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

Ditto to Rickcusick's call out. This is one of my favorite insights on this thread.

There are so many moments in life where we have to start back at zero. I like to think about the Teddy Roosevelt "Man in the Arena" speech when I'm back at a "0":

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Here's some "luck" for you:

  25% of all new businesses fail within the first year.
  36% fail before their second anniversary.
  44% fail before the end of the third year.
  ----
  46% fail due to incompetence.
  30% fail due to inexperience.
  11% fail due to lack of domain knowledge.

(stats taken from http://www.statisticbrain.com/startup-failure-by-industry/ )

As the years pass, the conditional probability that the new business will fail in the next year, given that it did not fail in the previous year, tapers off. The competence has been tested. The inexperience vanishes. The domain knowledge becomes less something you acquire from elsewhere and more something you make from within.

From the statistics, it looks like an awful lot of people are making uninformed guesses, out of their early incompetence or inexperience, and incorrect guesses destroy their business. That does not look like fortitude to me. It looks like walking your very first tightrope, never having had the benefit of even seeing another person cross one, over a pit of starving grizzly bears, as the people who have already crossed laugh at you and throw rocks at your head.

Those who already fell into the pit and managed to climb back out for another try have fortitude. But they also didn't get eaten. That's lucky.

It is unkind to say that those who never make the attempt lack fortitude. Perhaps they simply have an aversion to being chased down and eaten by ravenous bears. Or maybe they were born in the pit, and never got far enough ahead of the bears to try to climb up to the ropes.

But that does not address the question that should be on everyone's mind with respect to this analogy. Why do those people on the other side of the pit throw their rocks at the people on the ropes, instead of at the bears in the pit? Why is it necessary that starting a business be both radically unfamiliar and incredibly risky?

Dude I'm 33. I didn't even own a computer until my late teens. You can't compare yourself to people who had a different upbringing and a different time. Even 3 years difference is a life time in terms of technological advances.

Just do what you can do and don't be so hard on yourself.

I'm 33 and am a CTO at a seed funded startup doing node and react. And I've only been 100% JS for about 4 years. (c++ before that)

Just do what you want and don't worry. Even if you just want to watch netflix now and then. :)

This is something I've worried about for a while, and ultimately I've come to the conclusion that as cool as these hotshot young people are, being one of them would go against my basic personality.

Y'see, I'm a fundamentally uncreative person. I'm not the kind of person who will come up with a project idea and build an app from nothing. That's not me. On the other hand, you tell me you want me to build something for you, and I'll build you a damn good piece of software.

I've always been a more "behind-the-scenes" person. I'm the grunt whose hard work in the background enables the superstars to go out and do their thing. And I've found that I _enjoy_ that. It gives me a lot of personal pleasure to help and support people, especially people who I feel deserve my support. I've realized that I'd be much happier being the kingmaker than being the king. I guess this is why I'm more drawn to systems programming: it's behind-the-scenes supporting work, suitable for a behind-the-scenes supporting person.

I could also get into Myers-Briggs typology here. I'm fairly sure I'm an ISFJ, and what I've described is very, very ISFJ. Though I've got a bit of an INTP streak too (both types share the same cognitive functions, just in a different order, so I'd say my INTP streak is mostly a case of my weaker functions "flaring up"), and that accounts for my interest in systems architecture.

I have had a similar kind of issue my whole life as well. Being ambitious at the core but actions not being representative of how I think. And though I haven't figured it all out, I have improved massively from earlier. What helped was an understanding of how subtle anxiety affects me. Initially, at the age of 26 (30 now), if someone told me it was anxiety I would have told them no, but over time (with lot's of mediation) I began to realize that it is a very subtle, subconscious anxiety that makes is significantly harder to do anything that has a result riding on it.

To test if this is your problem, look back at things that are difficult but didn't have a expectation or result riding on them. Say you created a small app or read up on a complex topic and understood it well. If you are able to do difficult things that don't have expectations but are not able to similarly difficult (or even easy things) that do have an expectation it is probably an issue of anxiety.

If this is your problem, I would recommend the book The Now Habit. Also, start mindfulness meditation if you can.

Hope this helps.