Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?

I'm a 26 y.o. software dev working on going indie. All my life, I'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's "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 — and he's half a decade younger than me! How will I ever be able to catch up? Experience-wise, I'm still a junior dev.

It'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's age. If I'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's exhausting and terrifying, but I also don'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.

It's been getting better. For the first time in my life, my procrastination is starting to get tamed. I've been working hard on my first big project, and I expect it's going to be a great one. 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. Mentally, I've resigned to the fact that I've procrastinated away a decade of valuable time, and it just endlessly haunts me.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 ;)