You're as old as you feel. The number of times you've orbited the sun is irrelevant.
Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
51–60 of 426 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
#52I'm not famous or "accomplished" enough that you will ever hear about me, but I'm extremely successful by the metrics/goal I have chosen. My goal was simply to be happy . What separates us from (other) animals, is our ability to alter our environment. Use your big brain to figure our some combination of the parameters in your life (work/environment/free time/etc.) that makes you happy and change your environment to o…
Good piece of wisdom. I somewhat have the same opinion but could not put it into words.
right.. and it is not age that matters but finding your purpose+meaning.. call it love passion caring for something/someone.. this is the true success in life everything else is only temporary fame.. glhf
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
#53Celebrate the graveyard of side projects. Accept that not everything will be seen through to completion for one reason or another. The years will fly past and you will get to this position eventually, so you might as well do it now and have some fun on the way.
One day you will have children and you will come to realise that raising the next generation is an absolute joy and often the greatest lasting achievement many of us have. As long as you have some ability to provide for your family, then the adoring faces of your kids make for a great fallback position.
There are countless people out there who have a mundane and unremarkable working life but, in accepting that, have a lot more spare time to enjoy their life in progress.
I imagine like many of us here, you enjoy a lot about the process of working on side projects, so make sure that enjoyment is as much a part of it as any concerns about potential success.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
#54It sounds like you need to do a month vacation (or two weeks, whatever you can). The first half of your vacation, go off-grid completely. No cell phone, no computer, no internet - just you, your tent, and nature. Be it camping/fishing/hunting/surfing/skiing - spend at least a week explicitly not staring at a screen - just de-stressing and listening. Get an hour massage, go swimming and soak in a hot tub, take a legit vacation that would make both your younger self and will make your older self jealous.
When you're back from vacation, you can plot a new course for success, with reasonable milestones.
edit: to answer the question in the title: When you find people that are better than yourself, write to them with two simple points: 1: let them know what exactly it is that you admire in their work 2. politely ask for specific resources/advice with regard to that thing.
When you find someone that is better than yourself, it should be reassuring rather than stressful because 1) it proves that it is possible to be that good and 2) it provides you an example to learn from. You can build upon the work they've done. You don't have to start from scratch/reinvent the wheel - you are actually at the advantage.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
#55then maybe the list of accomplishments at the end of my life will be longer.
There isn't a high score table.
The balm for this kind of ambition is to visit a suitable big-city graveyard or cathederal and have a look for the largest, most elaborate tomb with the longest list of achievements on. Unless this is a former world leader there's a good chance it's someone you've never heard of. On the way back, look at every house you pass. The person who lives there is almost certainly less remarkable. Ponder the size of the world for a bit.
The ambition/procrastination loop is an anxiety disorder common to people identified as "bright" from an early age. You can retrain yourself out of that in a number of ways, but the simplest one is scheduling. Put half an hour of work in every day. Possibly if you have time bracket it with daily light exercise. This is how the marathon runners do it: one step at a time, with years of repetition behind them.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
#56This 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
Those were also pretty different times. Nowadays we read almost everyday about teenagers who start and sell startups and I think this aggravates the sense of urgency in most of us who are still under 30 and are not yet on the front page of TechCrunch.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
#57At my core, I am intensely ambitious. Are you sure about that? There seems to be a lot of evidence to the contrary. One of the most important lessons I've learned so far is that ambition is not wanting money and recognition; it's a desire for constant challenge, pressure and responsibility. A lot of people don't want those things, they just want the cash. It's actually possible to find niches where you can earn good…
In my opinion, I wouldn't call what you describe "ambition", but rather "need for self-validation". Ambition is desire and determination of achieving something, whereas challenge, pressure and responsibility just seem masochistic. Where's the end goal?
The problem here, in my opinion, is that the "default" goals one sees in the "start-up culture" (or the banking culture, that I'm better familiar with) are bland, spoon-fed and vulgar: "Hey, this guy has shitloads of money, imitate this guy! What? You still aren't rich? Then you're not doing it HARD enough." All in all, it just seems like a self-help book gone way, way wrong.
I think the reason OP can't motivate himself to do these things, is because they are only superficial, exogenous goals to him.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
#58I'm 45, and have about 60 unfinished side protects in my /Dev folder. I've also just reached the feature complete milestone on my first side project that will actually ship. After working on it, or a variation of it for SEVEN YEARS. Your question made me smile. Are you having fun? I'm having lots of fun, and have had throughout my career. There was a time in my 20's where I felt exactly the way you do. Don't sweat it…
I'm 40. I had a nice open source project that went well (it's a bit dated now) ... but my regret is not having my kids younger. The work. projects, start ups and all those dreams still live on. But having kids is a lot of fun.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
#59I am just a novice in the tech field, just out of college barely 2 years ago. Right out of college, i joined one of the so-called 'Big' company, earning decent amount by my own standards. But the similar feelings pushed me out of that place to where i am working as well as feeling happy.
The greatest irony of our lives is that we spend a lot of time and energy looking for that utopian place where people appear happy, thinking that if we reach there, we'll be happy. Instead we should look for the place that makes us happy and then strive to make that the best place to work for.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
#60Do this[1] to get you to love learning again and deal with procrastination/time management/life-juggling. You'll know some of this stuff already. Finish it anyway. Best value for time of anything educational that I have done - bar none, hands down, etc.
Take one of these[2] when comparing youself to other people. If you had spent time to brand yourself, you'd probably look at least twice as good as "hot-shot young dev with handful of fancy projects". Public image and developer prowess aren't necessarily related.[3]
If, like many devs, your procrastination issues were related to.. hm.. illicit substances-well, you know the answer to that: "Pan metron ariston"[4] ~= "moderation is everything".
> Mentally, I've resigned to the fact that I've procrastinated away a decade of valuable time, and it just endlessly haunts me.
It hardly sounds like you've done that. So you didn't reach your max. potential in this "procrastination decade". Guess what: nobody does.
Don't let shit haunt you. The past is immutable. Change your present and future.
[1] https://class.coursera.org/learning-003/
[2] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Chill+Pill I sure as f- need them.
[3] If you gave yourself the mini-project: "Let's make this X bad dev look good", you'd probably succeed for most X. If you care about your public perception, make that your mini project and you'll find that when you're done, your image will be A+++ - as you're not a bad dev.
[4] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/642841-pan-metron-ariston-ev...