"My 20's are gone." Boo-hoo-hoo. You Millennials make me sick with your constant whining.
I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
171–180 of 276 posts
Re: I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
#172I have been a dreamer all my life. It took me until last year to figure this out, and only thanks to this community. Great. Dreaming is necessary but not sufficient for great accomplishments. Glad you're one of us. I hardly ever tried - and when I tried, I didn't persist. It has been my goal to start a business since ever I can remember. And yet I never really tried (until last year, which resulted in abysmal failure…
In 2007 i read a blog post similar to this.... here is an excerpt: " It was in February this year that I decided to try and make triathlon my career. It was a leap into the unknown: I knew nothing about what it meant to be a professional athlete. Now, two months down the line, I am still climbing that steep learning curve. And believe me, it’s a long slow climb. But what made me take the plunge, give up my job and th…
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Re: I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
#173Good luck man, even though you have the community behind you, ultimately it's still you vs. the world.
Re: I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
#174Look. Becoming a programmer is NOT going to give you a satisfying life. Being a programmer is fucking boring. Companies do not give a shit what cool stuff you've built once they hire you. They want you to spend your time figuring out why their automated build system is broken and optimizing their databases. Sitting in front of a screen for 8-12 hours a day is a terrible approach to achieving satisfaction in your life…
> Being a programmer is fucking boring ... They want you to spend your time ... optimizing their databases
Honestly, I really fucking love optimising databases. I can't believe my luck that people want to pay me to do that sort of work for 8 hours a day.
To me, hell is having to define and defend my own problem. I would loathe running a startup - I love the feeling, instead, of having people come to me to solve their problems. Fortunately, I've managed to arrange a situation where enough of those problems are reasonably interesting to my apparently unusual tastes :-).
This is not meant as a dig against those who run startups, just a note from someone with a very different perspective.
Re: I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
#175I feel exactly like you, friend.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend hitting the gym. The amount of self-confidence you get when you look in the mirror and see yourself in good shape is priceless. That, and the number of hours you'll be sitting in that chair will pretty much require if it you don't want to suffer any health-risks =)
Everything goes from there... you talk to people better, you posture yourself better, eventually you'll look at yourself better and maybe even start believing that you could do it.
Daryl Teo - also a loser like you. But that only makes victory more sweet.
Re: I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
#176Look. Becoming a programmer is NOT going to give you a satisfying life. Being a programmer is fucking boring. Companies do not give a shit what cool stuff you've built once they hire you. They want you to spend your time figuring out why their automated build system is broken and optimizing their databases. Sitting in front of a screen for 8-12 hours a day is a terrible approach to achieving satisfaction in your life…
Seconded. You'll find a lot of people on here saying about "never to give up" but IMO, programming is not that glamorous only outside looking in. To give you best sense of this, it's like people not in academia thinking that it's great to have tenure and be paid to pursue your own passion in an academic community.
The truth is most people in IT do very mundane stuff; most web-stack stuff glorified have nothing to do with C pointers. And most people are applying commonly used open-source technologies as users than making original contribution to algorithms. A lot of people have the vision of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg but it's like winning the Nobel Prize, a lottery; especially in today's social-media infused tech scene, it's about being in the right place at the right time.
Ultimately, this is not to discourage you from going further into tech. But to short-circuit a lot of the BS floating around. You'll get pretty far if you work hard in IT; meaning if you sacrifice your free-time for the start-up treadmill, in 10-15 years, you can get to $150-200K as mid-level manager, saddled with a mortgage, kids and high cost of living in socially-eco-conscious city. For the average-case, it will not give you extreme wealth, it will not give you friends/family, and it will not be novel after a few years of the mundane work.
Take original replier's advice, "live without regrets." If you want to get over the hump of some kind of perceived technical inferiority, by all means, go for it but don't go all in thinking that any field will validate and solve all life's problems. That is very personal and not even your mother would even know. Some people here are happy just being a web developer, a "part of the revolution"; some people here see themselves as tortured young startup artists in struggle to be a triple threat of "a creator, an influencer and a monetizer"; some people get off on the rush of show & tell of weekend projects and their technical prowess and pulse on the trend.
Don't let the community dictate who you are.
Re: I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
#177There once was a guy who, at the age of 24, wrote a short text moaning about how he seemed to have been accomplishing little in his life, and how his peers were having a better start.
His name was John Milton. That text was Sonnet VII, "How soon hath Time the subtle thief of youth..." And it wasn't until thirty-five years later that he published "Paradise Lost", the work that made him widely regarded as one of the most outstanding English poets of all time.
You never know when your prime time -- the time for your opus magnum -- will come.
Re: I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
#178Like others have said, it sounds like you may be depressed. Untreated depression can lead to serious problems. Please talk to your doctor.
Re: I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
#179Dear Stefan Kueng, please read "Mars" of your compatriot Fritz Zorn. Please do that. You will understand why.
All the best.
Re: I'm a loser and I want to change that - now
#180First, who are you accountable to? Saying "HN" is too easy. Find someone who will keep you on track with this. A close friend/significant other is a good start. Second, what's your plan? I didn't see one. You need to have some objective metric you will be accountable to. Finally, be careful what definition of success you accept. Dont pin your self-esteem on this new change. You don't want that kind of pressure. HN is…
> First, who are you accountable to? Saying "HN" is too easy. Find someone who will keep you on track with this. Actually, I already found someone. Right before posting this. It was my motivation to "come out" in the first place. > Second, what's your plan? Start building stuff. Starting tomorrow morning.
Good! Write a blog and keep us posted.
I'd read it. Talk about what you're building, and what struggles you're having.