Becoming the person who does the thing

Why not? Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age. Getting those depends on doing it, not just waiting on time passing by. I'm much older than the article author, but it would be foolish of me to think that I couldn't learn things from 20 year olds – including important and profound teachings and advice.

It's the "secret" that kind of flies in the face of much of the type of grit-your-teeth-motivation type of self-help and advice.

There's nothing broken, nothing wrong with our current selves. In fact, we already have good internal compasses and we should listen to them. Go to the gym or park for a few minutes, stay as little or long as we want. See how we feel. Take it easy if we want. Push harder if we want.

It's this slight tweak in perspective that I think is pretty significant. It's an acceptance of the idea that we are not some kind of deficient ball of mess that requires carrots and whips to even know the right direction to our own wellness or happiness. That we don't actually need external pressures and motivation bearing down on us.

We're allowed to just want things because we do. And we're allowed to not want things because we don't. Feels like getting back to simpler times as a child where we could just act on our own emotions and internal state without such gripping regard for the external (e.g. comparison, external ideals, external validation, etc.).

It's been vital for me lately to engage in this...type of "non-striving" form of exercise too. (I now go to the park almost daily for a good walk.) I started doing it just because I wanted to. There were no plans to keep doing it, no routine or regimen expectations, no goals. Just allowing myself to to engage on my own terms. The most important benefit for me has been just been feeling more ownership over my own self-concept.

It's much simpler, quite freeing, and also resistant to commodification.

> What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage?

Some of my friends tried going down the influencer path. Some on LinkedIn, one as an Substacker, others on Instagram.

Seeing their influencer content in contrast to their personal lives made it abundantly clear that they were using their influencer side as an outlet for their thoughts. As ideas or epiphanies came to them, they would jump to their influencer accounts and preach their realizations as if it was knowledge they had held for decades.

The optimistic angle is that they were using the outlet as a place for sharpening their thoughts. Thinking in public and putting your thoughts into words forces you to sharpen your ideas and make them more coherent.

The part that never sat well with me was how they were trying to preach it to others and present themselves as the wise, experienced guru sharing this advice to others when really they were just barely figuring it out.

The content can be helpful for others to sharpen their own thoughts or catch up on basic realizations about life, but for others it feels weird to see so much fanfare around basic social and workplace understandings.

>Is this kind of thinking normal?

Sure. Haven’t you ever met someone who had a bad teacher and now claim they’re not good with numbers or languages?

We usually get comments like “oh you are smart!” when we succeed immediately at school. This is damaging, because it rewards current state rather than progress - the kid who doesn’t succeed at once assumes it’s not their thing, better to try something else.

The opposite is also true, after thousands of hours learning to draw people will get told “wow you’re so naturally talented!”, which accidentally is a dismissal of their effort.

I’m not saying talent doesn’t exist, but I’d go as far as to say it doesn’t matter much for non-elite settings - yet we seriously undervalue practice in the west.

This is true, it's normal with the age.