I'm 19 yet I feel I can relate in some way.
Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
81–90 of 203 posts
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#82Why are none of the sentences capitalized? It makes it difficult to read (so I didn't finish it). What I did read wasn't very interesting anyway, so no big loss.
davemcluredoesntcareaboutfontsorcapitalizationorwhatyouthink.
Dave McClure doesn't care about effective communication. Maybe his ideas are shit? I'll never know.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#83I'm only 30, and I feel like I've made a million wrong turns. There are many people, who at my age, have already created their own billion-dollar company. However, I only work on what I believe in (aside from the mundane work I do to pay the bills), which I readily acknowledge is probably the worst route to traditional (i.e. monetary) success. There are many ways to flip a worthless company for a profit in the softwa…
I'm guessing very few people have actually created a billion dollar company by the time they're 30. Just sayin.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#84This 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…
To be honest, I wouldn't worry too much. Everyone is like "I was programming since I was 10!" Nobody ever asks what they were programming at 10, most people wrote relatively simple stuff until they grew up and got a professional job. Now to wait for replies from people who designed OSes when they were 12 :)
When I was ~12 I wrote a 4000+ line monstrosity in Pascal. I had to learn about functions/procedures because the GOTO wouldn't jump far enough anymore.
I called it an OS, even though it was just a text-based visual shell running in DOS that let you do pretty much anything. Actually used it as my primary "OS" for a few months.
Another cool thing was a game I wrote in BGI graphics with Pascal. Was fun to play, but I didn't know about arrays so there were roughly 200 global variables.
Oh and all the code I wrote before I was ~15 tried to use as short variable/function names as possible for some reason. When I used up the alphabet I'd go to aa, ab ... I want to slap my young self for that.
PS: I started programming when I was 9, in Logo. That was fun too. But the real fun started when I "unlocked" Pascal at 11.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#85Life is not about winning or losing, life is simply an existence where we have to spend time without getting chronically bored. For some it may be startups, for others it may be spending happy times with the family. If you consider anyone else more "successful" than yourself (say a founder of a recently IPOed company), do you think s/he is happier or more satisfied than you are? How about if you get to know the founder recently went through a bitter divorce and also that his board doesn't have faith in him and is actively planning to fire him. Different levels of so called "success" are simply different modes of living, each mode bringing its own nuances or subtleties. From media or personal stories, all we hear about other "successful" people is better parts of their lives. The boring or bad events are seldom talked about.
Once you are beyond basic poverty, your basic self (and happiness levels) more or less remains the same (no matter what you do or where you go). It's a myth that "success" _should_ be had and a worthwhile life is the one in which something worthwhile (as defined by the society, and not you) was achieved.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#86Well 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…
That's a cop out. Yes it's great getting married and having kids but you can't answer DM;HK to everything.
Doesn't matter; Had kids.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
20 years - the world wide web was invented just 22 years ago. In 20 years the world could be completely different from today. How do you even try to predict being a billion dollar company in 20 years?
The world will always need business process management software. If you provide something flexible, you can adapt to new technologies and opportunities. But the basic overview of business process management software hasn't really changed as much as we might want to think. Even mobile devices have been around this area for most, possibly even all, of the last twenty years though they used to be a lot simpler. As far a…
I just see that some billion dollar companies that got big through the web or computing are already going downhill again. For example Yahoo and Nokia (not sure about Microsoft).
For business management, off the top of the head I would ask: what devices will be used to run it in the future? Will desktop software still exist? Will everything be in the cloud? How will data enter the system?
One scary thing about the internet is that for a lot of things, a single company can cater to the whole world. That eliminates a lot of opportunities and competition.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#88Dave's dilemma is far too familier to a lot of people in the tech scene in general, and bay area in particular. Bay area attracts the brightest minds from across the globe. All of them have been at the top of their high school classes. They have all been told from a very young age that they are destined to doing something great in life. They not only expect themselves to do better than themselves but pretty much dema…
Even comparing your present self to your past self is fraught with numerous biases. Humans have imperfect memories, so they only remember most interesting events from the past. Based on the few remembered details and a vague sensation of your self 2 years back, you would construct a full detailed description and compare it to your present self. But you forget that the past self that you have constructed is influenced a lot by your experiences in these past 2 years. Your past self really wasn't what you think it is.
You cannot accurately compare yourself over a time period. Moreover, on which dimensions are you going to compare? Say if I had a successful software company, but I give it up and move to Paris to become a mediocre painter, a vocation I'm currently enjoying a lot (but can't say if I keep enjoying it forever), have I made a good or a bad decision? Have I "progressed" in life or not?
Key should be to not overanalyze life, but rather simply live it as if it is not that important (in face of death, it isn't). Life should not be obsessively optimized. You can spend your whole life analyzing what you have done and still find yourself dissatisfied.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#89At 33, I was single, penniless and back living with my parents. I had spent my twenties partying and getting drunk, somehow managing to carve out a career as a middling journalist during the sober bits. Journalism does not pay well and I was always teetering over the edge of my overdraft limit.
In my early thirties, I sobered up a little and noticed that my career was going nowhere. I decided to sack in my reasonably secure job in publishing and move from Manchester (a provincial city in the UK) to the capital London. Big mistake. I struggled to get a job, got into debt and, eventually, in desperation, asked to move in with my parents.
So there was I - a guy who had always valued his independence, who had on several occasions even mocked people who lived with mum and dad - staying in a tiny room in his parent's house. I was the epitome of a loser.
I am now nearly 40 and my life situation has improved immeasurably. I am married to a wonderful lady, I own a house, I have a couple of reasonably successful projects-cum-start-ups that pay the bills and free me - hopefully forever - from having to work for someone else. I am not a mega-success on the world stage but, compared with where I was at 33, I am in a very good position.
I suppose what I am saying here is that one can bloom at anytime, early in life or late in life. I would also add that being a programmer (I got a job as a web developer a couple of years after leaving my parents house) gives one a far greater chance of financial and business success than if you are involved in most other professions. Try doing a start-up if all you know is nursing or stacking shelves.
So we are lucky in that we have a skill that can turn-around our lives at potentially any time.
Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
#90Well 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…
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 same thing in its effect.
That gets to be a complicated thing. It's delusional in part, of course. But it's also not, in part. He likely really could have achieved a lot more if he'd put more of himself into it.
Maybe not all he imagines, but he's clearly saying he knows there was more to do than he's done.
I don't think that's a bad standard to hold yourself to. I think a lot of progress depends on that kind of standard.
My senior year of high school I had this long running fight with one of my teachers. I'd cruised through school to that point, putting in just enough effort to pass everyone else, but no more than that. This teacher started grading me lower, writing "You can do better than this" on my papers. I was furious with him. Furious. I'd stay after school and we'd literally yell at each other about it for hours. I said he had no right to expect more from me, I was giving him more than anyone else was as things were. He had to grade me on the same scale. He completely refused to do it. Being a very stubborn boy, I refused to do more.
I "won" that argument by just not giving him what he wanted from me. But he was right to demand it, and I was wrong not to work harder. I paid for that attitude in college and for many years after.
I think in the end it's about not cheating yourself. I think that's that McClure is on about, and I think he's right.