
Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older? - tastyface
I&#x27;m a 26 y.o. software dev working on going indie. All my life, I&#x27;ve struggled with procrastination. I find it very hard to sit down and work on a project without an external motivator, and on many nights I end up vegging out in front of the TV or aimlessly clicking around on the internet. As a result, even though I am successful on an absolute scale — CS degree from a top-10, worked at a startup and a large company, enough savings to last a few years of solo development — by my own metric of success, I am crippled by the feeling that it&#x27;s &quot;too late&quot;. Every day, I read an article by some hot-shot young dev who has a handful of fancy projects behind his belt (not to mention a great website and design sensibility) while I have exactly zero — and he&#x27;s half a decade younger than me! How will I ever be able to catch up? Experience-wise, I&#x27;m still a junior dev.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;s age. If I&#x27;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&#x27;s exhausting and terrifying, but I also don&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s been getting better. For the first time in my life, my procrastination is starting to get tamed. I&#x27;ve been working hard on my first big project, and I expect it&#x27;s going to be a great one. But I can&#x27;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&#x27;ve resigned to the fact that I&#x27;ve procrastinated away a decade of valuable time, and it just endlessly haunts me.<p>Does anybody else have this problem? How do you deal with it?
======
vijucat
> It's been getting better.

It's not, it's getting worse.

You are in a cycle of slave-driving yourself. You remind me of Jiddu
Krishnamurthi's assertion that "Influence acts strongest when you don't
realize that it is acting". I would venture that most of your accomplishments
are a result of being told what you should do, what you should be.

You will NEVER have the energy that the people whom you compare with have.
Because they are being themselves, and are connected to the natural wellspring
of motivation that comes from genuine interest, while you are the salmon
swimming upstream, aping societal ideals and trying to be someone you are not.

Choose the opposite for a while : stop doing things that don't motivate you.
Find out what motivates you. Be spontaneous. If you find a small plant at the
roadside that you want to water, do it. Observe that absolutely no effort was
required in this action. This is the mark of genuine flow : you will not feel
the effort. If you chance upon some project which you execute in this natural
state of interest, you will not feel tired.

Almost no one takes my advice because it's so threatening to be natural. What
if you are not naturally ambitious? That's a horrific thought to have while
being in the company of achievers, isn't it?

~~~
tastyface
OP here.

Believe me when I say that there's nothing more I'd rather do than what I'm
doing right now. Not even in question. I _love_ programming, I love the
project I'm working on, and I love the ideas that are waiting to be worked on
in my future. My heart fills with joy when I think about holding those
finished products in my hands. When I get into the flow, I can zone out for
days and work on my projects with hardly a break for food and sleep.

However, I have a natural weakness towards idleness. Like any negative
personality trait, I have faith that it can be worked on. (If you're depressed
or socially anxious, you wouldn't just accept these as the way you are, would
you?) Internally, when I run into this problem, it doesn't feel like swimming
against the tide; it feels like a massive speed bump that needs to be
overcome, but that I _know_ from experience has a smooth road ahead of it. I
think it is a mistake to believe that every ambitious person is naturally
driven, from beginning to end, solely by their ambition. Sometimes it's not
enough.

Were I to succumb to my personality, I would sit in front of the TV, depressed
and unfulfilled, for literally decades. That is not an option.

~~~
wpietri
> If you're depressed or socially anxious, you wouldn't just accept these as
> the way you are, would you?

Have you considered that you might have an anxiety problem?

You mention being crippled by fear. You mention a constant gnawing. You
mention a daily rehearsal of a major anxiety, your always feeling behind,
frequently feeling exhausted and terrified, an endless state of panic, and
being endlessly haunted. That is a whole lot of anxiety, and there are other
kinds of anxiety disorder besides social anxiety.

My tip for you: find a therapist you like and go regularly. You've got two
problems here: you are trapped in a behavioral loop, struggling for context.
And, being young, you don't have enough life experience to see as many
patterns as somebody older, especially somebody who spends all day talking
with people. Regularly seeing a good therapist will help with both of those.
They can also help you consider whether your level of anxiety is unusual, and
what your options are.

I should add that when I was your age, I was too arrogant to do that. I was
sure that by dint of raw smarts I would figure it out on my own. Which was
both true and dumb: reinventing psychology from scratch would in some sense be
an achievement, but like most reinventing of the wheel, it's not an
achievement that anybody cares about, not even me.

Anyhow, I have worked out an anxiety-related checklist over time. Now when I
notice anxious feelings, the things I wonder:

* Am I getting enough exercise? 30-60 mins cardio 3-4x week is about right for me.

* Am I carrying a lot of stress in my body? Yoga, massage, and hot tubs are helpful.

* Are there environmental factors? E.g., noisy environment, messy living space.

* What am I eating? My mood is most stable on foods with low glycemic index, worst with junk food.

* Am I getting enough sleep? I do best with ~7.5 hours on a very regular schedule.

* What's my drug intake? More than 100mg caffeine or 2 drinks alcohol and my mood will be less stable the next day.

* Am I taking my vitamins? This could be placebo, but I take a B-100, a sublingual B12, and some fish oil. My doctor recommended them for reducing the effects of stress.

For me, my procrastination is directly driven by feelings of anxiety. The more
chill I am, the more I get done.

~~~
bemmu
Also: are you getting enough social interaction?

I live in Japan, most of the time holed up in my apartment and hardly
interacting with anyone. On the rare occasions I get to enjoy a true fun
interaction with someone, it really helps improve mood and reduce anxiety.

------
Spearchucker
I'm 45, and have about 60 unfinished side protects in my /Dev folder. I've
also just reached the feature complete milestone on my first side project that
will actually ship. After working on it, or a variation of it for SEVEN YEARS.

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.

~~~
ganeumann
I'm 48. More productive in the past ten years than ever before. I used to feel
the way you do, in my twenties. A lot of it was just jockeying for position
among a group of high-achiever friends--trying to be the alpha in a group of
alphas--and some of it was having been the big fish in the small pond of my
immediate peers and finally being thrown into the big pond.

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.

~~~
M8
_> 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'.

~~~
crpatino
> 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.

~~~
thelambentonion
> On the other hand, you can accept that both of us (along with every human
> alive today) will die. [...]

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.

~~~
crpatino
Because curing smallpox and polio are specific, well constrained goals, while
curing death is open ended and not even well understood on a fundamental
level. It's like saying that because you can earn a paycheck above poverty
level, you can be richer than Bill Gates, Carlos Slim and King Midas put
together. In theory yes, but this reasoning fails to address important
practical concerns.

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).

------
chrisbennet
I'm not famous or "accomplished" enough that you will ever hear about me, but
I'm _extremely_ successful by the metrics/goal I have chosen. My goal was
simply to be _happy_.

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.

~~~
teebot
Good piece of wisdom. I somewhat have the same opinion but could not put it
into words.

~~~
zita
right.. and it is not age that matters but finding your purpose+meaning.. call
it love passion caring for something/someone.. this is the true success in
life everything else is only temporary fame.. glhf

------
pjc50
_then maybe the list of accomplishments at the end of my life will be longer._

There isn't a high score table.

The balm for this kind of ambition is to visit a suitable big-city graveyard
or cathederal and have a look for the largest, most elaborate tomb with the
longest list of achievements on. Unless this is a former world leader there's
a good chance it's someone you've never heard of. On the way back, look at
every house you pass. The person who lives there is almost certainly less
remarkable. Ponder the size of the world for a bit.

The ambition/procrastination loop is an anxiety disorder common to people
identified as "bright" from an early age. You can retrain yourself out of that
in a number of ways, but the simplest one is scheduling. Put half an hour of
work in every day. Possibly if you have time bracket it with daily light
exercise. This is how the marathon runners do it: one step at a time, with
years of repetition behind them.

------
noonespecial
I've posted this before but I feel it bears repeating:

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.

------
onion2k
_At my core, I am intensely ambitious._

Are you sure about that? There seems to be a lot of evidence to the contrary.
One of the most important lessons I've learned so far is that ambition is
_not_ wanting money and recognition; it's a desire for constant challenge,
pressure and responsibility. A lot of people _don 't_ want those things, they
just want the cash.

It's actually possible to find niches where you can earn _good_ money rather
than ' _fuck you money_ ', but without all the stress. That's a much better
prospect in my (somewhat unambitious) opinion.

~~~
jevgeni
In my opinion, I wouldn't call what you describe "ambition", but rather "need
for self-validation". Ambition is desire and determination of achieving
something, whereas challenge, pressure and responsibility just seem
masochistic. Where's the end goal?

The problem here, in my opinion, is that the "default" goals one sees in the
"start-up culture" (or the banking culture, that I'm better familiar with) are
bland, spoon-fed and vulgar: "Hey, this guy has shitloads of money, imitate
this guy! What? You still aren't rich? Then you're not doing it HARD enough."
All in all, it just seems like a self-help book gone way, way wrong.

I think the reason OP can't motivate himself to do these things, is because
they are only superficial, exogenous goals to him.

~~~
visakanv
^Yes. You don't describe yourself as ambitious, you reveal it through your
actions. How you prioritize. How you manage your limited time and resources.

It's weird to say "I am ambitious and I waste time vegging out watching TV" in
the same breath– chances are the "I am ambitious" statement is really identity
performance.

OP wants to be seen as ambitious (not just by his others, but by himself as
well). It's a comforting narrative to hold, but it's also damaging (kinda like
a cigarette addiction– you enjoy the pleasure of the cigarettes but you start
noticing that your health is going downhill).

The gnawing pain that OP feels in his chest– I'm sorry that there's no nice
way to put it– is the realization that he's a fraud [1]. It's the dissonance
between "I am ambitious" and "I am wasting my time". One of those things have
to go.

And we're all frauds to some degree, because we all tell ourselves stories
about ourselves that feel good. OP is working himself up into a brilliant,
painful frenzy, and in a sense it's likely that he enjoys it in a twisted
sense– just like how some groups of people enjoy the drama of social
relations, and keep perpetuating it.

BTW, just for fun (but seriously, too)– the most accomplished people like this
tend to be writers. Balzac, Proust, Dostoeyvsky– all of them did this whole
agonizing woe-is-me thing, or represented it powerfully in their work. OP, you
might just make a great novelist. Write a modern day Lost Illusions with
yourself as the title character, and you might just achieve the success you
were hoping for!

~~~
Aushin
"The pain OP feels is the realization he's a fraud"

Holy judgment, Batman! I think the gnawing pain he's experiencing is the FEAR
that he's a fraud (which I think is far from a decided matter). What an awful
thing to call him when all you've got to go on is a couple of paragraphs.

And honestly, I think ambition is probably a prerequisite for feeling the way
he feels. Unambitious people are likely immune to feeling like they're wasting
time.

Working on something original, that you're the sole creator of, that you're
solely responsible for, is a TERRIFYING prospect no matter how much you love
the work you put into it and no matter how ambitious you are.

Calling him a fraud because he hasn't figured out how to crack the existential
barrier between what he wants to be doing and what he's doing is such an
oversimplification of how people work that I'm actually a little offended FOR
him.

Comments along these lines only perpetuate Great Man worldviews (which I also
consider a gross oversimplification of how people operate).

~~~
visakanv
I do realize that line by itself looks a little nasty, I'm sorry. I meant it
to be taken together with "And we're all frauds to some degree, because we all
tell ourselves stories about ourselves that feel good."

How about without using the word fraud, which can be a little more loaded than
I intended, I simply stick to the line afterwards– that we feel gnawing pains,
etc whenever our actions are not consistent with the beliefs we hold (or claim
to hold).

~~~
Aushin
IF what you're saying is the gnawing pain is awareness of the gap between who
we are and who we want to be, then I agree completely.

------
sean_the_geek
I was in the same boat when I was 26-27. I was passionate, better than most in
programming and had a better job than most. However, I was not happy. There
was this constant fear that somebody would overtake me or somebody is x-years
younger than me but earns y times more or he is so young but achieved so much
more than me blah blah blah. This eventually led to mild depression(or at
least that's what I think it was). Then I started doing meditation. I don't
want to preach but trust me it works. It made me focus on what's important and
what's not. It made me realize that I am externalizing my happiness, that I am
comparing myself to others when such comparison is not fair,that whoever I am
comparing to might have problems of their own; nobody's life is perfect. But
most importantly it made me realize that all my adult life I have been
preparing to be happy without actually being happy. It's like this. If I do
this project and publish my web app, I will be happy. Or if I conrtibute
x-lines to some OSS and get my name on the contributers list, I would be
happy. It was sort of like preparing your bed but never actually sleeping in
it. So the TL;DR is start with a little bit of meditation.The Art Of Living
Sudarshan Kriya and mindfullness would be my humble recommendations.

~~~
cushychicken
>If I do this project and publish my web app, I will be happy. Or if I
contribute x-lines to some OSS and get my name on the contributers list, I
would be happy. It was sort of like preparing your bed but never actually
sleeping in it.

That realization sounds a lot like the TED talk I saw recently from Shawn
Achor. He likens it to always moving the goalposts on your own happiness. (FYI
- you can get the same amount of info from this TED Talk as you can from his
book. Not worth $7.)

[http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_bet...](http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work?language=en)

~~~
sean_the_geek
Thanks for that link, bookmarked, will definately watch. I don't exactly
remember where the analogy came from so could very well be from him.

------
adventured
Too late because you're 26? More like too early. The way you deal with the
gnawing in your chest is to correct your view of success with a healthy dose
of reality. The 21 year old success is almost exclusively a lie, little more
than a media fabrication; don't buy what they're selling.

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)

~~~
M8
This list needs corrections, e.g.:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Zip2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Zip2)

$22 million at 28

~~~
adventured
I chose Tesla for three reasons (over PayPal and Zip); first, it's what he is
most famous for; it produced most of his fortune and is by a large margin his
biggest success; and it's amazing what he went through to pull it off.

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.

~~~
M8
I understand your logic, but find the list misleading. Regardless of hard
work, Tesla was founded by an _experienced_ _millionaire_.

------
azurelogic
This is the facebook feed problem for software developers. You said:

> Every day, I read an article by some hot-shot young dev who has a handful of
> fancy projects behind his belt (not to mention a great website and design
> sensibility) while I have exactly zero

This is going to keep happening. The only thing you can do is find something
you love and grind it. That's what most of them have done. They (or at least
most of them) don't just pop out a new smash hit every night. Most of those
articles still take time to put together.

I didn't even start my career until I was 28 (while I was working on my MS).
My daughter was born a year later, and it took me 2 years to get my blog
going. (I foolishly thought I could write a CMS. I ended up building something
clean and minimal with a static site generator.) It takes me forever to get a
post together, but that's ok. I work at the speed I can. I'm happy because I'm
still making progress.

Not everyone gets to be a rockstar all the time, and you have to jam in the
garage before you get to take the stage.

------
UntitledNo4
I'm 40, started working as a programmer only about 10 years ago, so I
definitely have more lost opportunities that you. But I don't care. I manage
to make a good living, enjoy what I do and get the appreciation of my clients
for the work I do, and that's what I wanted when I went my own way. I can
understand though, and I think part of the problem is actually HN. When I
started reading it I was suddenly informed of many new (to me, at least)
programming languages and other technologies. I felt behind and thought I
needed to learn, or at least understand, them all, but I didn't have the time
-- I had much work to do during the day, and then no will power to learn
anything new in the evenings after I had finished working for the day. So then
I felt guilty about it -- how do other people manage to both work and learn
all those things at once? I don't know. I just stopped feeling bad about it
since (as stated above) I make a good living, enjoy myself doing this and get
appreciated for my work, and that's what important to me.

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

------
jqm
Hahahahahah.... (sorry) I'm 44 and feel like I'm just getting started.

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.

------
meric
This is a cliche, but worth bringing up. Sanders, founder of KFC, started
selling fried chicken at 40, and KFC founded when he was 62.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders)

~~~
creativityhurts
Those were also pretty different times. Nowadays we read almost everyday about
teenagers who start and sell startups and I think this aggravates the sense of
urgency in most of us who are still under 30 and are not yet on the front page
of TechCrunch.

~~~
abcd_f
You read about these teenager because they are interesting to read about.

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.

------
jbenn
"But the thing that got me through that moment, and any other time that I’ve
felt stuck, is to remind myself that it’s about the work. Because if you’re
worrying about yourself — if you’re thinking: ‘Am I succeeding? Am I in the
right position? Am I being appreciated?’ — then you’re going to end up feeling
frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always
have a path. There’s always something to be done."

\- Barack Obama

------
bontoJR
I am 28 and I am actually in a similar situation, but honesly in the last
months, my mind started to chillout about getting old with the risk of stay
behind. It doesn't really matter the age of a developer, but the most
important thing is the curiosity about what he does. A developer without
curiosity is a walking-dead-dev, you can be passionate (I don't like the word
itself because means suffer in latin) and love your job, but the curiosity is
what makes a developer shine. So, unless you lose this, you don't really have
to worry, try to learn always as much as you can and keep going on, you will
definitely find your path and the way to enjoy what you do.

~~~
rebelidealist
This is so good. It highlights the importance of working on something bigger
than myself.

------
PaulRobinson
I "started in earnest" at the age of 11. Now I'm 36 and have CTO in my job
title (but I'm very hands on - still a small firm, headcount < 20), and I
still feel behind sometimes.

When I talk to younger people about what it is to be a professional
programmer, I ask them "Do you like learning? Are you prepared to learn
something new every day? Are you prepared to do a job where your task is to
quickly learn and apply that learning constantly?"

That is what a programmer is. We all learn from each other. From the
stackoverflow copy/paste crowd to the most senior computer scientists you have
ever heard of. Some of them have original thoughts, original applications, but
mostly we're just this big crowd learning off each other to get things we
enjoy doing or are paid to do (and ideally both), done.

Procrastination is your subconscious saying "I really don't want to do this".
You either listen to it, or you start telling your subconscious why you do.
It's OK to move onto another project. Maybe no projects appeal to you right
now. Maybe you need to talk to somebody about anxiety and depression, as you
have some of the symptoms.

~~~
plongeur
> I ask them "Do you like learning? Are you prepared to lea ...

you should have been more honest and instead asked them whether they are
prepared to sit in front of a computer 95% of the time - whether they like to
learn new technologies in their spare time just for the sake of staying
competitive no matter if it bears real practical relevance and if they are
cool with earning less than their fellow key account manager ...

------
nc
Compare yourself only to your past self. Don't beat yourself up over other
peoples accomplishments. Instead focus on being a better version of your past
self. Procrastination will make room for real work when you do.

It's almost hopeless to compete with others without a narrow playing field
that, say, sports offers. Due to the fact that everyone has vastly different
resources/talent/starting points.

------
stray
Young people hitting it big makes news copy advertisers like. But news is news
because it's out of the ordinary.

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.

~~~
Yadi
That's a good list right there!

------
websitescenes
Dude. I didn't learn to program until I was 26. I learned HTML and CSS when I
was 18 but didn't do anything with it until age 26. IF I had the same attitude
as you when I was 26, I'd still be a mechanic and not the lead web developer
at an award winning design studio. Now at 31, I am working on multiple
startups outside of work. Why? Because I'm not old until I'm dead, or stop
learning..

------
ilaksh
I'm 37. When someone says they are 26 and 'getting older' it is very
irritating to me.

Not every kid is lucky enough to have a rich uncle or show up at the top of
the App store. Its just the lucky or privileged or self-identified
entrepeneurs few that you see in the news. And it is partially slanted towards
articles about young people because that is a more interesting article.

I mentioned 'self-identified entrepeneur' because I think identity has a role
to play in this. The person that you really believe you are subconsciously
influences your behavior to reinforce that outcome.

So if deep down you think you are a great UI designer and an important app or
open source developer, you are likely to put yourself in that position and do
things that perpetuate it. For example, you might sleep the couch of a wealthy
friend (accelerator) and spend all of your waking hours on your website and
startup rather than working a corporate job.

Anyway I think that we create our own cages. Some of them are very easy to
fall into, like taking a regular job or watching TV after coming home from
work. But if you have a self-image which creates a strong subconscious belief
in a different lifestyle, that can help you make choices that will move in
that direction.

People accomplish things by dedicating time and effort to them. Its not easy
to become famous or make a superior website or project.

------
jmolinaso
Just to add my advice to the list. I'm 35, I went through a path to get to be
a developer that took me long, I could call myself "software developer" round
30's, that's by the time I finish my Bachelor degree and found a job related
to development. What I did in between was fixing computers, sysadmin, and
netadmin .. I always got bored in those jobs as I knew I could do better.

Then I got into the devel world and I started doing the same as you do. But
maybe because I became father in between, maybe something else ... I end up
turnning off the media noise and add some behaviours:

1\. Kill your ego, it just don't help you get better. 2\. Read news about tech
you find interesting, but just read them, if you feel like, just try them. 3\.
Start getting off the screen, walk around (meditate, sports, just walk
surrounded by nature) 4\. Start paying attention around you, what the people
close to you struggle with, and maybe help them. 5\. Don't reinvent, if you
have a tech ich, just browse around, you might find a nice project you can use
(open sourced) and maybe start helping there maybe not. 6\. Just create a
dynamic in you that gets you where you like to be.

After you get this kind of movement in you, success is a question of being in
the right place at the right time.

From my side, just followed that list some time ago. Now I'm checking
potential things about domotica and it might get me somewhere, might not ...
but something I know, I'm moving because I have an ich. And I'm learning a
lot!

The rest is just noise you can simply reduce.

------
csl
I'm sympathetic with your feelings. My advice is to focus on yourself instead
of comparing yourself with others. I've often found solace in Max Erhmann's
"Desiderata" \---
[http://mwkworks.com/desiderata.html](http://mwkworks.com/desiderata.html)
\--- which says:

    
    
      If you compare yourself with others,
      you may become vain and bitter;
      for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
      Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
    

I recommend reading the whole thing; it's beautiful and very inspirational.
Also, Richard Feynman has a great quote about disregarding what others are
doing, which I guess is from "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman", but can't
find his exact words (can anyone help me out?).

From [https://imagineer7.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/the-most-
importa...](https://imagineer7.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/the-most-important-
lesson-nobel-laureate-physicist-richard-feynman-learned-about-creativity/)

    
    
      Feynman wrote one word, in capitals: DISREGARD on his
      notepad when he read that. This word became his motto.
      That, he said, was the whole point. That was what he had
      forgotten, and why he had been making so little progress.
      The way for thinkers like himself to make a breakthrough
      was to be ignorant of what everybody else was doing and
      make their own interpretations and guesses.
    

You can't stop time, so you better learn how to deal with getting older. I'm
sure you're a great person, just find out what you want to spend your time on
and focus on that, and disregard what others are doing. As Max Ehrmann said:
"Strive to be happy".

------
simonswords82
I keep this Reddit post handy whenever I feel the way you do right now. I
strongly recommend you read it, and would love to hear your thoughts :)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/1cv2gr/payed_off_210...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/1cv2gr/payed_off_210500_worth_of_debt_excited_to_be_debt/c9ki7lb)

------
hypertexthero
Good to see Krishnamurti mentioned here!

I warmly recommend The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, both
books that affected me deeply and improved my life.

Here is the table of contents (from a PDF) from the latter. I recommend
getting a hardcopy — it is a short book, to read once a year.

    
    
      Authors's Note                                      3
      1. The Function of Education                        4
      2. The Problem of Freedom                           12
      3. Freedom and Love                                 19
      4. Listening                                        28
      5. Creative Discontent                              35
      6. The Wholeness of Life                            42
      7. Ambition                                         49
      8. Orderly Thinking                                 56
      9. An Open Mind                                     64
      10. Inward Beauty                                   71
      11. Conformity and Revolt                           79
      12. The Confidence of Innocence                     87
      13. Equality and Freedom                            95
      14. Self Discipline                                 102
      15. Cooperation and Sharing                         109
      16. Renewing the Mind                               119
      17. The River of Life                               127
      18. The Attentive Mind                              135
      19. Knowledge and Tradition                         144
      20. To Be Religious Is to Be Sensitive to Reality   153
      21. The Purpose of Learning                         161
      22. The Simplicity of Love                          169
      23. The Need to Be Alone                            179
      24. The Energy of Life                              188
      25. To Live Effortlessly                            197
      26. The Mind Is Not Everything                      205

------
delvingFinn
I fail to find the exact ancient Roman quote, but loosely: "The best racer
does not seek to be the first". There is a hint of a cognitive strategy here:
the person who wastes his/her cognitive resources on comparing oneself to
others loses that bit from resources from his/her results. Your mind is not on
the topic/goal but on other people. It is a waste of time and energy.

Sure it is useful every once in a while to check out what other people do so
as not to re-invent the wheel, but that is about it. Concentrate on what YOU
do. Observing other people may end up yielding you nothing.

------
helpfulanon
Created a throwaway to say this since I don't want to give away my medical
history..

Basically I struggled with these problems for most of my 20's. Then a year ago
I started going into therapy with a psychologist, got tested for ADHD and was
diagnosed. Meds changed everything when it came to procrastination. It used to
be the cause of so much anguish in my life and today it's almost a non-issue.

Therapy really helped me decouple from the narcissism that had warped me into
a compulsive fixation with benchmarking myself against other people. Humbling
yourself is important. Spending time on non-code hobbies, with family, away
from work and tech industry noise is important.

Not everyone can or should be running a software product, and that's ok. Not
everyone is successful in their career at age 26. When your life is surrounded
by these skewed values, all this survivor bias, it seems like not being on the
frontpage of Product Hunt is a mark of failure. If you head out of the tech
bubble, go somewhere with friends or family that have no association with this
world, you'll realize that this value system isn't normal.

Also, keep in mind that the people who do run successful projects are often
unhappy. Running a product is a lot of work and can be extremely stressful and
exhausting. Success is a double-edged sword.

Edit: replaced a rant about wanting to be a successful entrepreneur. This guy
just wants to be a good coder, I missed that.

------
kmjnhb
My heart goes out to you, because these are issues I've dealt with my whole
life, and I can now, with age, see how pointless it was to get wrapped up in
them so tightly. If I could say one thing to you it would be to try and
develop a little compassion and love for yourself. Really, make a conscious
effort at it, maybe even check out meditation, "Metta meditation" in
particular.

First, this sounds like typical ADHD behavior to me. Have you considered the
possibility that you may have ADHD? If not, they research it a bit. (Right now
-- Go ahead, I'll wait ;-)

Also, you seem to have a constant feeling of insecurity, of being "less than".
Even though you have obviously accomplished a lot, you are still in a panic
over not accomplishing enough. This is just a guess, but I'd bet it has
affected your life in a a lot of ways far beyond your programming career.
That's OK, you are certainly not alone, but just something else to mull over
in your mind, and why I think mindfulness and metta meditation might be
especially useful for you. Check out "Pragmatic Buddhism", as well as Jack
Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Tara Brach, Shinzen Young, and simiplar teachers.

I'm stressing meditation because I've found it to be the most effective way to
deal with similar issues in my life. It's not fast, or easy, but it seems to
be the most effective thing so far.

------
PrinceBishop
I'm 44 (and three quarters) - been working in software development for over 20
years, the last 8 or so working for my own business as an enterprise software
java contractor on client sites. I've been working on side projects for the
last 5 years - and feel I'm only just getting started with it.

I look at it like I'm only at the halfway point in my career - and currently
trying to decide the best course for the next 20 years (and beyond,
hopefully). I've tried to choose side projects that are aligned to the tech I
use in the day job - use them to try out new things and get a better grounding
in stuff that I don't necessarily work on full time (android, ios, AWS, etc).
Aside from being interesting I've found it a great discussion point in
interviews. Hopefully one of the projects might grow into something bigger,
but if not - it's no biggie - I've already gained from it.

I've found that releasing stuff early and often keeps me motivated to keep
things ticking along. I use JIRA as my organiser/mental notepad to put tasks
in as I think of them, and try and grab half an hour every morning, and
whatever time at weekends I can to just keep pushing things along. Work when
I'm in the mood, and accept there will be weeks/months when I won't have the
time or inclination. Over time I find it really satisfying to see things
slowly take shape. I'm not too worried about getting anything finished quickly
- as I've got the contracting work. If that dries up, or I get any bench time
- I've got the side projects to jump into more.

~~~
danesparza
Some great suggestions from somebody with actual experience doing this for
decades. Thanks!

------
lgomezma
I'm 29 and have exactly the same problem.

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.

~~~
akhilcacharya
I'm 18 and I feel this way very frequently, except with academic credentials
instead of age. I feel kind of silly knowing that people with significantly
more experience than me feel the same way.

------
sixQuarks
I've been a life-long procrastinator. There is no cure, but it can get better.
These are the best articles you can read to help break the cycle:

Why Procrastinators Procrastinate [http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-
procrastinators-procrastin...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-
procrastinators-procrastinate.html)

How to Beat Procrastination [http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-
procrastination.ht...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-
procrastination.html)

------
erikb
A few points I haven't seen while scrolling through the comments:

1\. Impact of Achievements does not relate to time as much as we think.
Someone can start with 50 and make more impact than the most talented
programmer made in 30 years of hard work. Maybe you need 2-3 years to get up
to speed, but for longer time periods there are too many other factors
involved. So if you are really as good as you think (most programmers do, but
we can't all be better than all the others) taking your time and working on
something that is interesting to work on might be more interesting than a
comparison with a guy 10 years younger.

2\. Start small. That is even more true for side projects. Do a very tiny
thing. Then you can finish it. And if you have more motivation add a second
small thing to it. This way even if you lose some motivation you still have
something to show for it.

3\. Code on something you need. I'm certainly a below average coder, but my
best side project is something that started without planning because I wanted
to automate a tedious task of mine. I'm working on it from time to time for
years now and gradually it becomes more and more useful and nice to use. It's
not on Github. It might not help anybody else. But I'm really proud of it, and
it really helps me a lot on an almost daily basis.

4\. That also means the code itself has no value, but what the program helps
you do has value. If you don't code something that does something useful, than
your project is meaningless. And by far the easiest person to please is
yourself.

5\. The most valuable programmers and the ones who have achieved something in
the eyes of the public are not the same. Your mother might think Steve Jobs
must have been a much better programmer than you. But he's not even a
programmer at all. Public recognition is not what we think it is as 20
somethings.

~~~
pestaa
Would you mind shedding some light on your automation tool?

~~~
walterbell
This subthread reminds me of a procrastination-calibration tool and one of the
finest pieces of software ever written -- EccoPro. Abandoned in its prime
twenty years ago, it remains unmatched in function, has been virtually bug
free, remains operational on Windows, and has been extended to support Lua
scripts via binary patching. Full-text search and n-dimensional views of N
dreams/projects, to surface non-obvious relationships and metastructure.

------
tomjen3
Two points:

1) The examples you see are biased in the extreme. The most sucessful are held
up to an extreme degree, so that the average of what you see is six or seven
sigma ability. This is not even close to being the actual average.

By having a couple years of savings, you are probably actually 3 or 4 sigmas
ahead.

2) We all wish we started earlier. The truth is that I am not who I was 5
years ago. That person was an idiot and if I had started a business then I
wouldn't have been successful. The person who was me 5 years before that was a
complete lunatic and I am surprised I ever had any friends then. That person
fortunately hadn't moved out from home yet, or I wouldn't have gotten anything
to eat.

So you see I couldn't have started earlier, because I didn't exist. Sure the
person with my DNA who walked around existed and I have that persons memories,
that persons scars (in some cases literally), etc but he isn't me.

Therefore wishing I had started earlier is as productive as wishing I had been
born a millionare.

------
eranation
As someone who's 37 all I can say is don't worry. I had a few years like that.
I got a renaissance love to code and an inner motivation only at age 30 (I'm
coding since I'm 20, but I was a mediocre enterprise java grunt) Only now I
started my master degree, open source projects, learning tons of new languages
and instead of watching tv I watch MOOCS or read technical books or write in
my blog or work on one of my side projects. I get unsolicited emails from
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Linked-In (sadly no greencard yet
but I also love my existing job too much to move) Bottom line, relax, when I
was 26 I swore I will never code again, but things change when you grow up. I
would kill to have all the free time I had when I was 26. (I am married wnd
have two kids) but even at my old age, you can still be passionate about tech,
still be more than relevant, and you don't have to compare yourself to anyone
but yourself.

------
Htsthbjig
I had a working pal that was amazing, great family, the world was his property
at 20 something. He got cancer and soon he was dead(nine months).

Thinking about death is a great thing to identify what is important in life.
Also traveling. In India I saw a bus filled of kids that had been mutilated ON
PURPOSE for asking money to tourist.

I mean today there are kids in India whose eyes are being burned, or bones
being crushed, so someone else could profit from it. This puts all your
problems in perspective.

At the end of your life if you look back what would you be proud of? Of a
beautiful website?. Fancy projects? glory? money? I don't think so.

There is a reason for procastination. Your subconscious is a great BS
detector.

Read or listen "the Now habit" audiobook to understand it from experts in the
area.

Nobody can do everything. There are things that you hate to do and some you
love, and the solution is not you forcing yourself to do what you abhor. The
solution is to find someone who loves doing what you hate.

Companies naturally do mix different people so they complement each other, the
sum is much bigger than its parts. This is the problem of indies, going alone
could meant paralysis because you hate so much a (small) part of your journey
that blocks you.

The reason you hate to do something is normally your personality type. There
is a reason there are different personality types: all of them are better for
different things.

People tend to rationalize their own personality as the best and undervalue
all others. E.g If you are chaotic, fast problem solver you could despise
perfectionist low paced problem solvers. Big error.

I bet there are things on your work that you better would love not to do. Get
rid of them getting someone to do it as fast as you can. You won't need tv
when your job is the best thing you can do at any given moment.

------
prawn
Celebrate the graveyard of side projects. Accept that not everything will be
seen through to completion for one reason or another. The years will fly past
and you will get to this position eventually, so you might as well do it now
and have some fun on the way.

One day you will have children and you will come to realise that raising the
next generation is an absolute joy and often the greatest lasting achievement
many of us have. As long as you have some ability to provide for your family,
then the adoring faces of your kids make for a great fallback position.

There are countless people out there who have a mundane and unremarkable
working life but, in accepting that, have a lot more spare time to enjoy their
life in progress.

I imagine like many of us here, you enjoy a lot about the process of working
on side projects, so make sure that enjoyment is as much a part of it as any
concerns about potential success.

------
burnt1ce
You're comparing yourself to others and it's making you feel like shit.
Honestly, the problems you're experiencing is small compared to the shit
that's worth fretting about (degrading health, lost of family/friends). When
you're 40 and you look back at your 20's, you will feel fortunate to have the
problems you're having now.

Find ways to start enjoying life now. Don't let pride get into the way. Your
ego may demand you to live up to an unrealistic identity. Compare yourself to
your old self and not others. That being said, it's easier said than done. But
if you habitually and intentionally change the way you view yourself (like how
a recovering anorexic looks at him/herself in the mirror), your change in
thoughts will change the way how you feel. It'll take time but you'll
eventually get there.

------
themanr
I would say I'm ten times more productive at 35 than I was at 26. Seek
inspiration, self-knowledge and maturity away from the computer screen.
Climbing a mountain as a metaphor for making persistent progress with a
project works much better when you have struggled to climb a mountain or two
in the fog.

------
LukeB_UK
I think one of the key points would be to stop comparing yourself to others.
You're you, they are not.

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.

------
yourad_io
Do this[1] to get you to love learning again and deal with
procrastination/time management/life-juggling. You'll know some of this stuff
already. Finish it anyway. Best value for time of anything educational that I
have done - bar none, hands down, etc.

Take one of these[2] when comparing youself to other people. If you had spent
time to brand yourself, you'd probably look at least twice as good as "hot-
shot young dev with handful of fancy projects". Public image and developer
prowess aren't necessarily related.[3]

If, like many devs, your procrastination issues were related to.. hm.. illicit
substances-well, you know the answer to that: "Pan metron ariston"[4] ~=
"moderation is everything".

> Mentally, I've resigned to the fact that I've procrastinated away a decade
> of valuable time, and it just endlessly haunts me.

It hardly sounds like you've done that. So you didn't reach your max.
potential in this "procrastination decade". Guess what: nobody does.

Don't let shit haunt you. The past is immutable. Change your present and
future.

[1]
[https://class.coursera.org/learning-003/](https://class.coursera.org/learning-003/)

[2]
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Chill+Pill](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Chill+Pill)
I sure as f- need them.

[3] If you gave yourself the mini-project: "Let's make this X bad dev look
good", you'd probably succeed for most X. If you care about your public
perception, make that your mini project and you'll find that when you're done,
your image will be A+++ - as you're not a bad dev.

[4] [http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/642841-pan-metron-ariston-
ev...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/642841-pan-metron-ariston-everything-
in-moderation)

~~~
patrickdavey
Hi - I just wanted to say "thanks" for the link to the coursera course. I'm
going through it now and really enjoying it.

------
spion
The key thing here is procrastination, not age. Remember that technical
articles have the same positive bias as Facebook, except its even worse. On
Facebook you only get to see only the best parts of the lives of your friends:
when reading technical articles, you're competing with the best in the
industry that also had the most luck and everything else fall into place a
while ago - otherwise it wouldn't be newsworthy.

------
saluki
Don't look back at where you've been . . .

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.

------
orthoganol
Same age, used to have same mindset when I was right out of college.

I now believe, firmly, that being intensively competitive with everyone like
that, constantly comparing yourself to others, will greatly increase your
chances of failure. People who accomplish truly great things, technology,
sports, politics, philosophy, whatever... get so invested in their vision that
they pay zero attention to what others are doing except in a practical sense,
and they definitely don't measure themselves by other's external standards.

I mean, if I were an investor or something, and I knew that all you really
cared about was success for the sake of success, I would get out real quick.

You should do some introspecting, make some tough changes, and get rid of a
stifling mindset like that.

------
roneesh
One technical aspect you didn't consider:

The work you wish you'd done sooner (1 to 6 years ago), would have been done
with that year's tech. Starting an app 6 years ago, whatever idea, would have
been harder to do. Early versions of mature frameworks we enjoy now weren't as
easy to deal with. In the last few years things have gotten much faster.

It's easy to see how easy work is to do today and look back and say, "If only
I had those lost years!" but that's not the case, that work would have been
different by it's nature, due to the tech.

If only you'd started your app 15 years ago! You could have gone through the
fresh hell of flash, php, hand writing deployment and basically being a
sysadmin!

------
walterbell
_> 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.
_

This theoretical regret about a progress bar to presumed "answers" assumes
that the "question" was not changed by your life experience.

 _> Mentally, I've resigned to the fact that I've procrastinated away a decade
of valuable time, and it just endlessly haunts me._

It's only procrastination if you fail to trust your own choices and find the
inevitable lessons therein.

A haunting thought: what if your subconscious was seeking _something_ while
"procrastinating"? What if you already found it?

------
jordanlev
It sounds like you might have an anxiety disorder. You should seek out a
therapist or counselor to discuss this. It's unfortunate that there is such
negative baggage associated with therapy -- I have found it to be immensely
helpful in learning more about myself and how to manage my own anxiety and
depression (key word being "manage" \-- these are aspects of who you are and
can't be changed, but you can learn to accept them and deal with them instead
of just wishing them to go away). Best of luck.

------
wambotron
There are tons of people who have all sorts of coding accomplishments. I don't
have any in particular, but I also don't care. I do enjoy working in this
field, it's never been an issue of being forced into it, but I also don't live
and breathe code.

There are a ton of things I like to do outside of work, and 99% of them
involve 0 coding/architecture/programming. I don't have any notion of what a
programmer "should" be, and, after working at a bunch of different places, I
know that there is no one definition of who a programmer is.

You're putting this pressure on yourself because you're reading
sensationalized articles. This is no different than a little girl seeing a
wicked skinny model and becoming anorexic in hopes of being that. The people
pumping out tons of great code and projects are anomalies. The headlines you
see relating to them are all to get you to click on someone's blog or website,
to use their project, or to tell you why you should hire them. It's all
marketing.

My advice to you would be to stop worrying about this stuff. It's completely
pointless in the end. You're not going to be on your deathbed thinking "oh I
should've created more open source projects." This point in your life could be
something you totally forget about. You've only been working professionally
for, what, 3 or 4 years?

I hate the Packers, but Aaron Rodgers had some good advice in a press
conference last year: R-E-L-A-X

~~~
brainflake
Great piece of advice! My only complaint is I wish I had written it :)

------
pandler
Listen, I'm 25. We are not old. To combat those feelings, I remember two
things.

1\. I'm 25. I still have like... 60 years left. That's a long time.

2\. "There were never any good old days, they are today, they are tomorrow" \-
that's a line from a Gogol Bordello song that's always resonated with me and
helps me put that feeling of having wasted my life so far into perspective.

(Song:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aZwFQbeD1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aZwFQbeD1k))

------
commadelimited
Come talk to me when you're almost 44 and have the same feeling.

I've probably accomplished more than some: I'm the co-author of 3 tech books
on jQuery Mobile, I have a number of 1000+ star projects on GitHub, I do
contract work on the side and more. Yet I still feel that I'm not doing
enough.

The thing is that you have to feel okay with what you're doing. If you want to
do more, then do it. If you'd rather take time and chill on the couch, then go
for it. You probably work hard during the day.

------
zeeshanm
Here are some random bits from my perspective:

1) Don't worry too much about what others have done because in some way you
are still ahead of the curve if it matters.

2) Focus on the work you can somehow find interesting. The work does not have
to be challenging to be interesting.

3) Don't work too much but when you work block your time for one or two hours
sprints. Try to put some music on auto-replay.

4) Reward yourself every few hours like by taking a walk or just stepping back
to reflect.

5) Remember if you have a problem there are tons of other people who would
have the same problem.

6) Find a meetup that you can really find your place in and regularly go to
the meetings. Focus on the quality of friendships you can make.

7) Nobody is genuinely happy in whatever condition they are in. Everyone has a
story. And that's ok.

8) If we all would be genuinely happy there would not be much to live for.

9) Try not to hold grudges. We only have a limited number of our brain CPU
cycles. Try not to waste them especially at peak time.

10) If you have a lot of interesting ideas to work on that's super cool. Don't
get too carried away with the popular notion of being focused. It sounds good
to say but nobody knows what they are talking about.

Last but not least, don't read too much especially the blogosphere. Write your
own story. Get a blog up. And it's OK to be in conflict with oneself.

------
djloche
It sounds like you need to do a month vacation (or two weeks, whatever you
can). The first half of your vacation, go off-grid completely. No cell phone,
no computer, no internet - just you, your tent, and nature. Be it
camping/fishing/hunting/surfing/skiing - spend at least a week explicitly not
staring at a screen - just de-stressing and listening. Get an hour massage, go
swimming and soak in a hot tub, take a legit vacation that would make both
your younger self and will make your older self jealous.

When you're back from vacation, you can plot a new course for success, with
reasonable milestones.

edit: to answer the question in the title: When you find people that are
better than yourself, write to them with two simple points: 1: let them know
what exactly it is that you admire in their work 2. politely ask for specific
resources/advice with regard to that thing.

When you find someone that is better than yourself, it should be reassuring
rather than stressful because 1) it proves that it is possible to be that good
and 2) it provides you an example to learn from. You can build upon the work
they've done. You don't have to start from scratch/reinvent the wheel - you
are actually at the advantage.

------
b0o
You're 26? I'm also 26. Like me, your friends are probably also out there
graduating from med/law school, getting married turning into parents. I also
have that gnawing feeling from the tick-tock in my mind, and my lack of
success, but I'm slowly getting there. The best way for me to complete things
is to just make a list on what I need to do to reach the goals I want and to
just slowly cross things off. i.e. if i do this, I'll be able to do this next,
otherwise if you just look at the big picture, it'll just seem impossible.
There are always people who are going to be younger and better than us, and if
you ask them most of them will attribute their success to two things:
extraordinary luck & timing and gut-wrenching hard work.

Coincidentally this was on the imgur fp
[http://imgur.com/gallery/OLB8s](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.

------
cdnsteve
Creation is passion I believe all developers share. Many are always working
hard, trying to find the the next thing but forget to appreciate what we have
right in front of us. Family, friends, good health.

Stop thinking about work. Start thinking about life. You're in your 20's. You
have the rest of your entire life to think about work. Take your savings, grab
a friend/family member, or go it solo, and go travel.

Right now. Before you get a second older. Before you start another job or
think you don't have enough money. Before you have kids. Before you think
about more work. Tomorrow you'll wake up and be 30 something, with kids, a fat
mortgage and real life expenses and you won't have the freedom you clearly do
at this point.

Take the chance of a life time and go travel. Go recharge. Go create a life
altering experience. Do it with someone you love. Because when our time is at
an end the things that matter are the people you love and the experiences you
shared. Not what you built, not your HN posts, not your code, not your company
or projects.

People remember people and maybe along the way you'll learn about yourself.
This is the goal everyone shares.

------
mod
Age doesn't matter. You're making up a reason to feel inferior.

~~~
galfarragem
“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” ―
Mark Twain

------
tat45
Short answer: You don't.

Do what makes you happy. Ultimately, your subconscious is going to work
against you until you are aligned with your true desires. Better to wake up
and realize that sooner rather than later. Ultimately, the life you think you
want to lead is probably out of alignment with the life you actually want to
lead.

Honestly, you sound like me. Being the best is just super hard work, and I've
recognized that I'm not. I'm 38 and I've just returned to software development
after a 10 year hiatus in management during which I wrote maybe two small perl
programs. Now I'm happy just to be back writing code, and I don't feel like I
have to change the world any more.

So you're not the best. You pick up and continue. Honestly, your anxieties
look ridiculous to a 38 year old, just like my anxieties must look ridiculous
to a 50 year old. You could die tomorrow. Live life in the way that brings you
the most joy.

------
moron4hire
Every morning, I ask myself, "Just when _do_ you plan on getting out of the
bed?" And then I hop right out of bed.

I think vijucat is right that you probably still need to figure out what you
even want out of life. Just, for every answer you come up with, then ask
yourself "and then what will I have?" And if the cycle doesn't end somewhere
with "happiness", then you're not on the right track.

It's important to decide on your own metrics for success and not let others
dictate it to you. Who are you working for, anyway? I mean, in the most basic
sense, are you working to make a life for yourself or a life for these other
people? What should their opinion on your success matter?

Then get really fucking honest with yourself. If you really, truly love
software development, and you're goofing off on HN all the time, yeah, you're
a piece of shit. Don't hide from that fact. Get it wedged deeply into your
head "I've spent the last 3 hours trawling HN for content, I am a piece of
shit." And maybe you'll learn to have some respect for your time.

Speaking of respect for your time, I also find that forcing myself to _not_
work outside of work hours makes the work hours more "real" to me, and I get a
lot more done during that time. I try to guard my time: this over hear is the
time I spend goofing off, this over hear is the time I work, I don't want work
to encroach on my goofing off, so I don't let goofing off encroach on my work.

Part of that comes from understanding that there is effectively an infinite
amount of work. The work will always be there, and I will die before it is
done. There is no sense in burning my entire life away without any enjoyment
on a fool's errand. Unless you're a fire-fighter or an emergency room doctor,
there is no such thing as urgency to work, it is all an invented construct. So
don't let other people force it on you.

------
annasaru
As an aging developer who's on the wrong side of 41 yrs (or say 42, or 43 ..)
, I am surprised by your impatience (to put it mildly).

Don't develop an ambition just because others have it. You have decades left
in you. You seem to be unhappy now.

Glass half-full, or half-empty ? Upto you.

You are a top-10 CS - that pretty much means you know a lot. Shouldn't be
overly reading those technical articles. You are denying, or discounting
knowledge that you have in you. Have patience with yourself. Back yourself.

Whether you are ambitious or not - you will get there. As long as you don't
become a veggie, or an addict. Your skills and talent will take you places
without overloading your anxious psyche with fake ambition. Things will happen
if you stay away from the wrong places and the wrong times. Takes time - no, I
am not saying you need to wait till 41 (or 42 ..). Decades sooner.

------
kasajian
I don't know what to tell you. I'll be 50 in less than a year, and I am
learning new things on my own constantly as I have been since I started
programming 35 years ago. The only difference I feel is that I am able to
learn faster (and a deeper level) then when I was half my age. One thing I've
really gotten good at is learning. I know how to do it.

I don't expect my behavior to change any time soon.

I think if you have have the attitude that learning is only something you do
to prepare for work, but then when work starts, you don't have to learn as
much as you did before, then you're going to get frustrated really soon.

What you know now will be half as useful in 5 years, and practically useless
in 10 -- for the most part.

But if you embrace life-long learning, you will adjust how you live your life.
You'll allocate time to do, and allocate time to learn. Give yourself goals
such as, "learn a new programming language each year" \-- or whatever your
passion is. If you're a DBA, then learn a new Database each year.

The mistake a lot of people make is they only learn things that they believe
they need for their immediate job rather than learn things for the sake of
learning. The latter is when you get the "aha" moments, that bit of spark that
makes you realize you've not only learned something new, but something that
can be practical in your daily job.

As one example, last year I spent time learning Haskell. It has made me a
better C# and JavaScript developer.

Don't beat yourself up for watching TV. Just set small achievable goals with a
reasonable time-frame, and stick to it. You say you don't have a fancy web-
site, well make it your goal to create the best one you can possibly create in
2015. Make the goal real. Tell yourself that you'll blog about it and talk
about it at local meet-ups in 2016 -- talk about your experience creating it..
from the initial goals all the way to completion, including what you've
learned from the experience. Then it becomes something real and tangible.

------
Bahamut
Forget about what other people are doing - focus on what you want to do. That
is my philosophy towards software development - while I do spend a lot of time
coding and contributing to open source, I don't feel like a slave to it, and
am more than willing to not do it when I don't feel like it or don't want to.

I am 30 - I only started professionally coding almost 2 1/2 years ago.
Compared to some of the younger hotshots out there, I'm behind, and that's ok
- I accept that. The important thing is to learn new things, and from whatever
you can. What other people do doesn't matter when it comes to improving
yourself because all you can do is control your life.

------
joshuahutt
Is it possible that the cycle of procrastination and anxious regret is an
elaborate defense mechanism?

I think the reality of the situation could be that you are afraid that if you
actually focused on a project and put a lot of time and your best effort into
it, it would still fail.

And, to protect yourself from that potential outcome, you sabotage your
efforts with procrastination and then tell yourself a convenient fiction after
the fact: "If I had only focused, I, too, could be a hotshot."

Possible solutions include learning to accept mediocrity, bracing for failure
and going for it anyway, and therapy.

Or maybe you just need a partner (or team) to help you stay focused and
motivated? That helps me.

------
raverbashing
"Whenever I encounter a technical article, I immediately and compulsively
investigate the author's age"

What technical article? About the latest js fad? About the latest "Software
Craftsmanship" pointless discussion?

You went to CS, you know the fundamentals, the rest is syntactic sugar, small
differences and tradeoffs.

Yeah, a lot of unfinished projects. Or maybe not, some of them I used for a
certain purpose, or even some I use pretty much always.

Don't try to catch up with _everybody_ which is what you're doing.

Meanwhile someone is doing the next billion dollar project in PHP and MySQL
(or maybe node.js and MongoDb) without using a Docker container...

------
jtauber
Having experienced similar when I was your age (I'm now 41) here's what I've
found useful:

1) never ever compare yourself to others, especially based on _age_. do _your_
thing. for _you_.

2) wanting to achieve things in life is great but how young you do them really
doesn't matter nearly as much as you think it does

3) wanting to achieve things in life is great but the way you treat people
day-to-day trumps any achievement

4) go with where your energy is and let your goals emerge from that rather
than expect the other way around. Don't set a goal of running a marathon if
you hate running.

------
ColCh
I have this problem.

I have also Youtube, 9GAG and other websites "for fun". I tried so much ways
to break with "fun sitting", but I have no success with it.

So, in one day I've noticed, that only one way to stop wasting time is remove
all the unuseful stuff from subscriptions and make some body exercises
(really!).

I've had this trouble. Now I'm trying to resolve it.

And. One thing from me... I live in poor family. One thing that really spins
my gears is terrifying future - I don't want that my kids will be living like
I. So, I should take care on my future to make it better.

------
kokey
You shouldn't forget the impact of luck and the environment on people. For
every successful band in their early 20s there are probably many thousands of
better musicians out there that are just getting by. I also know a number of
people who were significantly more successful than me at 26, but were unable
to sustain that success as the lack of skill and experience reversed their
luck in the long run.

For me, 26 was an age where I started to focus on my general productivity. My
most productive time initially was in my teens, where I learned and achieved a
lot from the age of 15 to 19, so much that it put me well ahead of others my
age and really carried me through a comfortable career until I was 26. During
those years of working I didn't have a computer at home. I went out, I was
rarely at home, I partied a lot, I dated and I developed a lot of social and
cultural skills at that time. I did things that didn't count as successful
projects, but developed and educated me in so many ways, just like spending
years on HN will let you grow a wide body of knowledge but you might end up
with nothing to show for it. After 26 I also had enough work experience to
land jobs where I had both the skill plus the autonomy to take on interesting
and useful projects at work that I could get stuck into. It's only deep into
my 30s that I developed the ability to focus and complete projects outside of
my working hours.

------
amyjess
This is something I've worried about for a while, and ultimately I've come to
the conclusion that as cool as these hotshot young people are, being one of
them would go against my basic personality.

Y'see, I'm a fundamentally uncreative person. I'm not the kind of person who
will come up with a project idea and build an app from nothing. That's not me.
On the other hand, you tell me you want me to build something for you, and
I'll build you a damn good piece of software.

I've always been a more "behind-the-scenes" person. I'm the grunt whose hard
work in the background enables the superstars to go out and do their thing.
And I've found that I _enjoy_ that. It gives me a lot of personal pleasure to
help and support people, especially people who I feel deserve my support. I've
realized that I'd be much happier being the kingmaker than being the king. I
guess this is why I'm more drawn to systems programming: it's behind-the-
scenes supporting work, suitable for a behind-the-scenes supporting person.

I could also get into Myers-Briggs typology here. I'm fairly sure I'm an ISFJ,
and what I've described is very, very ISFJ. Though I've got a bit of an INTP
streak too (both types share the same cognitive functions, just in a different
order, so I'd say my INTP streak is mostly a case of my weaker functions
"flaring up"), and that accounts for my interest in systems architecture.

------
neilk

        THE NEED TO WIN
    
        When an archer is shooting for nothing
        He has all his skill.
        If he shoots for a brass buckle
        He is already nervous.
        If he shoots for a prize of gold
        He goes blind
        Or sees two targets—
        He is out of his mind!
    
        His skill has not changed. But the prize
        Divides him. He cares.
        He thinks more of winning
        Than of shooting—
        And the need to win
        Drains him of power. 
    

From "The Way of Chuang Tzu", as translated by Thomas Merton, © 1965.

------
ZeroFries
Ask yourself why you must be so productive and ambitious in the first place.
Your self worth is clearly tied into that list of accomplishments; why is that
so? Maybe try writing down a list of reasons why you believe accomplishment is
the greatest measure of your own worth, and see if they make logical sense to
you when you think deeply about them.

At the same time, ask yourself why you procrastinate. Come up with a list of
reasons for that as well. Probably a strong reason is that you're afraid of
failure (since you need successful accomplishments so badly to feel self
worth). Only when the anxiety of not finishing anything outweighs the anxiety
of failing something do you not procrastinate. This is what happens when your
primary motivator is anxiety.

Thirdly, ask yourself why in particular minimizing (age/accomplishments) is so
important to you. If you live an average lifespan, you still have 2/3 of your
life left to accomplish what you want. If you started from scratch now, you
could still make major contributions to most fields in under 10 years time. If
you're worried about declining brain health with age, do things which minimize
the decline (avoiding excessive anxiety is probably a good place to start).

Consider that most people regret not spending enough time with friends and
family, not fully appreciating life, and not communicating how they really
feel, when they die. They don't regret not working more.

------
abathur
I struggle with this myself from a few angles (my educational background is in
creative writing, and I've been a bit of a late-bloomer, but I also experience
this with programming as well). I'll give you my best conclusion (which has to
some extent helped me put this sensation in my rear-view):

In almost every field there is some type of prodigal-genius, and its bearers
find a lot of success at a very young age. Society is in general enamored with
these stories, because by and large most 25 year olds have accomplished little
to nothing of note (these days, even accomplishing financial independence by
that age is a coup). These people get an outsized amount of attention because
of their precocious talent and drive. Because we talk about them so much, they
loom much larger in our minds than they do in the real world. There aren't as
many of them as you perceive there to be, and they can also be prone to
burning brightly until they burn out (especially in the arts). Coverage of
these people tends to ignore: the role luck often plays, and the costs that
sometimes come with going so fast and achieving success so early (i.e., the
things they've ignored, the blind spots they can only fill with maturity, and
the struggles these will cause as they grow old enough that no one's willing
to overlook these flaws anymore).

In almost every field there's another type of genius that is borne more like
new leather; it takes a while to break in. It takes experience, maturity and
much wear for its bearers to grow comfortable with and capable of showing it
off in the world.

------
balabaster
Calm down, I'm 38. Your biggest critic is yourself and your surrounding
influences. Age discrimination may be alive and kicking amongst the younger
crowd who want to be with their own age group but there is still much out
there that needs doing on projects where they value the experience of older
devs - not that you come close to qualifying as "older". Take heart, you're
not old until you let yourself be classified as such. Shun the label and get
on with the work to be done.

------
automathematics
Dude I'm 33. I didn't even own a computer until my late teens. You can't
compare yourself to people who had a different upbringing and a different
time. Even 3 years difference is a life time in terms of technological
advances.

Just do what you can do and don't be so hard on yourself.

I'm 33 and am a CTO at a seed funded startup doing node and react. And I've
only been 100% JS for about 4 years. (c++ before that)

Just do what you want and don't worry. Even if you just want to watch netflix
now and then. :)

------
cmurf
You need to find a new metric of success than comparing yourself to others'
achievements. And at the same time, your comparison of your age to others is
completely broken. No one under ~20, or over ~80 matters as points of
comparison to "career age" and on that 20-80 scale, you're very young, so your
obsession with your age as somehow being old and "too late" is quite simply,
stupid. The bottom line is, I think you still haven't found a sufficiently
interesting project that you compare yourself to yourself, rather than to
others.

What you seem to care about is working on a "great project" as defined by
others rather than something you think is interesting and therefore great all
by itself no matter what anyone else thinks. This is classic lack of self-
confidence.

And as for finding motivation to overcome procrastination, sometimes you need
to merely be disciplined to overcome it. You have to recognize, and trust your
assessment of the proper priority of a task, and when it's important enough
you just do that task as a matter of discipline, not as a function of enjoying
it. And sometimes you need to plot procrastination and just enjoy it.

When you're 80, I pretty much guarantee you you're not going to say, "fuck me
man, I wish I would have worked more."

------
ohitsdom
> I've been working hard on my first big project, and I expect it's going to
> be a great one.

It's probably not going to be a great one (especially if it's your first).
Don't build things for the success, you'll always be disappointed. Build them
because you want to solve a problem and enjoy the actual work. If all you
enjoy is potential future rewards of success, you probably won't be able to
suffer through the long, thankless work it takes to get there.

------
habitue
Don't be sad that you can't change the past: you weren't the person you are
now 6 years ago. But be happy that you can change yourself, and get better
over time. Don't let the stress of not measuring up destroy you, but
definitely let it propel you forward, to keep pushing yourself to do better.
Not better by someone else's metric but by your own.

Would you like to create and maintain useful projects that you love to write
and people love to use? Then it's not to late at all! Edward Kmett maintains a
ton of widely used haskell libraries. He had a successful career as a software
developer, went back and got his master's degree in his 30's, learned haskell,
and became a leading figure in the community. Not just as a hacker, but he
gained a deep knowledge of the mathematics behind haskell and made numerous
contributions.

Think about that. At 26, you may not even have found the thing that you'll
become famous for yet. You may not even know anything about the field that
it'll be found in. The only way to get better is to push yourself, and little
by little you'll become more disciplined, and learn more.

Read, push yourself, code, learn. You aren't dead yet, and don't let the
achievements of people younger than you make you feel like you are.

------
StudlyCaps
I feel your pain. I'm quite a bit older than you are. Programming is my second
career and I'm competing with people who have been doing it their whole lives.

I must say, it sounds like you're being VERY hard on yourself. Having a CS
degree degree from a top 10 school and enough money in the bank to freelance
for a few years puts you in a really good position.

Stop constantly comparing yourself to others. Set some realistic goals for
yourself. Those goals should be based on what will make you happy, not what
will make you feel like you measure up to others.

When was the last time you took a vacation? You may be a bit burned out. This
will definitely cause you to procrastinate. Take some time off to refresh and
recharge your battery.

Also, do you suffer from depression or anxiety? If so you may want to consider
doing some therapy. Do you have a social life? Do you do fun things on a
regular basis? If not, start making time to improve the quality of your life.
I suspect that most of your problems are not career problems but side effects
of general unhappiness. When you find happiness it will solve the other
problems.

One last piece of advice. Going "indie" is not for everyone. I have a feeling
it's not for you. You may find that you will flourish in a staff job that you
truly love.

Best of luck friend!

------
NicoJuicy
I was in the same boat as you, just a little older ( 27) and created a web
application www.ledenboek.be (it's also in English). It was a niche, but i
don't think "sportclubs" have enough money. So i just abandoned it ( i have
one customer - created an emailing application to email the 50 partners
(emails) that he gave me).

It was a learning experience and i'm really considering about sharing my
experience with others when i'm more successfull then now ( i have my own
small company now, but not enough to talk about it)... I do plan to talk about
it though... ( when i earn more ).

If anyone would be interested (this seems like a nice place to put it), there
is a newly subscription list on
[http://goo.gl/forms/Ck1kK7YuhJ](http://goo.gl/forms/Ck1kK7YuhJ) \- I called
it "Moving away from reaching too high - when to pick a stable income".

I cancelled plans (for now) on creating a web application without knowing it
has a future (= income) and i'm planning to get a more stable income (already
happening and i'm only 1 year further -- i have a full time job also - so i
have no pressure).

I really hope you enjoy what you do though... 99% of the mass never create a
successfull web application.

------
tasty_throwaway
I made this account to reply to you. Take or leave these ideas, it's all love
to me. You sound burned out with your chosen profession. And it also sounds
like there's a little fear-of-failure in your procrastination habits. Normally
I try and avoid speaking for others but I only say this because it mirrors
closely a lot of experiences I've had. I remember feeling the same way
partially through school and basically every day after. I don't have a
solution for you, but I have some suggestions. I remember at 26 feeling so
old. And it's true - you are the oldest you have ever been. And you always
will be. So you should probably forgo the obsessive comparison of your age
with others. But 26 is a great age - it's probably the best time to be young.
You have more resources, but you can still go a little wild without really
alienating anyone. You still get to have adventures, you still get to make
mistakes. Don't get me wrong, you can do that when you're much older too, but
the stakes tend to get higher. You have money saved up for years? Take a long
fantastic trip. Alone. Meet new people. See new places. Maybe it will relax
you. Maybe it will give you fresh ideas. But at 26, I guarantee it will
reshape you. SE Asia is so incredibly cheap yet well-trodden, The US is
sprawling and gorgeously diverse, Europe is a different adventure with every
train you take, Africa is... wild. Point being that you can start in your own
backyard or halfway around the world, but you're at a time where you can
really take advantage of the experience. Also, you're probably better looking
now than you'll ever be again. Take advantage of that while you can.

-jayce

------
logicallee
What problem? You just haven't had an idea that was big enough to interrupt
your life yet. In my personal judgment (after skimming your text, and deciding
based on _specifically_ you, OP), eventually you will. It's kind of a
stochastic process, though, and can happen anytime. I also think it's a
poisson distribution. The fact that it hasn't happened to date doesn't make it
any less likely to occur this year.

------
d3m
1) Remember that tech news is biased towards that kind of people. They are the
"ideal", young "wizkids", the ones that fit the narrative. The fact that you
don't hear about 30 or 40-something entrepeneurs/engineers with great ideas
that make a difference and/or make millions doesn't mean they don't exist.

2) You need to understand that there is always going to be somebody better,
more talented and/or more hardworking. Remember to play the market, assess
yourself objectivly, understand your strengths, understand the context, see
the real problem, know where to push and get good at timing your pushes. Don't
bruteforce, be sophisticated, precise and elegant. And most importantly,
understand that the alternative to "The Constant Grind" is _NOT_ being a couch
potato. Remember that beating yourself accomplishes nothing. Be prepared to
accept that if the procastination is too deep maybie, just maybie, you might
just be lying to youself when you say you "love" what you are doing.

3) Read Patrick Mckenzie's blog:
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/)

------
TheMagicHorsey
I'm nearly forty years old.

I can't claim that I don't ever feel the way you do. But honestly, those
feelings come to me only rarely now.

Behind the things you have written is a motivation you don't realize. You are
trying to win the approval of other people.

At some point in your life you will realize there is not much point in
impressing people. They are just like you. Mostly they are concerned about
their own lives. No matter what you do, people will only think about you for a
small moment of time, and then their own lives will be most important again.
So why do you care so much about these external things that impress other
people for only a short moment in time? Anyone that is famous, that writes
about fame, admits its kind of a burden and not much benefit.

The primary benefit of fame and notoriety is in finding mates and
collaborators. But even with modest levels of success you can cultivate those
things, without the psychic burden of trying to impress people all the time.

Trying to impress everyone is an endless treadmill. Even if you get some
success, there will be a little man in your head that tells you that you are
successful only because of luck. You'll want to reach up for the next rung on
the ladder.

------
emergencevector
_> I'm a 26 y.o. software dev working on going indie...Every morning, I take
tally of my age._

26 is a _fantastic_ age. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise! I would
literally part with my right testicle if I could be 26 again, knowing what I
know now. The chances are very, very good that you are more attractive,
intelligent, and energetic than you realize. Most 20-somethings don't have the
life experience to put these things in proper perspective. Just as sure that
you're not as good a driver as you think, you've got a lot more going for you
than you realize.

 _> Whenever I encounter a technical article, I immediately and compulsively
investigate the author's age._

There are so many ways of being awesome, just like there are so many ways of
making money. You don't have to be what other people are.

 _> Mentally, I've resigned to the fact that I've procrastinated away a decade
of valuable time, and it just endlessly haunts me._

That doesn't exist, except in people's minds, especially yours. Just do
something now.

 _> But I can't help but feel that if I had started in earnest at 25, at 21,
at 19_

Late 40's here. I know how you feel. Take it from me: You have no business
feeling like that!

------
chrismarlow9
Do some ops stuff in your free time. Setup an awesome VPN with a jumpbox.
Setup a MySQL/LAMP cluster. Put an nginx server in front of it. Replicate the
databases properly. Setup iptables properly and script the configurations so
you can deploy new boxes.

I did this for a while and it really helped to motivate me because it was
different type of work, but it puts you in a position where literally all you
have to do is write the code. You have a production stack, a launch pad so to
speak, everythings nice and pretty, now all you have to do is build a rocket.
Don't try to build a fantastic one on the first iteration, just do it. I find
using Python for initial versions of anything is a good idea because it's
quick to code. After that find the bottlenecks and micro-service using
languages that seem appropriate for the various bottlenecks.

Start small man. Don't focus on the light at the very end of the tunnel, you
will think it's too far and get discouraged, especially if you're watching
everyone else. Focus on the beta launch and the minimal set of features
required. You'll be surprised after you see it running how inspiring it will
be to start cranking out code.

------
n1vz3r
Hi! I had similar situation. It was worse because the source of my
professional and business envy was the my old friend and classmate. He built a
successful IT business at 25, - in a country where it's very difficult to do.
A self-made man. This fact made me nervous and caused a deep and long
depression. I'm not ambitious in common meaning of this term but I think I'm
smart enough and I always thought I'm smarter than others. And I'm also 80lvl
procrastinator :) also now I'm 33.

The solution to the depression was external and not related to my 'career'
(I'm self-employeed) or better self-organisation. Instead, the solution came
with long-distance running, positive thinking and yoga. I healed mentally and
now I'm much more stable. I use this guy and his success as a measure of how
healthy I am. If I don't care - that means I'm ok. If I care about his
'success' \- that means I should rest more, spend more time on open air or eat
healthier food.

So I would recommend you to invest more in your mental health.

P.S. I work on several software projects but it's not a matter of amibiton, I
just like what I make and want to made it better.

------
kluck
You are comparing yourself to others way too much. If you want to be happy,
stop comparing your abilities and characteristics to those of other people.

------
kazinator
No problem here at 44. I have listings of code I wrote when I was a teen. It
was good code. Code I wrote in my twenties is very good when I look at it
today. I was pretty good at a young age, and so are others who are those ages
now. I'm also a tad smarter than my younger self, and that's what counts.

Someone who at 25 was smarter than my 25 year old self (whether at the same
time or decades apart) will probably be smarter at 45 than my 45 year old
self.

Someone who wasn't smarter than me at 25 will probably not catch my 45 year
old me at 45 either.

You're driving yourself with the concurrent comparison: people who are
currently younger. That is fallacious. Someone who was smarter than you at
your age or younger _historically_ also counts.

For instance, someone in 1969 could have been a brilliant hacker at age 17;
better than you are now. Do you discount that person today because he or she
is _currently_ older than you?

Basically, you should compare yourself to historically good people. When you
do that, you probably don't stack up. So, get over it and move on.

Future-wise, also. Someone not even born until after you die will be better
than you.

------
wellboy
There are 3 points that I hope can give you a better perspective on this

1\. There is a nice startup wisdom that you really shouldn't worry about
competition, you just need to be the best version of yourself. The competition
has their own problems that they don't talk about, so any fancy project out
there is probably not as fancy after all and has its own problems. It all
looks nice and pretty on the surface, but most concepts are just not viable,
same in startups as in dev projects.

2.All the other projects that others have are based on years and years of
unsuccessful work. They had to work hard, so rather try learning from them
than being jealous and one day, you might be successful, too.

3\. There is always someone younger, prettier, faster, better, bit I think
that is a very beautiful thing. How boring it would be if you were the
youngest, prettiest, best one already?

At 26, you are at the BEST age to start a startup, just out of Uni and not
kids yet, how awesome is that. So now you have seed funding probably over
$100k from what your runway tells me and now you got around 3-4 years without
major responsibilites to start a startup.

------
helen842000
It seems you are preoccupied with the notion of age, thinking that it should
somehow relate to ability. It doesn't. While we all may follow a similar
curriculum while in school when outside of academia age has little to do with
where you're at.

Perhaps you recognise that peer-pressure & comparison is a huge motivator for
you (it's probably what got you through your CS degree) you are trying to use
that stick to force you to work more. However it's having an adverse effect on
you. You cease to enjoy anything.

Try and make something small, just for you, just for fun. Focus on being happy
instead of perceived success. What if you just let yourself enjoy your TV show
or browsing HN? You may feel freer to enjoy your work.

You are not behind or in front, you are exactly where you are at right now.

You can't run a race if you're busy looking over your shoulder.

Your mention of feeling jealous reminds me of a quote from Mary Schmich when
talking about advice she would give to the younger generation.

"Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re
behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself."

------
nabusman
I have had a similar kind of issue my whole life as well. Being ambitious at
the core but actions not being representative of how I think. And though I
haven't figured it all out, I have improved massively from earlier. What
helped was an understanding of how subtle anxiety affects me. Initially, at
the age of 26 (30 now), if someone told me it was anxiety I would have told
them no, but over time (with lot's of mediation) I began to realize that it is
a very subtle, subconscious anxiety that makes is significantly harder to do
anything that has a result riding on it.

To test if this is your problem, look back at things that are difficult but
didn't have a expectation or result riding on them. Say you created a small
app or read up on a complex topic and understood it well. If you are able to
do difficult things that don't have expectations but are not able to similarly
difficult (or even easy things) that do have an expectation it is probably an
issue of anxiety.

If this is your problem, I would recommend the book The Now Habit. Also, start
mindfulness meditation if you can.

Hope this helps.

------
eludwig
If you are convinced that you are doing what you want to be doing, then you
need to respectfully disregard the inner voices that are impeding your ability
to work in the present effectively.

In the creative world, these voices are sometimes referred to as "witches."
Everyone has this. They are not always about procrastination and failing
either. People can also get insane "visions of grandeur" voices too! You may
have thoughts about being the greatest programmer that has ever lived or the
best writer ever. That type of thing. These thoughts are the flotsam and
jetsam of the creative process. Icky foam. (Okay, no more ocean metaphors)

The mistake is listening to them. They are not helpful and are just
impediments to working in the present. Think of them as intrusive guests that
will leave if they are ignored. Let them rise and fall without worrying too
much about it. Worrying about them can start a vicious cycle that is also an
impediment.

The only place that work happens is today, now. This is the same for everyone.
Even the people that you admire have to work in the present.

------
davengh
I'm something more than twice your age, and have felt the same way you do now.
I've spent countless hours "keeping up" \- lost a marriage in part due to this
- and there is _always_ stuff I don't know and am curious about. There is
_always_ someone more knowledgable, or faster at coding, or better at
interpreting requirements. That's one reason I like working with smart,
capable people-there's always something to learn from them. I've lived through
marathon coding sessions, death march projects, been a manager, been an
employee and been a contractor.

I don't care to keep up on everything any more. I remain intensely curious and
"keep up" in a general fashion, reading articles, playing with code samples
etc with an eye to being able to converse with my colleagues about what
they're doing, not with the idea that we're competing to be the alpha geek.

Some of the other posters here have suggested you find something you're
actually interested in and spend time on that, or that you find cause you can
volunteer for and to that. Those are good suggestions. Find something outside
your head you can do and _commit to it_. Part of your anxiety is because your
world is narrowing because of the concentration on what is in reality a little
area and you see others doing "better", whatever that means to you. Get out of
that world for a bit.

Understand that time _will_ pass and whatever technologies you get to know
well _will_ pass out of the market sweet spot. Maybe you'll be ready for that
and maybe you won't. The question is will you have enjoyed your life when you
realize this? Tech is a _tool_. One you use to make a living, one your
employers of whatever stripe will try to use to make money. It is _not_ a
reason to get up and breathe.

------
jkoudys
You might just be reading more articles or seeing more independent projects
from young people, because those young people are less likely to work a full-
time job (or if they do, they're not doing 12-16 hours a day in addition to
open-source and articles). Plenty of people in their 30s (or even, _gasp_ ,
their 40s) are still productive, high-earning professionals in the software
world.

I started out quite young myself, writing software for gameboy advance at 15,
and I did plenty of public-facing work: articles, coding competitions, etc.
After uni I joined a big corporation, and while I was learning plenty and
doing a lot of very influential work, there was much less personal credit for
what I was doing.

While this is less related to age, don't be too impressed by how you see the
work of others represented. I've seen plenty of fancy videos (and TED talks)
for people who just had vapour. You're always going to view yourself with all
your perceived shortcomings, but you'll see others as the public persona they
have meticulously crafted.

------
acoravos
OP -- thank you for having the courage to put your story out here. You've
sparked an important conversation, and it's clearly resonated with so many
people. There's a lot of advice here. Some conflicting. I trust you'll
continue to build your mental filter and sort through the good and the bad.

Two favorite piece I like to re-read when I have these moments.

\+ The Secret to Success (this one is my all time favorite):
[http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/5/30/secret-to-
succes...](http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/5/30/secret-to-
success/?page=single)

\+ Daring Greatly by Brene Brown ([http://www.amazon.com/Daring-Greatly-
Courage-Vulnerable-Tran...](http://www.amazon.com/Daring-Greatly-Courage-
Vulnerable-Transforms-ebook/dp/B007P7HRS4))

I can already see that you have so many of the skills described in Brene
Brown's book. Keep fighting the good fight.

------
flavio87
May I suggest the following
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness_\(psychology\))

Can you find a question (not an answer) that can help you look at things
differently? Who is it who is jealous? How does it feel to be jealous? What's
going on right now?

------
egypturnash
This is not a story about programming. But it is a story about mastery, and
surrendering that fear of not measuring up.

Back around 2000, I got my dream job: I started working at Spümcø, the
animation studio responsible for "Ren & Stimpy". At one point I was working
closely with Jim Smith, whose work is _amazing_ \- I normally don't give a
shit about the big muscle dudes he loves to draw, but he does it with such
grace and fluidity that these big beefchunks become beautiful.

I was in awe of his casual knowledge of every single muscle in the human body,
and the ability to deploy that knowledge in his art. I would never measure up.

Then one day he brought in some old work. Kid work, teenage work. I looked at
it and a lot of it was _terrible_ \- awkward posing, horrible proportions, a
whole bunch of general classes of errors that I recognized from looking back
at _my_ teenage drawings.

I looked at the dates. These drawings were older than I am. And it was like a
light was switched on in the back of my head: of _course_ Jim could draw rings
around me with half his brain tied behind his back; he'd started before I was
even _born_.

Since then, I have looked at artists who are better than me at one thing or
another with occasional envy in my eyes. And then it instantly dissipates,
because I know I could learn to do what they do better if I want to spend a
few years on it - do I want that in my toolset bad enough?

And that realization freed me. I was able to look coldly at my work and decide
that, yes, I'm good enough to get hired, I'm better at cartooning than like
90% of the people out there. I had the confidence then to embark on a year-
long art project (drawing a Tarot deck), and then to move on to a four-year
project (drawing a graphic novel) that I'm almost done with. I can't say I've
worked on the comic every day by any means. But more often than not, I make
myself spend at least a half hour on it. There's always _something_ I can do
without having to load the entire story into my head to turn it over and think
about the shape it should be. And if I've only spent a half hour at the end of
a day, it's still a half hour closer to being done than if I'd just spent the
day playing video games.

Step outside of the fear of failure, the envy of younger, more successful
people. Look at them as things your brain is doing and ask yourself why; treat
it as a programming problem if that metaphor works for you. And find a way to
make time for your own projects, even if it's just a half hour in the morning
most days.

Let go, slack off, unclench your brain.

------
loahou04
I feel the same way. I actually do the same thing too. I end up talking with
people i used to work with and seeing how much they've grown and their
positions. I don't feel like I am bad. I've started my own consulting company
and did over $500k in revenue last year, yet I will talk with these developers
who are just so much smarter than me and do better than me and i just get
crazy jealous about it probably from my competitive nature. I think its just a
part of life. Literally just last night I had a real bad depression of what I
have done professionally and how though I have a lot in savings and I've
started my own company doing consulting work I locked myself in my room all
night and started working on my own side project. It's not going to be big,
but just to have it done and say that I did it I think would make me happy. In
the end I think you just got to find what will make you happy and just go with
that.

------
ArekDymalski
Whenever I see the procrastination topic the auto-handicap mechanism comes to
my head: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
handicapping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-handicapping)

The way you describe yourself (ambitious; so many great ideas; big project)
suggest that your self-esteem is high. However it might be unstable due to
lack of evidence ("Experience-wise, I'm still a junior dev") that is
convincing for you (as a result of constant comparisons with others).

In such situation (high but unstable self-esteem) auto-handicap is a common
strategy to preserve the self-esteem by avoiding situations that could lower
it and providing some rationalizations instead. It feels nasty but we people
keep doing it.

One of many ways to cope with it is identify the sources we use to build our
self-esteem and give them right proportions. Usually it comes down to
rethinking the influence of other's opinions.

------
bearclough
Breathe, I was where you were a couple of months ago literally when I was 26.
It's intimidating reading hn and seeing everyone's accomplishments in
summation. I read 2 books that helped place things in perspective "The Growth
Mindset" and "The One Thing". They'll help you be more focused, productive,
and stop beating yourself up.

I didn't start coding in earnest till 25. I don't count my cs degree. I
lamented my choice to go to architecture school after graduation. I COULD have
gone to CMU or MIT most likely on scholarship. I regretted my choice deeply
until recently when I realized I use the thought processes learned in my
design lab more than anything I learned from my cs degree.

Recently I ve been hyper productive and am slowly marching towards my first
product.

Meditate a bit, take stock of what you want to work on, and come up with a
reasonable plan to get there. Take the time to figure out how you best work.

It's all going to be ok.

------
jmadsen
I suppose this is pretty troll-ish, but some folks need a good dose of cold
water to wake them up to reality.

You're not to old, you're too young. Too young to even realize how young and
immature you are.

I have hard time distinguishing you from a teenager, and wonder why so many
people are taking this post seriously.

Here's some free life advice: Sell your television.

------
o_syn
One of my observations is that people procrastinate because it is entropically
favorable, not necessarily because they want to procrastinate or because
procrastination is fun. The Internet does not help with its vast potential for
incessant context switching.

The obvious solution to this is to reduce entropy, and slow things down. Stay
without the internet and television for a week, since these are the primary
ways in which you procrastinate, think of it as rehab therapy. Eliminate all
sources of deviations, and try to systematically lengthen your attention span.
I would suggest meditating every day for an hour[1].

Secondly, stop reading the news. It's a complete waste of time. The set of all
thought sequences you can have between time A and time B should be small.
Watching the news, or reading HN greatly increases the number of irrelevant
thoughts you can have. A perfect Bayesian with a utility function like
"maximize knowledge gained" would not read the news at all. It is always a
good idea to ponder about what a perfect Bayesian with your chosen utility
function would do.

It's true that the only thing stopping yourself is you. And it's also true
that you can do amazing things if you spend long enough on any particular
thing[2]. I would suggest making an Excel sheet with the time spent doing
productive work per day, and optimize for that.

I went from averaging around 30 minutes a week when I started measuring my
productivity (I'm a college freshman .. so I'm free the entire day) to around
4 hours in the last week.

\---

[1] Music I find helpful for meditation.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPni755-Krg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPni755-Krg)

[2] Einstein spent an entire decade on General Relativity. Andrew Wiles spent
7 years trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Persistence is the most
important trait anyone can have.

------
shubhamjain
> 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.

Even if you did, there is no reason why you wouldn't have felt the same. I met
someone of my age who had made an excellent game and was one of the winners of
Github Game-Off. I felt envious, I struggled and finally made my own game with
free art [1]. When I finished, did I feel any sense of accomplishment? Yes,
sort of, but few days hence, I was in the same hole feeling shitty about my
game being mediocre and having done nothing significant.

I have a reason to believe, that even many accomplished people, feel that they
have missed so much, things could have been better and they could have
achieved more.

[1]: [http://coffeecoder.net/penguin-walk/](http://coffeecoder.net/penguin-
walk/)

------
saiprashanth93
I am exactly like you now, but I am 22. I feel like a retard when I see 18
year olds contributing to open source projects. To an extent we only tend to
compare ourselves to outliers and feel like a piece of crap. So, while you
have wasted some time, you still have ages to accomplish something great. Time
is not your enemy.

------
niche
Yes! You are not alone my friend. Try changing your perspective and delighting
in the successes of your psuedo-peers as opposed to being jealous. Everyone is
on their own path. Meet yourself where you are; the time is always now and you
are indeed exactly where you need to be.

Lately, I have been dealing with cutting back on what I do as opposed to
piling stuff on; focusing on no more than 3 things (for example), rolling off
of less compelling projects, creating space. Give yourself, your days, some
space and see what happens. Listen to your heart!

Think critically about what is and is not serving you and adjust accordingly.
Expect nothing. You are divine! Look at all these people who want you to
succeed! You are on the front page of Hacker News...certainly if there is
nothing else that must be a sign that you are on the right path, especially as
a tech professional

Great good wishes to you my friend

------
lfender6445
Great work is great work, regardless of age. I am 27 and still find time to
work on personal projects that give me a creative buzz, but its for me and me
only.

It sounds like you have developed an irrational fear around the concept of
ageism. The less you worry about what others think the more productive and
creative you will be.

------
scrrr
You are probably constantly reading and hearing of those examples and you feel
compelled to do impressive things. Worse yet, you assume that software
projects, startups etc. are all big accomplishments. Just like becoming famous
perhaps. Or amassing a lot of stuff. That's a recipe for disappointment and
failure. Take a step back, breathe, analyse what it is you really want. And if
you want to define your self worth with such things.

Imho, society, in my case: software development culture, (to some extent) is
sick. Many of us probably believe we need all to be Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon
Musks. Insanity. I suggest you take a step back and find out what you really
want. Perhaps a time off for centering yourself might be a good suggestion.

Someone said: A lack of ambition is a wonderful thing. That's probably true.
Please relax. ;)

------
mgkimsal
Lots of other good advice in the thread already. I'm not sure how to phrase
mine, but "live with it". Use your understanding of math to realize right now
that statistically, you will _always_ be worse than just about everyone at
pretty much everything. You will always be behind multiple other people on
just about every score you can come up with.

The fact that you read about person X or Y or Z, then feel inferior.... ugh.
You don't have much imagination. Stop reading about other people - you should
be able to feel inferior without reading the specifics of anyone else. But you
can also feel... accomplished(?) both to your earlier self and to some others
if you choose to.

Once you start to realize that, you'll hopefully have a different (and better)
perspective on things.

------
TheLem
I'm 27, I quitted my job 11 months ago to start a journey where I can finally
achieve something and forget about years of procrastination and being "right"
on the system. I think you're experiencing, as I do, what's called the
"quarter life crisis".

------
tastyface
PS: I know the 30-year-olds in the audience will laugh at me for feeling
"old", but I imagine that applies to every stage in life. When I was 21, I
certainly didn't expect I'd suddenly encounter this overwhelming fear of
getting older around my mid-twenties.

~~~
hamstr
I have read often that in academic settings, many people make their biggest
research contributions in their mid- to late twenties. That's where you're at,
you seem to know what is important to you, you are working hard; it sounds to
me like you are doing all the right things. If you spend less time looking at
the facades of other people's success, you'll be fine. And facades is what
they are.

As 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.

------
DawkinsGawd
I share a similar fear. I am a 25 year old dev. I have a bachelors degree in
comp sci from a large state school. I have an internship plus an additional
year of experience under my belt. I am constantly aware of the age of my
competitors. I constantly feel as though I am behind the curve. I am always
been told that I am too young to worry about such things, but I feel as though
people don't understand my industry. My fears are not substantiated by my
experience. I have had no trouble finding employment. I have been coding since
the age of 12 and truly love the profession. I have a strong desire to
succeed. I love the industry. However, I feel as though the constant
comparison is hindering me mentally.

------
encoderer
Sigh. I'm so sorry you feel this way. My demons are different but I often feel
the same intolerance for them. There is a very harsh and critical voice in
you. In these cases I ask myself, whose voice is this? How did this develop?

You can't accomplish anything with a conflicted, unfocused mind. Without
kindness to yourself, you can't be healthy enough to be productive. If you
want to unlock the stamina and inspiration to build the life you're aspiring
towards, you need to understand yourself and your mind and how _you_ work and
how to make it work. It sounds like you're trying to dictate when maybe a
listening and trial/error approach with a kinder and gentler disposition would
be more effective.

------
chudi
The only time that you have to look into the plate of another person its to
see if it has enough.

------
yourad_io

        <meta>Threads like these make me with I could save comments.</meta>

------
zamalek
Once you reach your goals you will be in exactly the same place as those who
are 25, 21 and 19. Don't confuse ambition with competitiveness: if you are
strictly ambitious about your life goals then it really doesn't matter if
someone else reached theirs first.

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.

------
evanmoran
For me I had to do science on myself. Keep a journal throughout the day on
what you are actually doing, minute by minute. If hacker news is in there too
much. Block it (I did this for years=). If you spend too much time polishing
and not enough doing, then set alarms for yourself that say "get it working
first. Do the core of it." You will find what's slowing you down and then you
can take action to fix it.

Also, exercise. Put aside 3 hours a week and run/bike/do anything. It will
give you energy in ways you won't expect! You probably are 100% there already,
but for me it wasn't obvious and so I wanted to include it.

------
spectrum1234
Happiness = Reality / Expectations.

Decrease your expectations and you will be much better off. Seriously. It
sounds like you are probably in the top 1-2% in the world in wealth. Enjoy
that and don't let the expectations that holds affect you.

------
issa
Your 20's should be fun. There are are a whole host of things that you CAN do
when you're young that will be much more difficult when you are older.

Working really, really hard is technically one of those things, but it's
generally a really bad use of time. Especially if you don't have an overriding
passion for it.

If you are 26 and have money in the bank...your options are wide open. My
advice: Immediately quit your job and go contemplate life from an exotic beach
or a remote mountain top. Meet some people, see the world.

If the only things you've done in life are school and work, it's not very
surprising that you haven't found your passion yet.

Go have fun!!

------
vonnik
You're not old. But it's easy to waste your youth sunk in the fear of getting
old.

Also, it doesn't matter whether you hit it big or not. Big is something other
people will call you, or not. After you have wasted your youth, and you can
feel the years in you, you will feel their indifference toward other peoples'
judgment. All you have are a stream of seconds that are filled with your own
thoughts. That doesn't change no matter how famous you get.

You should focus on the things that enliven you, not the projects of great
promise that will make you famous if someone notices. In the end, that feeling
of being alive will be all you had.

------
brokenalarms
I'm 33. I went back to school to do a CS masters after floundering and
procrastinating for 10 years after my first degree (humanities), trying to be
a professional musician whilst working my way through a succession of dead-end
temp jobs.

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 continually on the prowl for 'unsubscribe' in my
emails, to try and not spend my entire time reading on my phone all day about
all the things I should be learning (which reading about learning, unless it
is a tutorial where I am doing practical coding, in fact does not teach me
anything practical). Then just pick one thing and stick to it.

\- Use the Pomodoro technique. I'm more productive in 25 minutes when I know
exactly when they'll end then I am in 5 hours when I'm sitting at the computer
and 'just click those few Quora links from today's email' first....now my
evening, as with most of my other evenings (when I don't employ these
techniques, which I need to learn over and over - discipline is training) has
gone.

\- RescueTime is also a great app for seeing where you're inadvertently
wasting most time, and you'll find after blocking enough sites like Buzzfeed
in your .hosts file that you actually start to run out of time wasting
activities...

I hope maybe you get something useful out of these thoughts...!

~~~
galfarragem
Great comment - I can relate to a lot of what you've said - despite being in
the bottom of this HN comment thread .

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](https://github.com/we-build-
dreams/hamster-gtd)

~~~
brokenalarms
Ha, yes I used that too to manage my 100+ daily emails at my old job ;)
Fortunately in my new one I receive maybe one email daily, as everything is
screened by the technical lead and I can just follow tasks on
Github/Jira...bliss :D

------
novice_1
I am just a novice in the tech field, just out of college barely 2 years ago.
Right out of college, i joined one of the so-called 'Big' company, earning
decent amount by my own standards. But the similar feelings pushed me out of
that place to where i am working as well as feeling happy.

The greatest irony of our lives is that we spend a lot of time and energy
looking for that utopian place where people appear happy, thinking that if we
reach there, we'll be happy. Instead we should look for the place that makes
us happy and then strive to make that the best place to work for.

------
codingdave
At the end of their life, almost nobody is worried about what projects they
got done for work. They worry about how much time was spent with friends and
family and what they did in their personal life. There is often regret over
working too much and focusing too much on their own projects.

I think the rest of HN can give sufficient answers to your direct question,
but I truly encourage you to think now about the underlying worry you
mentioned of what you will have accomplished at the end of your life. Your
priorities at that time are highly unlikely to be related to what you have
coded.

------
khorwitz
"Does anybody else have this problem? How do you deal with it?"

Yes -- it's human nature. All you can do is focus on one thing at a time. If
you are focused on what's important, then you are allowed to not feel guilty.
A great man once said "take so much action your conscious brain doesn't have
time to fall into its default patterns of worrying".

For help on focusing on one thing at a time, and taking so much action you
don't have time to feel bad: [http://focusr.co](http://focusr.co)

------
mcguire
Repeat after me: "I am a grave disappointment to myself, everyone who knows
me, and most of those who do not." Keep repeating it until you have
internalized it. It's remarkably liberating.

As much as some of my engineering friends hate to admit it, life is a self-
graded test. If you're happy with where you are, ain't nobody can tell you
you're wrong. If you're not, you are failing. And if you're not happy with
what you've got, continuing to do the same thing won't help: you'll just get
more of it.

------
fragsworth
It's a bit late in the thread, but I hope you read this. Maybe you should try
LSD, just once. Sometimes, for some people, it allows them to reflect deeply
on what actually makes them happy, and allows them to then live their life
under the guidance of their own happiness, rather than focusing on comparisons
to others, and what others think of them. I've seen this first-hand more than
once. It's a long-lasting, deeply profound mental realization that can
potentially change your life for the better.

------
makebelieve
it doesn't matter where you start, it matters what you do now. there is
NOTHING you can do about the past. zero. it is impossible to change the past.
You can do things today. find the sweet spot of bliss. where what you do is
fun, and you are interested in doing for it's own sake, and where it is valued
by other people.

talent management and business success are different problems. talent
management is about pursuing what gives you juice. business is about
connecting your labor to other people, in a one to many type network so your
labor can be remunerative. both tasks require continuously figuring out how to
do a better job.

You will stop procrastinating when you believe and when you spontaneously feel
what you are doing is more important, and more fun, than your distractions.
procrastination is evidence of competing values, competing interests. you'll
have more success by orthogonally including these competing values in your
labors than by trying to shut them out and criticizing yourself because what
you think you should be interested in is different than what you are
interested in. you can align your values and desires towards your goals, but
only so much. you will be much more successful if you align your efforts
towards your values and interests. As you want business success and have a
curious mind (hence the distractions) you have to thread your own curious
solution.

------
marketingadvice
It's a simple fact that a lot of the stuff that exists now to do awesome
things and learn skills faster, wasn't available 2, 3 even 5 years ago (never
mind a decade ago).

But it's never really "late" to do anything career wise. Other's may have
issues with age, but you can always learn new skills, work on projects, start
businesses and more. There's no age limit on taking action.

It's easier now, more than ever, to pick up a framework to action on something
and just do it.

------
martin-adams
I feel for you. Not because I think you've wasted all your opportunities, but
actually because you're focusing on this failing rather than succeeding. And
the whole age thing, just forget about it. We all live in the 'now', some of
us just reach milestones at different points in our life.

I'm 33 (and still feel extremely young in what I do). I just read The Launch
Pad and was a little disappointed that to 'succeed', you need to be mortgage
free, no kids, be prepared to relocate and have a co-founder you share your
entire life with; generally traits of an unattached 20 year old with close
friends. I would fail all those, but would that put me off trying a startup -
hell no! Do I believe I could be part of the 0.1% of those that succeed? Of
course. But will I feel like a failure if I'm not. Absolutely not!

I focus on the following. Do I have more experience, wisdom and understanding
than I did 2 years ago? Am I enjoying the projects that I work on? Do I have
vision for where I want to get to? I also know that there will always be
people who are better and smarter than me. If that bothers me, learn from
them, but don't envy them. They are no more 'special' than anyone else.

If I could go back 10 years, what would I do with that abundance of time I
once had? Honestly, it wouldn't matter as I know I was not 'ready' to succeed
at that age. At that age I hand't found the passion for what I do and hadn't
seen enough of the world's problems first hand.

The problem I have is that I find it hard to focus on a single project and I'm
overcommitted in my work (I work for a startup and two organically grown
businesses). I have an endless stack of side projects that need my focus. But
I only stop working on one because I find more passion for another. I'm okay
with this - to a point. This is my challenge which I am working on by breaking
down the goals into much smaller, more manageable deliverables. Celebrate the
small wins as the big win is just a collection of smaller ones.

My advice to you. Forget about age. It doesn't matter if the other person is
18 or 68. I'd say to write down on post it notes the top 10 things you want to
achieve in the next 30 days. Pick the top one to start with, then throw out
the other 9 post it notes - they are just a distraction.

------
jjrumi
This is going to sound cheesy, but you need to find an internal peace with
yourself, and realise that you are _enough_.

Once you get there, what you'll actually feel is that it doesn't _really_
matter (there are more vital/core important things in life) and then,
ironically enough... you'll work better.

I felt the same way. My problem was I pressured myself so much I never
finished a single thing. I guess you have to somewhat break free from
yourself.

------
fluffheadsr
Also, life isn't about a list of accomplishments.. Make sure whatever you do
it affords you the lifestyle which you want to live. Rich and famous isn't
necesarry and life style business' are complete awesome even though they seem
to get a bad rap in the startup world. A business that simply provides jobs
and pays your salary isn't good enough.. Everyone seems to need the billion
dollar exit or its "not worth it."

------
tflhyl
thx for writing this and to all the advices on the comments. can't say how
much i can relate to what you feel. i'm younger than you at 24, definitely not
one of these hot-shot young dev. i have no any geek creds whatsoever, empty
github profile, no shiny personal website, no stackoverflow rep, nothing.
countless time i've tried to spend my free time working on some side project
although i know i don't actually enjoy doing it. in the end i end up doing
almost nothing. every start of the week i feel very grumpy thinking about how
much time i have wasted on the weekend.

i also like to compare myself to what others around my age have achieved and i
would set silly target for myself ('if they achieve that at the age of x, i
will surely achieve that as well when i turn x'). i know this is toxic
mindset, but i just cant get rid of it. i'm currently working in a very
promising startup now. i know i should be grateful with what i have right now
but i can't help thinking how little i have achieved and how i can get kicked
out easily once new bright young devs come in.

this couple of week, i'm starting to come to terms with myself, rethinking my
life goals and cutting off the unrealistic ones. i'm still mentally exhausted
though and currently contemplating of taking sabbatical break just to try to
enjoy life again. hope that you too will find your solace and i wish you all
the best for your new project.

ps: not sure about this, but i always assume that my problem will solve itself
if i can get a girlfriend. it will be great to have someone by your side that
support and acknowledge you. it also helps you to think less about yourself as
you shift your focus and attention to her. i'm not so lucky to have one
though...

------
mathattack
26 is too young to have this. And it's never too late to reinvent yourself.
Many people who enjoy the ride up lose it on the ride down.

It's easy to look at people who are doing great. (I went to high school with a
self-made billionaire.) It's easy to forget that there are a lot of talented
people who aren't doing well by external measures. Then again, who knows what
is going on inside people's head?

------
Spooky23
IMO, you need to figure out what you want. Stop defining your identity around
what other people are doing.

A lot of these people whom you're fixating on now are complete shitshows.
You're looking at the public persona of unmitigated success and awesomeness.
The reality is almost always not so rosy.

Think about what _you_ want to do when you grow up. Turn your computer off and
go cut grass, hike, swim, or whatever for a weekend.

------
franze
holy moly quaterlife crisis

instead of analysing you and give you some meta advice, i will give you some
hands on things to do. (my quaterlife crises lasted a whole decade, but it
laid the groundwork for the awesome life i have right now)

a) stop with whatever you are doing now, just stop, don't tell yourself you
can't as you have to do so much stuff, just stop.

b) and then start travelling. 9 months, a year, the longer the better. do not
prepare too much, you will not need it, travel alone.

only take a kindle and a crappy underpowered smartphone with you (i.e. a
firefoxOX device),

if you haven't travelled before, start with thailand, it's a safe and easy
country to start travelling, take it from there.

c) do not talk to the same people as you would talk at home, if you are
american, don't talk to americans, if you are european, talk to americans,
.... relax this rule after some time

d) return

you will not be the same person as you have before, and you will laugh at the
person you were before

the whole process is called "getting some perspective"

you can do it at home, too, but well, it's easier if you are physically away
and on the road

------
NhanH
My people, my people! We should have a (digital) support group. You've just
described me perfectly, even to the point of compulsively investigate people's
age. I know that feeling in the back of your head, I often describe my state
as :I hate myself every single waking moment, and then some more in my sleep.
I think this is not that rare of a problem for our age, and generally, I
disagree with the sentiment that optimize your life for happiness will solve
it (it's just a different life goal. Nothing wrong with aiming for happiness
as a goal, but it's not for me personally)

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 slogging through side
projects. Although extreme moderation is advised.

My email is in the profile, if you're looking for someone to commiserate from
time to time ;)

~~~
tastyface
> _I disagree with the sentiment that optimize your life for happiness will
> solve it_

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](http://anxietybox.com) (currently broken)

~~~
visakanv
> as long as they would persist in history and influence other people.

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.

------
72deluxe
As others have said, don't compare yourself. Just live.

Also, I would consider having enough savings to live without work for a few
years to be pretty great! I am certain there are many of us who would welcome
that (me included). Perhaps you should take time out to travel and see the
world to put it into perspective instead of running the rat race?

------
calt
I'm just going to answer with a webcomic that fits exactly this. Stop
comparing yourself. I went to a shitty cs program after dropping out of an
electrical engineering program. I'm doing great.

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3685](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=3685)

------
AndrewDucker
On saving the world the world, and other delusions:
[http://www.moreright.net/on-saving-the-world-and-other-
delus...](http://www.moreright.net/on-saving-the-world-and-other-delusions/)

This is a trap - and one you need to be really careful not to fall into, or it
will destroy your life.

------
mdisc
What about teaching others - young people. You seem to have the passion for
programming and I think you could find great fulfillment by sharing that craft
with others- not to mention making a huge difference in someone else's life,
particularly someone who never realized that programming was an option for
them.

------
bcg1
Fair warning, I'm about to punch you in the gut before I pick you up.

You're all over the place. You have no idea what you want. You're looking to
everyone else to shape your vision of what success is. Your problem is not
that you're getting older, its that you are unfocused and lazy.

Sorry to be so blunt but if you want to change your life you need to
understand that you are doing it wrong.

The good news is that you recognize that whatever you are doing, it isn't
working for you. The past is gone and the present is rapidly slipping into the
past so focus on the future where anything is possible. It sucks to know that
you are the problem... but its great to realize that you don't have to force
or convince anyone else to change in order to solve it. You only need to force
or convince yourself.

First thing, write down your goals. If you don't have goals that are so clear
to you that you can just sit and write them down, you need to figure that out
right away. Write on paper, with ink. Doing that changes your goal from a
nebulous "maybe someday" in your mind to something that is tangible, in the
real world.

Your goals should become your external motivator. You haven't identified what
you really want, so you don't feel motivated. Once you know the destination,
just treat it like you would any other trip... plan out the route and walk in
that direction. When you feel that "gnawing in your chest", use it as a
reminder to ask yourself "how is whatever I am doing right now getting me
closer to where I want to go?"

And listen, turn off the television. Altogether. If you have a gun you might
want to consider shooting it up. That shit is designed to make you feel like
an inferior piece of crap so that you go out and buy some actual useless crap
that they tell you will make you happy. You'd be better of smoking weed until
your eyes are so crossed that everything looks like one of those Magic Eye
posters.

I know it sounds cliche, but it is literally true that today is the first day
of the rest of your life. You can constantly compare yourself to the "hot-shot
young dev" and find differences, but one thing that will always be in common
between you is that the future only exists in your mind. It is up to you to
decide what that future will be, and if you want to make it real. So just
decide who the future "you" is, and start walking like that person right away.
The future "you" is depending on it.

------
scotty79
I remember feeling same way when I was 26. I remember envy when I saw a guy
who was 23, had his company with many employees, successfully built stuff for
the archiving radio broadcasts (which I kind of tried to get into with
"company" that we've set up with two of my friends).

To add insult to an insult he was good looking, he was surfing and his website
displayed in IE chromeless window which before that I wasn't even aware to be
possible. And I though of myself as knowing almost all of the tricks.

The way I removed myself from mentally competing with this guy was thinking
that this guy probably had a father, rich one probably, probably entrepreneur
while I was raised by single working mom and a grandfather who was a tinkerer.

That softened the blow enough to just work out an acceptance of the fact that,
at no fault of mine, world is filled with a lot more awesome people than me.
It is. If you are one in a million, there are thousands of people like you or
better on this globe.

Now I'm 36 and I'm feeling way better now. After years of bummming around as a
lone wolf I got hired by corporation few years ago. It turned out to be much
more profitable and way easier than freelancing. I pumped up my self esteem
and my account by showing me how high rates I can demand for my work and I
stopped feeling pressure to strike gold.

Surely everybody would want to be Marcus Persson but people like him are so
lucky that you can't compete with that in any capacity. It's as if you'd
compare your salary with somebody's lottery win. "This guy made a 10 million
dollars in a day and what I got? Few hundreds?"

If I at any point in my life get this combination of luck, opportunity, skill
and time to launch me way above everything I could build myself then great. If
not ... that's perfectly fine. I'm perfectly satisfied with gradually moving
towards places that earn me more and bore me less and in the off time playing
with whatever I find interesting without thinking whether it's profitable in
any way or not.

On more practical note... Try to pick jobs that pay the most. Try to stay on
those jobs only as long as you are surrounded by the people you learn from and
you are forced to learn. But avoid long hours.

You'll notice that that your brain will be more awake. Instead of watching TV
or reading internet you'll be prototyping new technology in your free time,
just because you'll feel like it.

If you start getting bored you'll see yourself to be doing in your free time
more and more mindless things. Most mindless is TV so the only way you can go
from where you are is up.

------
mikelyons
I sorta remember feeling this way when I was a junior when I was 26, I'm 29
now and a senior engineer for a global brand.

As you get older you'll probably give less of a shit about people's age. That
and you'll see how young, stupid and naive the people who are younger than you
really are :)

------
lnanek2
> many nights I end up vegging out in front of the TV or aimlessly clicking
> around on the internet

An Adderall prescription works well for this. Also a standing desk. I find
standing so much work I don't like browsing news sites while doing it, I just
want to get my work done and take a break, lol.

------
ForHackernews
Maybe watch this segment:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw)

In the real long run, we're all dead, and nothing we do matters. All we can do
is try to live a good life while we're here.

------
marcuskaz
A good article to read, Late Bloomers by Malcolm Gladwell
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/20/late-
bloomers-2](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/20/late-bloomers-2)

------
lee
It sounds like the problem you have is with your ego. You're portraying
yourself as someone you aren't, or someone you haven't become yet.

Your ego is handicapping you from doing anything. Throw it away. Stop
comparing yourself to others. And just work and be the best you can be.

------
ThomPete
You don't deal with getting older, getting older is the great part. What you
have to do is deal with not getting younger.

In other words, time passes and before you know it you are 50 and you don't
get those years back.

So how are you going to spend your life.

Worry about that before you worry about other people.

------
lchelak
Hey! So I had social anxiety apparently for 23 years before I finally just
said, "hey! I worry too much and it affects my motivation!"

Medication has made me 10xs the entrepreneur I was prior. I feel like I am now
my fullest self.

Get to the doctor :) Modern medicine is a wonderful thing.

------
teddyuk
There is always something that you regret and a feeling that you should have
done more, I wasted about 10 years drinking and taking drugs and and now I
feel like it was wasted but you just gotta get on with it - set yourself some
goals and go for it.

------
yareally
Do you exercise regularly and get enough sleep? They do wonders for my
alertness and motivation in the evenings after getting home from work. I have
developer friends that don't do either of those and pretty much veg out after
getting home.

------
OneOneOneOne
Stop beating yourself up and start working as you have wished. Work when it is
time to work but don't forget to live. You will never get that time back but
are still young.

Don't be afraid to fail. Push ahead and you'll see failure is temporary.

------
UK-AL
I read somewhere average ycombinator entrepreneur is late twenties, early
thirties. Not 21.

------
queryly
No one procrastinates on things they enjoy doing. You may not have found your
niche yet, keep looking. People grow up learning competing with each other all
the time as it is theme of life. You would have to unlearn that and enjoy
life.

------
thegreatpeter
People forget that there's a huge difference between engineers and business
men. I find myself in that position often.

Do I want to push something out quickly and get feedback, or do I want to take
the time to write the right code for it.

Food for thought

------
eva1984
Quite on the contrary for me, I wish I could be older in the team so that I
would have more saying in important matters like design and architecture
related decisions and have more freedom in deciding what to do for myself.

------
kyllo
Just remember that you're running a marathon, and you're feeling jealous of
the people who are ahead of you after only a couple of miles because they
started off sprinting. You'll catch up. :)

------
hidro
Same feeling here. I tend to feel underachieved a lot of time. Then I put my
focus on doing some project/learning new stuffs, really enjoy it, feel
empowered. Then the cycle repeats after a while.

------
bthomas
Don't change anything, but look for silver linings. That drive is hard to find
and makes you sound like an ideal person to work with - feel free to get in
touch if you're interested.

------
wernercd
I started school at 28 (after 5 years in Military and then a few years of
wandering...), got my AA at 30 and am currently 35 with almost 5 years in my
current job.

36 isn't to late... much less 26.

------
therzathegza
Go outside. From my perspective, you're failing to enjoy a successful life
because of your fixation on other people's success. Come back and you may find
your head clearer.

------
sanderjd
Let it go. Stop taking a tally of your age every morning. You're young and
you're doing well! Keep up the good work, and try not to stress about things
so much.

------
mpdehaan2
There's a somewhat famous quote from photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson —
'Your first 10000 photographs are your worst.' In that vein, everything you do
can get better.

25 is not old. The industry is somewhat young-people-worshipping now, but
that's because computation has gotten incredibly popular now, and that is the
age of a lot of people - most of the people I've worked with are older than
that, and that's fine. Experience is great. There will be a ton of older folks
making awesome things long into the distant future. I find the idea (it seems
a little bay-area centric) that 25 is old to be, well, insane, but perhaps
that's just what people of every generation do.

I started my first startup at 33 or so, really, there's nothing magically
about this (many parts of it totally suck!), and it's just as good to work for
a large company. Because someone started something at an earlier age is really
meaningless. Heck, just thinking about a great idea for 5 years and then
finally making it into a thing is valuable, so your time isn't wasted. We are
basically a culmination of all of our experiences, and how we use that
information. More experience is better.

The best thing you can do is build cool things that you enjoy, but there's
also no point in trying to "win" the game or be better than anyone else.

I think the general ideas about attachment or desire for greater things
breeding suffering are more or less correct. Build things that you enjoy, and
enjoy them for you. It's similar to "more money, more problems". Fame from
past projects or accomplishments will fade too, technology gets replaced
daily. You can be happy with today, but if you are always focusing on
tomorrow, you really can't be. Also, if you don't enjoy building things, do
something you do enjoy as well. Helping people matters. Everything else?
Building a really shiny ecommerce webpage? Not so much.

I guess what I'm saying is, those things don't matter. There's no benchmark.
There's only whether you are happy, and you can actually change what makes you
happy. And it's also ok if you don't know what that is yet.

But yeah, if you want to do good stuff, keep doing more stuff. Better just
happens. (And to bring it back to the quote -- everybody takes bad photos, the
trick is to just not upload the bad ones. Everybody writes bad code too!).

Ultimately I think HN focuses on people who get lucky and make the big bugs on
startup exits or big CEO salaries WAAAY too much. It messes up people's value
systems. Money is not all that matters - not by a longshot. It's also true you
can do really well without being one of those extremely lucky people.

------
otakucode
Everyone must have a conceptual image of themselves - an evaluation of their
self worth. Where that self worth is derived from makes a big different in a
persons life. You are presently in a trap that it is very common for people to
fall into. You are deriving your conception of self worth through social means
- in this case comparing your accomplishments and skills with those it seems
others have. People are often told to 'not care what others think,' but that
is impossible to accomplish without an alternative method of evaluating
yourself, and such alternatives are not usually provided.

A very beneficial approach to take is objectivity. The state of other people
does not influence the objective reality of your worth. If you were a runner,
for example, your ability to run a 4 minute mile remains regardless of whether
other runners are faster or slower. You could either look at yourself and say
'I am slower than other runners', or you could look at yourself and say 'I can
run a 4 minute mile.' One is contingent upon other people, and the other is an
objective measure which can not be influenced by people.

An objective basis of self worth, an inventory of skills and accomplishments
based on actual personal history, will also change your goals. Instead of
setting a nebulous goal of 'I want to be faster than other runners' which you
will never believe you have accomplished (as you get faster you will simply
change to looking at another group of faster runners and feel you have made
little or no progress), you will set goals like 'I want to run a mile in 3
minutes and 45 seconds' which is definite, testable, achievable, and which has
a clear path towards accomplishing it. Concerning yourself with objective
truth rather than relative measures is tremendously freeing. It builds your
self worth from successes which nothing can take away from you. Chasing a goal
like 'I want to be a better programmer' is fundamentally different from
chasing something like 'I want to implement the LZW data compression
algorithm.' The first provides no direction, and provides no sense of
accomplishment because you can always be 'better'. The second is something you
can work toward and accomplish and which will produce an artifact you can
point to and say 'I built that.'

Make no mistake, this is not simple, especially changing your thinking after
adolescence, but it is very rewarding. You would have to consciously fight
against your intuition, which, rewarding though it inevitably is, some people
are very uncomfortable in doing. Eventually, the tendency to judge objectively
rather than relative to others or reliant upon their opinions will come
naturally and make you happier.

------
humanarity
I did the same thing when I was 26. I'm 31 now and I don't really care.

One contributor is that I feel lucky I didn't get "tracked" when I was in my
20s.

I had time to explore the world and take in a lot of experiences and learn a
lot of things about being a human, instead of just being "the best" along some
metrics that everyone else might have said mattered.

Now maybe I'm just making myself feel better and there's little truth to all
that, tho I feel that's unlikely.

I think if you have taken the time to understand things, you will be more
effective than people who haven’t.

A reason is because in order to be successful you have to _keep making_
successful choices, a one-off doesn’t cut it. And there’s no way to do that
with luck because the probabilities multiply, meaning you’re exponentially
less likely to make a string of successful choices if you’re just lucky with
patchy understanding, than if you’ve actually cultivated your understanding,
and can reproduce it.

So taking the time to observe, learn and reflect, instead of just copying,
coding and competing, is actually doing a lot more for your future trackrecord
than you might have thought.

One time someone asked Picasso why they should pay him for a sketch it took
him 2 seconds to complete. Picasso replied, “You’re not paying for the two
seconds, you’re paying for the 40 years I spent to get here.”

You’re worried about time. Don’t be. It’s not important. The important thing
is your understanding, not the time you have, or even spend coding. Most of
the great products did not launch with something that would take 1000s of
hours of coding to create -- mostly, they became successful because their
business model, their marketing and their product market fit worked. And all
these things came to exist, because of the understanding, and the resulting
choices, of the product’s creators.

How did Zuck make FB so successful? Is it because he locked himself in his
room and was a coding-Einstein? I don't think so. I think it's because he
understood a few things about marketing and people, and could build something,
and kept making choices that worked based on that understanding. That made FB
what it is.

Did FB grow because it was a far superior technical product encompassing 1000s
of hours of work? No. It grew because your friends were on it, so you got on
it too. To get people on it, they hand crafted course timetables for each
college, and worked to make it useful. They original FB didn't even have
photos. Ahahaha. How lacking is that? And yet just over 10 years ago, college
kids were signing up to it. So Zuck and his friends knew something from their
own experience, and they put that understanding into how they built and sold
their work.

So think not on the 100s of hours you wished you’d spend coding. Think instead
on the time you invested developing your intuition so you could make choices
(about product, marketing and life) that are going to work.

Even PageRank is not a complex algorithm -- the iteration itself is basic.
It’s not likely that the biggest contributor to ROI for Larry Page’s time came
from hundreds of hours A/B testing and hacking this algorithm. It’s likely
that the biggest ROI came from Page and Brin’s _deep understanding_ of the
value of citations in establishing credibility and relevance, and that, a
little bit tongue in cheek, they decided to make a search engine for the web
on the same principle they’d observed operating in academia. And then, the
understanding that they had, and kept, cultivating created that they made a
string of successful choices around hiring, and around business model.

So before you can create some awesome product, you've got to create yourself
and your understanding because, if you're not real, then your subsequent
choices, even if the initial product is successful, will not bear out that
success in the long term. So whether you become an expert in a relevant part
of the world through intensive academics, or hanging around and having fun,
the thing that matters is that instead of caring about what everyone else is
chasing (being “tracked”) you care about what you care about, and observe and
experiment and gain understanding.

And this sounds like what you’ve been doing all along. Instead of focusing on
work, you’ve been focusing on yourself, and at the same time keeping one eye
firmly on your great ambitions.

So even as you’ve talked like you’ve wasted your time, like time is your
enemy, like procrastination is this big evil, I’m feeling like time and how
you chose to spend it is actually your asset. You’ve invested that time in
learning and observing which has put you ahead of the people who were too busy
chasing the “dashboards in their mind” about their career and “achievements”,
to really take the time to understand maybe in order to make an original
contribution you have to be an original person, first.

And when you get down to building your awesome and great product, it's won’t
be about the code, or the algorithms, nor is it, as we can see by looking at
Amazon, Google or even, yes, FB, about the UI aesthetics. It’s about the real
value you provide people (product market fit/UX), how you share that value
(marketing), and how you capture value for yourself from what you create
(business model).

Maybe you feel "How do those things apply? They’re business concepts.” I’d
say, it works to consider if they’re irrelevant or if they’re actually they’re
like thermodynamic fundamentals of how the world works.

The market is just the statistical aggregate of people’s choices on the grand
scale, like temperature. A business model is how you make sure you keep doing
the stuff you like, like conservation of energy. And marketing is anything
that increases the probability that a significant portion of people will
choose your product, like a catalyst. And real value is not something you’re
likely to search your way to through A/B testing, which partly exists because
people have spent so much time becoming experts at work, they’re not experts
at where they want their work to have an impact, the world, so instead of
being able to have convictions about the world, they choose to A/B test their
way across the decision landscape, and such a search only going to leave them
more likely atop a molehill than an Everest. Though in the long term, pivoting
plus A/B search can be a strategy which works on average, which doesn't mean
convictions and the choice to have them are without value. You choose to
develop convictions, and when you deploy them in a decision, maybe they get
you to Everest faster than if you had only relied on pivoting and A/B search.
That's an advantage. Sometime the advantage is so great that while every AB
searches over the rolling hills of planet Groupthink, you are already landing
pretty close to the highest point on planet Awesome because you chose to
develop and deploy your convictions.

So all that time you spent unstructured, untracked, that’s your greatest
asset. Anyone can learn to code, anyone can copy your idea, but only you can
keep making the choices which it has been your own unique experience’s gift to
you to make. So, before you lock yourself in your room again, chasing some
metric -- maybe consider that it works for you to keep observing more, and get
back to what you’ve been doing so well, but feeling so unnecessarily guilty
about, just hanging out and learning, because that's really the foundation of
your future success, far more than any coding is. :)

------
pcunite
What you are partly struggling with is known as Akrasia. Read "The Personal
MBA" chapter 7 by Josh Kaufman.

------
furyofantares
A good therapist can help you know yourself better and better manage thoughts
and behaviors that cause you distress.

------
bob3
Individual deeds so great they put people on pedestals do not come from
existential worries forcing their will.

------
vgeek
127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com etc.

------
Xophmeister
You're as old as you feel. The number of times you've orbited the sun is
irrelevant.

------
code_reuse
One piece of advice is to try to build something awesome that you can share
with the world.

------
aepearson
Gotta wonder - why is it so many programmers (myself included) have these same
problems?

------
benmarks
You're talking about Phil Sturgeon, aren't you? That guy ticks all of us off.

(<3 you Phil)

------
someone124
Its seems you are suffering from Agoraphobia. I myself suffer from it (Even
when I have an IQ above 135) I kept struggling most part of my life. It wasn't
until I knew I suffered from this condition I could understand the problem and
face it.

Go to a psychiatrist and get yourself evaluated. It would help you a lot. My 2
cents.

------
fluffheadsr
Here's the answer.. If you never start, you'll never catch up. The end.

------
pistle
The arrow of time flows in one direction. Let go of regret. Learn. Grow. Go.

------
antaviana
Success (or failure) is just a state of mind. It's overrated.

------
shove
I'm 38 and have felt similarly since I was your age. Relax.

------
abacab
you should attempt some introspection and root cause analysis of your
underlying and deeply seated self-esteem issues

what are you trying to prove? who are you trying to prove it to?

------
woodylondon
wait till you are a few weeks away from 40 and have the some thoughts :-(

~~~
akilism
or even 30.

~~~
cubano
or even 50.

------
VLM
As long as you hand over total control of your happiness and mood to other
people, complaining about how you feel while under their total control makes
no sense because its not your responsibility, you gave it up. The other 11
steps of the 12 step programs are off topic and probably some are wrong
anyway, but surely you'll never conqueror your problem until you admit you've
handed over control of yourself to something (someone) that doesn't
necessarily have your best interests in mind, and unsurprisingly its not going
too well, at least for you. So good luck with that step, first.

Also you're not older, you're just a kid with kid moods, which is perfectly
appropriate when you're a kid, so... good (edited to emphasize, good as in
there's nothing wrong with you, not good you're unhappy). You'll know you're
actually old "for real" when your self doubt switches entirely over to "Why
did I waste my life on screen time, doing stuff I don't care about to earn
extra money I don't need to buy stuff I don't want to impress people I don't
know who won't care anyway, when I could have been doing something meaningful
like (playing with the kids, watching that eclipse, climbing that mountain,
dating that person, taking that class, learning that skill, reading that book,
watching that live music event, building that thing...). All I really remember
from the youthful age of 26 was the fun of dating my future wife and to my
regret wasting too much time on work and business and computers, its the mood
switch that's how you can tell I'm old(er), not necessarily the memory loss
LOL.

There are also serious educational issues, looking at something like the greek
philosophical ideal of balance being the goal and lack of balance inherently
being wrong in and of it self, I can assume if you're only freaking out about
financial success and fame, then your musical listening and instrument playing
is going really well, you're reading some cool lit, and you're up to date with
exciting recent developments in philosophy and science, eating great food,
exercise is going well, and all that other "well rounded human" stuff. There
are Eastern outlooks that say basically the same thing with totally different
words. Seeking balance seems an almost inherent part of being human. So you
didn't get a good education, even if you got excellent vocational training or
on the job training. The only way to make that bad situation worse is to not
work on being more well rounded.

Note the common mythological trope of some dude who focuses entirely on one
thing, gets really good about it, and ends up having a really shitty life
(struck down by lightning by the greek gods for hubris, chained to a boulder
while vultures eat his liver for all eternity, wings melt in the sun and drown
in the ocean, etc). I think the ancients might be trying to give you some life
advice about the inevitable result of deciding to be a little too focused on
one aspect of life.

So best of luck, you're very young and have plenty of time to figure it all
out. It would be way more tragic if your post claimed you're 62 instead of 26
and you're just starting to figure out life. You'll do fine if you're already
that far at this young age.

------
visakanv
OP– I'm about your age, and I haven't completely solved this problem for
myself either, but I've thought about it really hard for a really long time.
Let me address your issues / statements / concerns one by one.

> I find it very hard to sit down and work on a project without an external
> motivator, and on many nights I end up vegging out in front of the TV or
> aimlessly clicking around on the internet.

This is a classic environment type problem. If you're committed to creating
great work, then you have to carve out time for yourself. This means having a
specific routine. Talk to people who train in sports and they'll tell you–
they don't rely on any particular sort of motivation (external or internal).
Rather, they have a routine where everyday at 6am they lace up their shoes and
go for their run, like it or not. Read Stephen Pressfield's The War Of Art– he
talks about Going Pro. You don't wait for motivation. You do the work every
day. Sometimes inspiration will come, sometimes it won't.

> Every day, I read an article by some hot-shot young dev who has a handful of
> fancy projects behind his belt

These folks are exceptions. They're exeptionally good and they're
exceptionally lucky. You'd be better off not reading any articles at all.

> It's a constant, irrepressible gnawing in my chest.

I experience this intermittently. IMHO, I experience it when I haven't been
doing work. The solution is literally to sit down and do work. The gnawing is
a reminder that you are working, not doing.

> even though I still end up on HN half the time

Turn off the Internet?

> 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

This, together with your vegging out / aimless clicking, suggests to me that
you're framing the problem too broadly.

The main obstacle between you and your goals might be you, but it also might
be, you know. One quant of work, followed by another, and another. Baby steps,
man. Do one thing at a time.

> I've resigned to the fact that I've procrastinated away a decade of valuable
> time, and it just endlessly haunts me

This is the venomous, compounding problem about obsessing about sunk costs.
Listen– life isn't a linear thing. Some of these folks younger than you will
get into car accidents and die. Others will get distracted, end up in horrible
marriages, all sorts of nasty things will happen. Life doesn't progress nearly
as linearly as you think.

What you need to do is really sit down and go, "Yes. I have burnt a decade. I
have some unknown amount of time in front of me. I have today." What are you
going to do with today? Why do you want to spend today agonizing about
yesterday?

------
yanonymator
Yikes! Me too. Exactly.

------
grimmdude
Switch professions.

------
jwmoz
You're 26. I'm 30. This is how I feel about you.

------
galestaf
re "Does anybody else have this problem? How do you deal with it?"

I'm a 41 y.o. management consultant for tech companies. Am I successful now?
Because I published my second book last month, some think I am successful. But
I feel like I am only getting "warmed up" and, at best, I am at 30-50% of my
potential. Do I compare myself to others and feel regret? I do. For example, I
look at what Eric Ries has accomplished. I admire him a lot, and I think he
deserves all the success he has achieved, but ask myself why I didn't do more
in my 30s. Another person I admire is Nir Eyal. Seeing what he's accomplished,
I wonder why I didn't do more in my 20s and 30s! Actually, I got to interview
Nir a few months ago, and discovered he's a normal human being, not a
superhuman creature.

Here's some advice. (BTW, my training and expertise is in industrial-
organizational psychology. It's not clinical psychology but the psychology of:
individual performance, team performance, motivation, engagement, etc.)

Plenty of successful people struggle with self-doubt, self-criticism, and
anxiety. For example, I struggled with depression in my 20s. Whatever your
pain, it is your cross to bear. Learn to manage your condition, and you will
become a stronger person, and better able to help others who struggle like you
did.

Learn to deal with setbacks and disappointments without freaking out. Learn to
meet adversity and hardships with equanimity -- with an even mind. Keep
driving towards your goal but be ready to change your plans as you go. When I
was 34, my dad died quite suddenly. It was terrible. But from that hardship, I
decided to take action toward my goal of becoming a management consultant. I
started down that new path. Three years later, I got my Masters degree in
industrial-organizational psychology, and was excited about starting my new
career. Weeks after my graduation, our youngest child was diagnosed with a
chronic condition for which there is no cure. I had to change my plans around
for four years mostly because I needed to learn to care for my daughter. She's
doing well today because we put her health and well-being first.

Self-compassion is important. You can be compassionate with yourself while
continuing to work and get progress made each week. You may want a coach or a
professional counselor to help you sort through this.

Some will tell you to "have no regrets at all" because they want to help --
ie. get you to stop worrying so much. Actually research tells us that some
degree of regret can serve a useful purpose. The problem is overwhelming
regret and shame. Again, the solution and antidote to all of this is self-
acceptance and self-compassion.

If you want to be successful, the research points to success being determined
by how many people you help to become successful, and how much talent you
multiply in others in your community of peers and your network. Look at ways
to keep improving your own skills but help others get more skilled and
successful too. Read the book "Give and Take" by Adam Grant.

Last but not least, you can't stop your mind from comparing your achievements
to others. But you can learn to observe your mind and your thinking, without
"buying into it" or being a slave to that train of thought. Take a course in
mindfulness meditation. You have many good years ahead of you.

------
epimetheus
I'll second (or third etc) those that previously said you need to sit back and
take some perspective. 26 y/o with what looks to be some good experience, and
a CS degree at a top 10 university with an emergency fund that can carry you
through that much unemployment? You have it made. Maybe I just don't get that
sort of drive? Don't get me wrong, I have drive, I'm just guessing not that
much. Here's some perspective (and I'm a fortunate soul too):

I'm 38. I didn't go to college out of high school, I went into the Marines. I
wanted to be a Journalist, but I didn't score high enough on the ASVAB
apparently and got stuck with an Audio/Video job. I was far from a
Valedictorian, I scraped by with Bs and Cs. Fast forward years later, having
worked many other jobs from factories/warehouses to gas stations; I grew weary
and went to college. I was 27. How did you think I felt after little to no
career success? I switched Majors three times. Started with the intention of
doing Physical Therapy, switched to Pre-Pharmacy, then Biochemistry -
struggled immensely, and finally went CS, sort of. I picked a CIS degree
because it would have been another year of college to do the CS (the math
would have added much of that).

I graduated at 31. I'm not a ninja programmer, and compared to much of HN I'd
have to agree I'm pretty mediocre.

So there you have it, one additional perspective in this enjoyable thread. One
more data point to show you that you have more than you think, and shouldn't
always compare yourself to the extreme outliers.

Edit: for what it's worth, I'm relatively happy with myself as a person if not
super proud of my current situation in my career (making much less than I
could be).

------
FD3SA
Sounds like you`re trying to peg a square peg into a round hole.

We all want to be Tony Stark. A captain of industry, successful philanthropist
and daring philanderer.

The truth is, this is about as realistic an outcome as winning the lottery.
Doesn`t stop hordes of people from becoming addicted to the possibility and
wasting their time and money on that impossible outcome.

Stop fantasizing about becoming Tony Stark, and start living your own life.
Maybe programming doesn`t really make you happy, and its just a means to an
end. That`s perfectly fine. Find a position with solid work life balance that
allows you to enjoy your life outside of work.

The HN crowd tends to idolize a tiny sliver of programmers who enjoy writing
code for the sake of it. I know very, very few people who can`t think of
anything better to do with their free time than to write code. For most of us,
its just a trade that pays well and is somewhat enjoyable. It`s a means to an
end.

Sure, we can fantasize about building the next PayPal, but in all honesty
there`s plenty to enjoy in life without having a net worth in the billions.

Stop measuring yourself using absurd metrics. You`re falling into the trap of
an internet world. It would be like comparing yourself to the King of England
a few hundred years ago. Unrealistic and absurd.

The world is not meritocratic, and it sure as hell isn`t equal opportunity.
You`re alive, you`re healthy, and you`re relatively smart. Enjoy that while it
lasts, and fuck the rest.

------
thiago_fm
I'm exactly of the same age of you. But I'm not american nor graduated at a
top-10 university. I actually graduated at an above average university in my
country.

I was born in a very poor area of a country called Brazil. I probably make now
as much as my whole street. I can't compare myself with somebody richer, or
that had better education at home and school.

I feel very successful and one in a million. Today I work in Germany and my
parents are very proud of me.

I think you have to first understand HOW DID YOU START, then WHY YOU ARE WHERE
YOU ARE. Maybe you don't find computing interesting as somebody of 17 years
old that is a 'genius'. You have a different life from them but that doesn't
make you better or worse, you are just looking at a very blind angle, which is
age.

I feel that it's ok if you just do your job, maybe write some software every
once in a while at your home and enjoy life: marry someone, try to respect
others(this is harder and more important than being the best on your field),
play video games, listen to music, cook something, learn another skill...

Actually, the more I reach closer to the top, the less I want it. I don't want
to deal with the people from the top, they usually lack a lot of things like
respect, they are usually very egocentric and so on, which is something that
doesn't inspire me at all.

You need to have a broader view of what a people do instead of looking just at
the age. Maybe by doing that all that bad feelings you have will go away. I
also have it but you need to learn to tame this monster. What if you let it
take over you and then you become this guy that writes articles and is all
famous and important but have a very negative impact in the world and the
lives of people that are close to him?

Take it easy.

------
wantab
There will always be someone greater or lesser than yourself. Don't worry
about it. You hear about the successes but not how they got there. Half the
time it was a lucky break; being in the right place at the right time. Other
times they worked 100-hour weeks for a year, got divorced, and their kids hate
them.

Then, next week, you never hear about them again. Well, maybe a couple of them
you will, a year later, but not the others. They're forgotten.

Do what you want to do and quit relying on other people's stories to make you
miserable. They aren't you and there are plenty of people, here on HN, who
wish they were in your position.

Strive to be happy.

------
michaelochurch
First of all, 26 is not old. It's just not.

 _on many nights I end up vegging out in front of the TV or aimlessly clicking
around on the internet._

An hour or two per day of that is not a big deal. You need to relax. As long
as you're doing well at your job and getting enough exercise, it's fine to
watch an hour of TV. One warning: assume that once you start watching TV or
junk internet, you probably won't do anything else for the rest of the day, so
don't _start_ until you've accomplished enough that you'd be OK with that.
Also, keep a set bedtime. The problem with staying up late with TV or junk
internet is that your judgment gets worse as it gets later and you're not as
good a judge of "Is this really more valuable than an hour of sleep?" at 12:00
as at 10:00.

You shouldn't beat yourself up over needing an hour per day of "do nothing"
time. That's completely normal.

 _I am crippled by the feeling that it 's "too late"._

As Ed Kmett says in this very good (and accessible) talk on how to learn
(link: [https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-
le...](https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-learning-to-
learn-by-edward-kmett-1750) ) your career is going to be a lot longer than you
think. It's far from too late.

 _Every day, I read an article by some hot-shot young dev who has a handful of
fancy projects behind his belt (not to mention a great website and design
sensibility) while I have exactly zero_

Well... a few of those people were just single-minded and focused, but many of
them were also produced. Evan Spiegel's a billionaire at 24, but he's _a
product_. He was picked by aging venture capitalists, facing irrelevance and
acting out of fear, to match _their idea of_ what Millennials look like.
Twenty years from now, these products (Lucas Duplan, Evan Spiegel) won't be
relevant. Take the same attitude toward those "30 Under 30" lists. They have
the same problem as the "holistic" component of college admissions: they're
middle-aged C-players trying to separate the A+ from the A players among the
young. (The middle-aged A/A+ players are out kicking ass and therefore too
busy to give a shit about "30 Under 30".) They're just not capable of making
meaningful selections, so you should view it as irrelevant celebrity noise and
ignore it.

Trust me that very few people half a decade younger than you (that's 21) are
producing fundamental work. Young people do get a lot more recognition for
accomplishments that would be mediocre by an adult standard, and those "golden
child" types get addicted to the recognition and don't improve. The people
your age who will be kicking ass 20 years from now are, most likely, not even
on your radar right now.

Some young people _are_ producing fundamental work, and that's awesome, but
they aren't numerous enough to represent a competitive threat. The people who
are producing fundamental technology are generally not peaking in their 20s,
but 40s to 50s and sometimes later. You have time to catch up. Some people
have incredible focus even at 17; most of us take some time to get our shit
together and that's OK. Fuck, I had a 9-year trolling habit (17 to 26, or
2000-09).

 _Whenever I encounter a technical article, I immediately and compulsively
investigate the author 's age._

Stop doing that. If you can't, see a psychiatrist. If it's an actual
compulsion, then medication will help you.

 _For the first time in my life, my procrastination is starting to get tamed._

It will probably continue to get better. The ability to plan and project
yourself into the future is sub-optimal from ages 12 to 25. In other words,
it's normal to take that long to get your shit together.

 _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._

Who knows? It's not worth fretting. You know kids who are straight-edge rule-
followers in high school and go completely apeshit (and not always funny
apeshit, but sometimes scary apeshit, like the guy who got to a near-fatal
0.37% BAC) with the first taste of freedom in college?That happens a lot to
people who are "on the rails" in their early 20s. And the ones who get huge
amounts of recognition (e.g. "30 Under 30" types) tend to fall the hardest
because the recognition from "above" gets them used to looking up, and when
they actually have to lead, they're not up to the challenge.

 _Does anybody else have this problem? How do you deal with it?_

Look, everyone has these insecurities. I would be lying if I said that I
didn't. It won't prevent you from doing a good job. Just get out there and
build. Don't expect the insecurity to go away; just work _in spite of it_.
From _Game of Thrones_ :

    
    
        Bran: Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?
        Ned: That is the only time a man can be brave.

------
noobplusplus
Author seems to be a "wannabe"!

Tell your parents NOT to impose their ambition and frustration on you!

------
MichaelCrawford
You're 26, and you're not good enough.

I'm 51, and I still don't know what I'm going to do when I grow up.

When I was 26, I was writing a test tool and a test plan for MacTCP 1.2. Not
long before that I was very excited at first to have saved enough money to
purchase a used 700 MB - yes megabyte! - SCSI drive USED from the Usenet News,
then quite a while after that, I managed to save up enough money to purchase
the second megabyte of memory for my Mac Plus, thereby enabling me to run
Multifinder on Mac OS System 6.

But for my next job, I was the Product Development Manager at Working
Software, I had an office with a door I could shut, I had a direct report, and
the very finest Mac in the entire company. A few months after I started at
WSI, I shipped my very first shrinkwrap retail product, a keystroke recorder
called "Last Resort". It wasn't for espionage but was a useful tool for saving
valuable text in the event of power failure, system crashes &c.

So you are 26 and your life has been a complete waste.

When I was 27, I shipped my very first product that sold like hotcakes at
$9.99.

You are comparing yourself to people like Mark Zuckerberg. Consider that he
was paid by some upperclassmen to write The Facebook under contract; he later
settled with them after they sued him for stealing their work. He went on to
quite openly state - in a very public way - that one should not hire older
employees. I don't clearly remember but I think he said one should never hire
anyone older than 25.

In the US, it is a civil offense to discriminate for reasons of employment
against anyone over the age of 40.

I write quite a lot of good, working code around the time that I was your age,
but even so these days I do not regard myself as having had much of a clue at
the time. For example I was completely unaware of the existence of C's
assert() macro. I spent a lot of time in the MacsBug machine debugger that
would have been quite unnecessary had I used assertions rather than single-
stepping assembly code and looking at CPU registers.

Looking over my entire career, I regard myself as having really come into my
own as a coder right around June 2000. It was then that I figured out how to
write C++ code that was completely free of memory leaks or pointer errors,
however it wasn't until a couple years after that that I really took automated
testing seriously.

In early 2002, the head coder for my Bahamian Hedge Fund client said to me
"Your code is by far the best in our codebase". That particular code went into
production with no known bugs; a year later, no bugs at all had been found.
When asked to implement what I later delivered myself, the original author of
that 100 engineer-year Windows executable asserted that "it couldn't be done".

So I got pretty good in 2000, when I was 36 - ten years older than you are now
- but awesomely good when I was twelve years older than you.

Give yourself time.

My concern these days is, for the most part, how rich I'm going to get, what
product I might ship, whether I can ever vest any stock that turns out to be
worth more than one square of single-ply toilet paper.

No.

My concern these days, is what software I can write, that will still be in use
ten thousand years from now.

I want to be remembered after I'm gone, you see.

My ex-wife Bonita Hatcher, a devout Shambhala Buddhist, pointed out many times
that I would never know whether I had been remembered, seeing as how I was
dead.

But I do know very well that when I lay on my deathbed looking back on a life
well-lived, I wasn't going to wish that I had shipped more product.

