
other attempts at a title were either too cryptic or long winded.

