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This teenager is hot property in Silicon Valley

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Re: This teenager is hot property in Silicon Valley

#51

Post by dools »

DontBeTaken wrote: post #8

As a 17 year old, this makes me feel under accomplished. While I do have skills in regards to computery things, I'm hitting a block when it comes to developing backends to sites. I know HTML and CSS decently but programming languages that I'd need to learn just seem to bounce off. On the plus side, I'm good at other things too, like photography / producing electronic music (no Madeon though. He makes me feel under ac…

It's such a cliche but worth repeating: there will always be someone more X than you are (rich, skilled, fast at running 100m, skilled at coding, effective at business) whatever it is. If you're attempting to derive your sense of happiness through relative goal posts like that then you'll never stop - you won't ever get to a point at which you have an "absolute" sense of success. The good news is you can get that sense of absolute success now: just focus on what you have and practice being happy (which is both a choice and a skill).

Secondly: don't think about what you can do out of the context of how that helps someone else.

"I can code" "I can make music" "I can ride a horse backwards"

All these are fantastic skills - what problems do they solve? You'll notice in each of the cases referenced in the original post, he is picking a very specific problem with a well defined revenue model. These are everywhere. Practice looking for them, and practice releasing anything (there are so many free services out there now you barely even need a backend for your site in order to make money - for example you could create a static site to generate affiliate revenue without a backend, then pay someone to build the backend once you have cashflow).

At any rate, don't focus on what you have to offer, focus on what other people need and eventually you'll see something where you think "you know I can do that - I could solve that problem" then you do it - and it might work or it might not, but you just keep trying.

Also just some context: I'm 31, I was "the kid to started the lemonade stand" etc. etc. I never had any business success, studied engineering at 21, got trapped in technology and emerged about 2 years ago and have been reconnecting with my business/sales self ever since. I currently gross about $200k per year but have a team of 2 people and a wife and child to feed so whilst we're subsisting we're not rich. We are growing, and with each year I find that my focus on solving problems and keeping my clients' and customers' needs at the front of my mind at all times, and not getting wrapped up/absorbed in the technology, not only does the business grow but that rate of growth increases as well.

Re: This teenager is hot property in Silicon Valley

#52

Post by readme »

sudonim wrote: post #11
DontBeTaken wrote: post #8

As a 17 year old, this makes me feel under accomplished. While I do have skills in regards to computery things, I'm hitting a block when it comes to developing backends to sites. I know HTML and CSS decently but programming languages that I'd need to learn just seem to bounce off. On the plus side, I'm good at other things too, like photography / producing electronic music (no Madeon though. He makes me feel under ac…

I'm 30. If I can give you advice to live by: don't measure yourself by others' accomplishments. If you focus on what other people have done, you'll end up chasing your tail trying to compete with an idealized notion of 20 different people. Blaze your own trail. Find the things you do well and double down on them. You'll get to where you want to be. It may not be by 18, so don't be impatient. Just keep doing the thing…

It's better to learn something in your 20s or 30s then say "I should have done that when I was 12" and then never learn anything and become an ignorant 40 year old!

It pains me when people compare themselves to the upper 1% of upwardly mobile people and then lose their self-worth over the whole deal.

Re: This teenager is hot property in Silicon Valley

#54

Post by chris_wot »

joshu wrote: post #40
chris_wot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An incredibly flawed and ridiculous argument. Flaw 1: You imply that no illegal immigrants are talented, or contribute to U.S. society. Flaw 2: Your argument presupposes that providing legal status, financial aid and work permits to illegal immigrants will prevent talented people from wanting to work in the U.S. Flaw 3: Providing work permits, financial aid and legal status to illegal immigrants is done for many reas…

don't feed the trolls.

Don't feed the trolls telling me not to feed the trolls. Got it.

Re: This teenager is hot property in Silicon Valley

#56

Post by klt39429 »

chris_wot wrote: post #32
klt39429 wrote: post #21

And with talented kids like him around, Obama decides to give work permit, financial aid, and legal status to illegal immigrants?

An incredibly flawed and ridiculous argument. Flaw 1: You imply that no illegal immigrants are talented, or contribute to U.S. society. Flaw 2: Your argument presupposes that providing legal status, financial aid and work permits to illegal immigrants will prevent talented people from wanting to work in the U.S. Flaw 3: Providing work permits, financial aid and legal status to illegal immigrants is done for many reas…

Quoting chris_wot1:

Flaw 1: I didn't say no illegal immigrants are talented. Let's say odds for an illegal immigrant to be talented is 50/50, while we know skilled workers like this kid is 100% talented (track record proven so far) -- so why makes it easy for the former group but not the latter?

Flaw 2: If there are slots available, they should be allocated to talented individuals. Evidence has shown many entrepreneurs and college graduates (legitimately) have gone back to their countries because of inability to obtain visas here.

Flaw 3: It's a bad thing. If you compare it to how tough it is for a legal, skilled worker to come here. Besides, I personally know countless people are planning to send their kids here illegally before 15 to benefit from this new regulation. But that's the whole new debate. My only point here is: Why not make it easier for talented individuals instead of illegal immigrants?

Re: This teenager is hot property in Silicon Valley

#57

Post by zacharyvoase »

I can sympathise with the visa situation. I'm 19 and don't have a degree, and I've been in exactly the same situation—you go through the whole interview process and then suddenly the company's lawyers tell them there's no way you can get a visa, and weeks of time have been wasted for both parties. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind living on a boat for a while: http://www.blueseed.co/

Re: This teenager is hot property in Silicon Valley

#58

Post by bertomartin »

javajosh wrote: post #25
sudonim wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 30. If I can give you advice to live by: don't measure yourself by others' accomplishments. If you focus on what other people have done, you'll end up chasing your tail trying to compete with an idealized notion of 20 different people. Blaze your own trail. Find the things you do well and double down on them. You'll get to where you want to be. It may not be by 18, so don't be impatient. Just keep doing the thing…

I'm 37. And if I can give some life advice, it would be to always start from the end. If you're building sites, start with the host. Make sure you understand how to deploy your thing. Then work backwards, and setup your build-test-debug loop with deployment as the final goal. Once you get something working, you can incrementally improve your process - but you need to start with some way to get your stuff online. Note…

You're so right about learning how to deploy your app. I'm using linode myself. I've been investing some time learning to use Chef to provision my servers. And Capistrano for deployment. This is a bottleneck of uncertainty for me, so I just finally decided to forget everything else and focus and figuring this thing out. By the way, if anyone has a good link to a tutorial on provisioning linodes with Chef Server, I'd love to have a link. In the meantime, I'm grinding...

Re: This teenager is hot property in Silicon Valley

#59

Post by reddit_clone »

raldi wrote: post #44
qeorge wrote: post #14

We sold Lachy the PSDtoWP.com domain a couple years back. Helluva negotiator, would never have guessed he was 15(?) at the time. :) Glad to see it worked out. Congrats!

What had you been using it for?

A PostScript to Word Perfect converter ?

Re: This teenager is hot property in Silicon Valley

#60

Post by bertomartin »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #34
DontBeTaken wrote: post #8

As a 17 year old, this makes me feel under accomplished. While I do have skills in regards to computery things, I'm hitting a block when it comes to developing backends to sites. I know HTML and CSS decently but programming languages that I'd need to learn just seem to bounce off. On the plus side, I'm good at other things too, like photography / producing electronic music (no Madeon though. He makes me feel under ac…

"[Julius] Caesar served in 63 BC as a quaestor in Spain, where in Cadiz he is said to have broken down and wept in front of a statue of Alexander the Great, realizing that where Alexander had conquered most of the known world at thirty, Caesar at that age was merely seen as a dandy who had squandered his wife's fortunes as well as his own." http://www.roman-empire.net/republic/caesar-index.html

Just wow. Some motivation there!
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