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

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.

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...!

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

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.

May I suggest the following 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?