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

You make a great point, one that I have been thinking about, and unfortunately, I'm not sure if I can entirely agree with it.

There are something to be said about habit and discipline. Certainly, one should never pursue something they have no interest in whatsoever. But for any thing we want to accomplish in life, there are tangent, chores, and generally "schlep" that you can't avoid. An extreme reading of your comment would mean that we should give up at the first road block. How do you differentiate between lacks of internal motivation, and great motivation being thwarted by fear of unpleasant tasks? In an ideal world, that shouldn't be an issue, in the real world, it's a lot harder to know.

When you're playing an instrument, if you've practiced a piece few hundreds times, you don't think your playing is good anymore. You know when you're making mistake, but even when you're playing perfectly, your perception of the piece you're playing would be a lot more "meh" comparing to the perception of some outside listener -- after all, you've heard that piece a lot of times. Motivated or not, without discipline it's unlikely you can keep doing things over and over.

When I was younger, I've always thought that great people doing great things by just focusing on their genuine interest, ie a physicist just want to understand the nature of the universe, and not particularly care whether his work is gonna have any impact or effect. It turns out that interest might not be the full picture: people who do great work might actually be conscious in wanting to be great, too. One of the example would be Richard Hamming, mentioned in his "You and Your Research" essay (which just popped up on HN lately, actually), even Feynman's biography mentioned that he need introspection during the period when he wasn't being productive as a physicist.

> In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'' Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do something significant.'' -- Richard Hamming, You and Your Research.

Just to add my advice to the list. I'm 35, I went through a path to get to be a developer that took me long, I could call myself "software developer" round 30's, that's by the time I finish my Bachelor degree and found a job related to development. What I did in between was fixing computers, sysadmin, and netadmin .. I always got bored in those jobs as I knew I could do better.

Then I got into the devel world and I started doing the same as you do. But maybe because I became father in between, maybe something else ... I end up turnning off the media noise and add some behaviours:

1. Kill your ego, it just don't help you get better. 2. Read news about tech you find interesting, but just read them, if you feel like, just try them. 3. Start getting off the screen, walk around (meditate, sports, just walk surrounded by nature) 4. Start paying attention around you, what the people close to you struggle with, and maybe help them. 5. Don't reinvent, if you have a tech ich, just browse around, you might find a nice project you can use (open sourced) and maybe start helping there maybe not. 6. Just create a dynamic in you that gets you where you like to be.

After you get this kind of movement in you, success is a question of being in the right place at the right time.

From my side, just followed that list some time ago. Now I'm checking potential things about domotica and it might get me somewhere, might not ... but something I know, I'm moving because I have an ich. And I'm learning a lot!

The rest is just noise you can simply reduce.

You shouldn't forget the impact of luck and the environment on people. For every successful band in their early 20s there are probably many thousands of better musicians out there that are just getting by. I also know a number of people who were significantly more successful than me at 26, but were unable to sustain that success as the lack of skill and experience reversed their luck in the long run.

For me, 26 was an age where I started to focus on my general productivity. My most productive time initially was in my teens, where I learned and achieved a lot from the age of 15 to 19, so much that it put me well ahead of others my age and really carried me through a comfortable career until I was 26. During those years of working I didn't have a computer at home. I went out, I was rarely at home, I partied a lot, I dated and I developed a lot of social and cultural skills at that time. I did things that didn't count as successful projects, but developed and educated me in so many ways, just like spending years on HN will let you grow a wide body of knowledge but you might end up with nothing to show for it. After 26 I also had enough work experience to land jobs where I had both the skill plus the autonomy to take on interesting and useful projects at work that I could get stuck into. It's only deep into my 30s that I developed the ability to focus and complete projects outside of my working hours.

You're talking about Phil Sturgeon, aren't you? That guy ticks all of us off.

(<3 you Phil)

This isn't kindergarten where you can just show up and start scribbling.

Even if the actual act of coding (or painting, or martial arts, or writing, or watering roadside plants) is effortless, there's a hell of a lot of effort that goes into just getting yourself in a position to do it.

Example: perhaps painting is effortless for you, but putting yourself in a position to paint involves a lot of mundane things that require effort. You still have to buy and stretch canvasses. You have to buy a brush. You have to clean your brushes. If you want to make a career of it, you need to tackle some basic business tasks. You need to deal with an agent or gallery. You need to file your taxes, because painting gets a lot harder when you're in jail or the IRS has taken your stuff. You have to work and pay your rent, because it's tough to paint when you're homeless and worrying about your next meal and whether you'll survive the night. And so forth. There's a lot of shit that has to get done just to place yourself in a position where you can regularly put brush to canvas.

When I started my own business that was my experience. Writing the code was the fun part. Effortless, you might say. I was compelled to write it - it was harder to stay away from it than it was to work on it. But I went through hell just to be able to write that code - I worked long hours at my day job so that I could pay the bills, I often had to choose between writing code and having a social life, and so on. And prior to even starting that venture, it took me years of hard work and college education just to develop the skills that allowed me to write that code.

Your advice is, at best, useful only to those who already have their basic needs provided for. Trust-fund babies and the like.