51–60 of 228 posts
In the west everything is more focused on the individual. I have to succeed at X. I deserve Y. I have to put my stamp on the world. etc. etc. Not sure this is the best path to happiness.
Unfortunately, there are aspects to our culture that conflate personal value with success; that is, your value as a human being is based on your success. So it's easy to compare to the very visible milestones; Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, etc. Or to compare to people we know personally; the successful start-up founder with a nice exit, the entrepreneur who got his lifestyle business off the ground and now pays the…
years ago i set myself an ambitious goal of being a self-made millionaire by the time i'm 30, and a billionaire by 40. it's crazy talk to most people, but it was a goal i set for myself. obviously, it doesn't seem that plausible now - it's really more of a fantasy than anything at this moment but still... i find myself feeling old and having wasted many years of my life.
this blog post lifted my spirits a little. i feel that if i begin working really hard now and make the next few decades of my life extremely, exceptionally and extraordinarily productive, i can probably still achieve enough to make up for the last few unproductive years of my life.
I'm getting past 40 and I don't think the problem will necessarily be with me in the coming years as much as it will with employer bias. While you can keep up with the latest tech stuffs, some employers still don't want to pay for your experience or see your age as a liability vs being able to run a youngin' ragged. One other thing I took away is that the author seemed that if you didn't make a big world impact no ma…
I often worry about whether my startup clock is running out. I'm closer to 30 than 20, finishing up graduate school, and for the most part feel young. But other than the pediatrics ward, the only other time I start to feel my age is when attending some of these startup events. What I try to keep conscious of is knowing what's reported in the media and what isn't, which are often 2 completely different worlds. On Tech…
I came up with the idea for my startup when I was 47. I don't expect it to be able to make a living at it until I'm 49. Age? Pffth. Then again, I'm not hacking together "Facebook for cats" and hoping for some zeitgeist to make it magically successful while buckets of venture capital rain down on my head, either. A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I…
This is such a key point. Sometimes it takes years, if not decades, of experience to even know that the problem exists. Put another way, if the problem can be solved by a 22-year-old with no experience in the field, there's a good chance they've misunderstood the problem.
https://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/What-do-people-in-Silic...
Some of the companies and founders' ages compiled from the answers:
- Zynga: 41
- LinkedIn: 36
- Salesforce: 35
- Intel: 41, 39
- Qualcomm: 52, 50
- Juniper Networks: 42
- Wikipedia: 35
- Pandora: 35
- GigaOm: 39
- Zipcar: 42
- TechCrunch: 35
- Craigslist: 42
- Netflix: 37
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's how I look at it. It's not the decimal number of years since your birth, but the phase in your life that closes doors. In tech, you constantly need to keep up to date on the latest technologies, read publications and go to conferences, because experience gets stale very fast. It's also easier (than in fields like medicine or law) for junior techies to get up to speed in experience, because they can skip the de…
Or you prioritize exercise, and keep your energy levels up. I'm 38. My pace now is higher than it was since I was 20, despite a 4 year old son. The big difference is for the last 8 years I've put in 3-5 hours of hard exercise (powerlifting) every week before work. I wish I had more time, both for exercise and projects, but these days I can pull all nighters and walk into the gym 7am the following morning and set new…
I often worry about whether my startup clock is running out. I'm closer to 30 than 20, finishing up graduate school, and for the most part feel young. But other than the pediatrics ward, the only other time I start to feel my age is when attending some of these startup events. What I try to keep conscious of is knowing what's reported in the media and what isn't, which are often 2 completely different worlds. On Tech…
I came up with the idea for my startup when I was 47. I don't expect it to be able to make a living at it until I'm 49. Age? Pffth. Then again, I'm not hacking together "Facebook for cats" and hoping for some zeitgeist to make it magically successful while buckets of venture capital rain down on my head, either. A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I…
I'm as creative and as smart as I was then, I don't think that has changed. But I'm wiser now -- about Computer Science, about systems -- and I have that perspective, which has made all the difference.
Very inspiring article. Being 24, almost half-way to 30, these past few months I've been thinking to myself "what have I really accomplished outside of work and school"? I think this is due partly to the high expectations I set for myself, but I also believe part of it is due to the current tech culture, where it's easy for those new to the field to misinterpret that if they aren't moving as fast as everyone else, th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I feel more energized and motivated when I leave the gym, and my energy levels are vastly higher now at 38 than they were when I started exercising properly at 30. And there's other things, like how at 30 I had totally lost the ability to squat down unaided - I had to prop myself up with a hand, and now I like to drop down and sit in squat position just because I enjoy the feeling of my newfound strength and…
Heh, I have a similar experience. I couldn't touch my toes for years - now I actively enjoy bending straight down from the waist to pick things up off the floor!