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Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

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Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#101

Post by JohnLBevan »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #90
count wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the type of competitive folks you talk about (of which I am definitely one), I think the Internet has really changed things - your 'scope' of competition is now 7 billion people , rather than the roughly 400-500 folks you could reasonably know in your 'home town'. Now, even in New Hampshire (to steal your example), you can subconsciously see yourself competing against folks in NYC or San Francisco or Beijing, who…

I think the message he's communicating is that he knows he hasn't fully committed himself ever. He's shied away from it, danced along the edges of it. But never done it. I'm of a similar age, and a similar childhood. I get where he's coming from, even though he's far more successful than me. He's comparing himself to what he knows his potential to be. Or what he believes it to be, anyway, which might as well be the s…

I had a similar experience in school - though no yelling. I often achieved A4s; A for academic grade, 4 for effort (1 being putting in all you've got, 4 being the opposite end of the scale). I took pride in this saying it showed I could deliver effortlessly. In some subjects which weren't in my skillsets (e.g. French & English) where I was getting Bs my parents said they wouldn't mind if they didn't think I could do better, but I was bright enough to get As were I to put in the effort; I decided that if I were less bright I wouldn't be expected to put in the effort, so aimed at making myself thicker (I still don't know how I'd hoped to achieve that, I just left it to lazyness and hoped that was enough). I also argued when it came to revising for exams, saying that revising was cheating as it doesn't show what you've learnt / retained, so anything you crammed in leading up to the exam was just temporary knowledge which you'd lose the moment the exam was over, so would give you false exam results grading you on a momentary peak rather than a general state for that phase of your life.

I blame myself for this, but feel education could be delivered differently to cater for people like us. I had a great education, attending the same school as Terry Pratchett and Heston Blumenthal had, with a lot of teachers who knew their subjects well and cared about their pupils' development, beyond just league table ratings. However, the reason I got A4s is because I never failed - I kept getting what I needed to without putting in effort; I needed a challenge to force me to push myself. In those days this may not have been possible; the internet was still in its infancy so you only competed with those in your year group. Streaming helps here, but with the numbers involved the top set may be the top 30 / 120 or so, so still a very mixed bag.

There are now a number of projects to provide education on-line. As this grows and the school/education models adapt to take advantage of this, I suspect we'll see competition between larger groups of people, encouraging those of a certain attitude to push themselves further to meet their full potential. That said, for those towards the bottom will this force them to up their game, or leave them feeling failures with no motivation? Hopefully the systems will evolve to aid those at both ends by selecting appropriate methods for the various personalities involved, allowing everyone to meet their potential.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#102

Post by JohnLBevan »

JohnLBevan wrote: post #101
waterlesscloud wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the message he's communicating is that he knows he hasn't fully committed himself ever. He's shied away from it, danced along the edges of it. But never done it. I'm of a similar age, and a similar childhood. I get where he's coming from, even though he's far more successful than me. He's comparing himself to what he knows his potential to be. Or what he believes it to be, anyway, which might as well be the s…

I had a similar experience in school - though no yelling. I often achieved A4s; A for academic grade, 4 for effort (1 being putting in all you've got, 4 being the opposite end of the scale). I took pride in this saying it showed I could deliver effortlessly. In some subjects which weren't in my skillsets (e.g. French & English) where I was getting Bs my parents said they wouldn't mind if they didn't think I could do…

ps. for anyone interested there's some useful info on streaming in education here: http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/grouping-pupils-ab...

One option not mentioned there is getting the top pupils to assist in teaching the others; thus providing mutual benefit (since you learn where the gaps in your knowledge are when teaching, leading to you getting a much better understanding by plugging those gaps)

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#103

Post by jwhite »

svdad wrote: post #55
vaksel wrote: post #3

someone needs a reality check. if he considers that kind of life "failure", he is going to lead a very depressed life unless he wins a few lotteries

couldn't agree more. "i only made a little money" -- enough to have started angel investing in 2004 after exiting paypal. enough money to live in one of the most expensive places on earth, probably without having to work too much? check. a family and (apparently) happy marital relationship? check. moderately successful times working at important companies? check. Sure, it's good to be ambitious and set high goals. Bu…

A friend once took a 30 minute car ride with two successful people, both multimillionaires, back when that meant something. He asked them how much money they would need to feel financially secure. By the end of the trip they had bid each other up so far that they agreed that it would take a large multiple of their current net worths, just to feel truly safe and independent enough to retire.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#105

Post by Toph »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #28
arohner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely true. I find the same effect on HN to be even worse. HN now has over 100k uniques/day[1] . That means that on any topic you'd ever like to comment on, odds are good there are many HN visitors who are better at that you are. [1] traffic from last year: http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png )

That's true, but there's also an advantage to that. It's possible to learn a lot simply by osmosis of reading this site. This does lead to some bizarre groupthink though.

I've also seen many people who learn things incorrectly and do harm to themselves from reading this site and others as well. It goes both ways and totally up to interpretation. As I once crossed a book in a bookstore which a cover which read "It's not what you say, its what they hear". Everyone interpret everything differently and sometimes this could be good and sometimes it could be bad. I think its all in perception.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#106

Post by arthurrr »

is74 wrote: post #74
simonsarris wrote: post #7

Well he's not a late bloomer to the vast majority of people. I think no matter your lot in life, if you're competitive, you get the feeling that you missed out on a lot that you could have accomplished. Stories of kids learning programming at 6, or starting companies at 16, etc, feed into this. Even I feel like I would be much farther "ahead" if I had only started programming before high school, if I had been more gu…

The author is already extremely successful, and not only in his career: " and at 40 hadn’t accomplished much other than finding a good woman who was foolish enough to marry me, and somehow managed to have two wonderful children that I was vastly unqualified to have fathered" So all he needs to enjoy the spoils of his success is to change his point of view. It can be done. But if it is not done, then it may be impossi…

Finding a good woman is a very difficult task, NP Complete I would say, depending on how you optimise. If you've solved that problem in your life, everything else is just noise. Starting a startup is trivial by comparison.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#108

Post by michaelochurch »

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction rather than individual skill as the driver of outcome) but often with very little information that would indicate what the good strategies are. Rochambeau has no randomizer (no dice or shuffled cards) and is a skill game if you can predict the other guy's moves. Iterated, it becomes somewhat of a skill game. Same with business. Iterated, both become games of making choices, often with no idea what good and bad choices are, because useful information is so thin on the ground. Business is obviously not "random" in a true sense, but it's obviously not a pure-skill game because so many idiots get lucky and a lot of really talented people (like DMC) don't. It's a game of making iterated choices, often with little or no information that would inform them, and the luck factor comes out of the opacity.

How does this relate to OP? DMC is a highly talented person, but he's in his mid-40s, he's worked in the supposedly meritocratic startup sector (and, as with trading, the definition of success in VC-istan is making money; if you've been in VC-istan for 2 decades and haven't made fuck-you money, you haven't won) and his net worth (as he admitted on Quora) is less than $1m. Given that, it's fair to say that he probably hasn't played his cards right. That doesn't make him unskillful or weak or "a loser"-- far from it, and I'm sure that none of those are true. It doesn't make him any less of a person, or any less smart, than the more successful people. It just makes it a good bet that if he could rewind to 20 and play from there again, he'd have a lot more success.

And ultimately, the reason why many of us are sitting here not being rich and outlandishly successful when people of similar or inferior talent smash $500m+ exits is that, when faced with a thousand identical-looking doors, one with a pot of gold behind it, they had the "insight" to pick door #467 while we picked #822 or #134 or #915. Some of us pick #467 at the next opportunity but, of course, the next time the pot of gold is behind #719.

I think the best thing to do is to back away from the VC-istan insanity, and pretend all that garbage doesn't exist. As long as I'm growing my skillset by 20 to 25% per year (which is not hard to do, because returns from increasing skill in technology are exponential) I feel like I ought to be happy with that. It can be difficult to be satisfied with this (first world problems) when you see unqualified idiots getting funded in enormous amounts, and then getting acquisitions and EIR gigs as welfare checks because they have powerful friends... so it takes some discipline and maturity not to be annoyed... but sanity is worth it.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#109

Post by tatsuke95 »

prophetjohn wrote: post #19

This is kind of inspiring. As someone who wrote their first line of code at 25 and won't be able to shed the "intern" title until I graduate at almost 28, it's really easy to feel like I screwed myself over by not being where I am now 5+ years ago. Especially so in an industry where the younger you are the better and there are stories of people in their 40s having a problem finding work. The real kicker is that I act…

>" I screwed myself over by not being where I am now 5+ years ago."

I think it's natural to think that way.

But how you need to look at it is: You didn't really miss anything. There are a whole bunch of new things you can get ahead on, right now. In 5 years you can be doing something that other people will look at and think, "I should have started on that 5 years ago".

There is no one good moment in life to get started. It's always now.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#110

Post by einhverfr »

ThomPete wrote: post #34
simonsarris wrote: post #7

Well he's not a late bloomer to the vast majority of people. I think no matter your lot in life, if you're competitive, you get the feeling that you missed out on a lot that you could have accomplished. Stories of kids learning programming at 6, or starting companies at 16, etc, feed into this. Even I feel like I would be much farther "ahead" if I had only started programming before high school, if I had been more gu…

I have always found that it's much more interesting to try and create your own space than to compete with others. This does not guarantee you success or that you ever find that space. But it does keep you on your toes on your own terms.

Completely agree.

Besides it is so much more fun.

And you get to see more stuff you make come to life.

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