Good luck!
A modern Robert Frost....
Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
181–190 of 203 posts
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#182Good luck!
A modern Robert Frost....
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#183Maybe the OP just needs to Embrace the Nagging Voice of Success - http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/21/embracing-the-nagg....
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#184Is not capitalizing the first word in a sentence the thing to do now?
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#185Well 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 found it difficult to relate to his position. By all accounts, he is already very successful and, more importantly, financially independent so he has the freedom to do anything he likes. Labeling that kind of lifestyle as either "late blooming" or "being a loser" is a gross insult to the majority of people who are still trying very hard to achieve his level. By his standards, I'm worth less than a handful of dirt.…
He doesn't feel successful because he doesn't identify with any of the stuff he's doing. He always feels like what he's doing is a product of his environment, or someone else's idea. If he had set out to become a lecturer at Stanford and definitively achieved it, then he would feel successful. But his experience is that he stumbled into it, he doesn't feel like that's who he is or even really what he wants to do. So it doesn't feel like a success, it feels like a passing accident.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
A week ago I had seven dollars in the bank. Granted, that was after moving the household to Europe again and I do have accounts receivable, but financially I'm at the point where when I'm not actually underwater I feel successful. Having "a little less than a million" as a pad would reduce my stress considerably.
My wife and I went out for a celebratory dinner recently when our net worth finally turned positive after years of grad school.
The question is: did the dinner put you back into the red? If not, maybe it was warranted. :-)
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I've seen for the most part isn't that people make the wrong strategic decisions. It's that they don't realize there are decisions to be made. For example, there's a major correlation between your career success and how visible your role is. Maintaining internal systems will almost never pay off as well as working on the flagship product. This, and many other considerations, matter as much or more than your indi…
Excellent post. Still, how do you advise one go about "making sure your day-to-day responsibilities don't take up much time, refusing to work on projects that will pull your career in the wrong direction"? On the first, it seems that the solution a lot of people take is to have short job tenures, because (in the absence of mentorship or high-level interest in career development) responsibilities accumulate while lear…
I'm not going to pepper my advice with caveats, but note that none of the below applies 100% of the time.
> making sure your day-to-day responsibilities don't take up much time
What do you do when you've finished a reasonable amount of work for the day? The average person will ask for more work or do more grunt work. Instead, don't. You'll get much further in your career if you have an amazing side project and produce 20% less other work, than if you produce more day-to-day work but don't have any highly visible projects.
> refusing to work on projects that will pull your career in the wrong direction
You can't really outright refuse if your boss asks you to do something-but projects are frequently assigned on a semi-volunteer basis.
> On top of that, there's the even harder question of how to know that the direction a project will pull a person's career in the first place. It's rarely obvious.
I agree, it's not obvious. As a general rule, try to work on projects that give you the opportunity to be in contact with a greater number of people, especially people in senior positions.
> How are they really formed? There are a lot of pet theories on this one, but it's not clear which of them (if any) is right.
This is difficult, but the good news is that you don't have to be perfect-even a little effort here yields significant returns. The average programmer could benefit massively from an hour a week of studying psychology or practicing meeting people.
For a 20-something the goal is to get powerful, successful, competent people interested in your career. This is hard and there's no silver bullet. A major part of that is to give off the impression that you'll be successful no matter what, while at the same time benefiting from their advice and replicating their ideas. There's also a massive element of luck at play. I've spent a lot of time working on this, and I still wouldn't be able to come up with any sort of consistent method-just things that increase your chances, bit by bit.
Finally, I'd like to note that despite my claims of how difficult some of the above goals are, making good strategic decisions saves you huge amounts of time. Allocating your time in a job wisely will quickly mark you as someone "up-and-coming", and help you rise to interesting work quickly. 100 hours invested in networking will save you years over your lifetime, in terms of advancing your career. A great mentor can keep you from accidentally committing career suicide. And so on.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#188Well 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 don't see a lot of the child prodigies really keeping up the pace. How many of the companies started by 16-year-olds actually last? Maybe in the 80s when guys were genuinely making blockbuster video games by themselves in college (e.g. Jordan Mechner, Eric Chahi)... but they really only had one or two hits in them.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I concur. It is a difficult task, and sometimes you just get very lucky as well. Either way you find Mr/Mrs Right, and when you recognize and appreciate the fact, you are well on your way.
Finding a good woman is certainly difficult enough. Vastly harder, however, is knowing that you found the right one and building a solid relationship with her.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
"why so few people vote or take part in the discussions." To vote or participate you have to be logged in. Would be interesting if PG released some data on logged in visitors. Also, isn't the amount of votes the amount of net votes? So you could have 100 upvotes and 60 downvotes to net 40? (Of course that still doesn't jive with his numbers which I agree were very interesting and unexpected I would have never guessed…
I don't know about the reason behind low number of votes, but the relatively low number of comments could be because the general attitude on HN (for the most part) is to be silent unless you have something constructive to say :) For example, I don't know anything about python for example, so anything I can possibly say would be completely un-constructive (except if it's a question), so I shut my mouth and don't say a…
"to be silent unless you have something constructive to say"
Interesting. I tend to read much more stuff that I find interesting and have something to say rather than stuff I know nothing about.
"removed maybe 40 comments "
I don't think I've ever done that. If I get moved enough to comment I feel what I've said is important enough and the only thing I don't like is a downvote w/o explanation which is inevitable.. Actually it's the thing that I find fun and addictive about HN. I can usually predict downvotes as well on things that I say.
Would be nice if there was a way to post (w/o logging out) anonymously from time to time. Say once someone gets to a certain karma level they have the ability to say what they really think w/o fear of downvotes which I believe does supress what people think.