Ask HN: What were your naivetés in your twenties?

They're not mutually exclusive: You might be a hacker-painter-parent. You can keep adding roles as long as you have time to do things. They're also not necessarily permanent: You can stop being a hacker if you don't like hacking anymore. But if you don't do any of those actions, you aren't any of the accompanying things.

Try to learn at least one other language, just enough to get you by. Try to live in different places. Major cities, small towns, every environment will teach you something.

Learn to appreciate the arts.

Avoid cynicism as much as you can, it is often a mask for inexperience, apathy, and fear.

Enjoy a good argument that challenges your assumptions, be prepared to change your opinions when faced with new facts, do not seek information just from the sources that feel compatible to you, cultivate media literacy.

My point is to discard the label/role from your thinking because it can lock you in place. Multiple roles suffer the same problem as singular roles in that the name has boundaries. It is harder to see where the lines blur (the shades of gray) because you have lines. Looking for the blur in the first place is a sign that you have accepted an arbitrary label with its connotations and are trying to climb your way out of that casting.

This is an example of where the language itself limits you. You hack, so you are a hacker. But "hacker" does not just mean "one who hacks". It might also make you think of Jolt. :)

The danger is when you start to mold your identity to fit in with the group that shares that label. Do you own a t-shirt that talks about your love of hackerdom? "10 kinds of people understand binary"? If you make it part of who you are, then you will find it more difficult to change.

There are several kinds of situations where this identity labeling makes someone feel trapped or slows them down. If you have never intimately known or been yourself suicidal (and managed to recover from it), for example, you would see that part of the problem is an inability to change, a clinging to the past, to an identity. Others and I were trying to eliminate that identity. We had to change in order to continue living. A similar problem exists for job loss.

Another way to look at this is to consider your choices. When your choices conflict with your identity, you have run into one of those labeling conflicts.

I'm actually one of those people who has had a hard time 'managing to complete tasks you start' (and while i still have that problem sometimes, I think i have accomplished more than the average bear.) - now, I do fight that directly some; you are right, it's too much in the way of everything else for me to ignore it because it's hard, like handwriting. They make some /really effective/ drugs for that these days, amongst other things, but as for 'hacks' to avoid that weakness? becoming a SysAdmin is one. If you can perform well in emergency situations, where you /can't/ drop things on the floor, lots of half-finished projects get forgiven. (and really, in SysAdmin work, if you don't take care of something when it's not an emergency, you take care of it when it /is/) I mean, it's bad to not complete things in non-emergency situations, maybe even worse than being a less productive programmer. But if you can 'hero' it out, even if that is the sub-optimal solution, you usually don't get fired for it. Management forgets that you only notice your sysadmin if he's not doing his job.

But, I find even the threat of an emergency motivates me to fix things, so I don't think add sysadmins need to remain in the less-useful 'hero' role forever... but being a sysadmin does mean that our failure mode usually doesn't get us fired.

If you can manage to hold down a job long enough to get some good experience, hiring other people can also be a way to get around this. I can start something and have someone else come along and clean up behind me. Also, just working with other people, I find, helps keep me on task.

but really, if I didn't have a skill that was relatively hard to find, well, for most of my life, I'd have had a hard time holding down a job at McDonalds. Nobody is going to deal with a fry cook who keeps Engineering hours.