It's not, it's getting worse.

You are in a cycle of slave-driving yourself. You remind me of Jiddu Krishnamurthi's assertion that "Influence acts strongest when you don't realize that it is acting". I would venture that most of your accomplishments are a result of being told what you should do, what you should be.

You will NEVER have the energy that the people whom you compare with have. Because they are being themselves, and are connected to the natural wellspring of motivation that comes from genuine interest, while you are the salmon swimming upstream, aping societal ideals and trying to be someone you are not.

Choose the opposite for a while : stop doing things that don't motivate you. Find out what motivates you. Be spontaneous. If you find a small plant at the roadside that you want to water, do it. Observe that absolutely no effort was required in this action. This is the mark of genuine flow : you will not feel the effort. If you chance upon some project which you execute in this natural state of interest, you will not feel tired.

Almost no one takes my advice because it's so threatening to be natural. What if you are not naturally ambitious? That's a horrific thought to have while being in the company of achievers, isn't it?

>> Almost no one takes my advice because it's so threatening to be natural. What if you are not naturally ambitious? That's a horrific thought to have while being in the company of achievers, isn't it?

Awesome. Yes, this is pure Jiddu Krishnamurti. Basically, comparison causes conflict, conflict causes anxiety, anxiety causes fear, and fear makes mind dull. There's no intelligence where there's fear. Key here is to eliminate comparison. I keep reminding myself often :)

Unfortunately, I can report that I have done all of my best work in my career when I was extraordinarily anxious, feeling like I was holding to the side of the cliff with just my fingernails. Whenever things have started to get too comfortable, I found that hubris has disrupted my successes.

It's a sad thought, but I see absolutely no reason to believe that the natural state of humanity is to be happy (or, more specifically, content). The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness [0] seems like a pretty harsh place, and that's also where I've found most brains function best.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Environ...

What about the fact that stress is tremendously destructive to our health? It is directly a threat to the survival of both individuals and the societies they live in. If being in an anxious state for extensive periods of time were the most advantageous to survival, then evolution seems not to have noticed it. The structure and functioning of our endocrine system heavily suggests that humans were built for occasional short bursts of high stress, not extended periods of constant high stress (as we have designed society to require of most people).

Sometimes its just good enough to be like cockroaches to survive and succeed.

I ask because I can recall several times in both school and career when I was much more productive because I had to be due to time constraints than when I had ample free time and was not as burdened. I'm wondering if you are describing that as well.

Would you rather be happy or productive?

Can an unhappy person be truly productive, not just doing some thing mechanically and painfully ?

The Underachiever's Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great

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What a great quote

And to actually add something useful to the discussion, I'll add that I think the key to dealing with fear, and distressing emotions in general, is not to try to get rid of it, but to learn to function effectively in it's presence. Sometimes fear is a valid response, and should be respected. A lot of the time, fear is not a useful response. Sometime, when fear isn't seen for what it is, when I'm acting out of fear but not aware of it, fear can be quite destructive.

Check out "Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong" (http://www.amazon.com/Things-Might-Terribly-Horribly-Wrong/d...), as well as almost anything from Pema Chodron.

"To survive in grand prix racing, you need to be afraid. Fear is an important feeling. It helps you to race longer and live longer." - Ayrton Senna.

I find I don't end up being comfortable with someone until we've argued about something. One of my favorite ways to become friends with someone is to find something we disagree on and debate it.

Am I the only one who read this in Yoda's voice?

Even if the actual act of coding (or painting, or martial arts, or writing, or watering roadside plants) is effortless, there's a hell of a lot of effort that goes into just getting yourself in a position to do it.

Example: perhaps painting is effortless for you, but putting yourself in a position to paint involves a lot of mundane things that require effort. You still have to buy and stretch canvasses. You have to buy a brush. You have to clean your brushes. If you want to make a career of it, you need to tackle some basic business tasks. You need to deal with an agent or gallery. You need to file your taxes, because painting gets a lot harder when you're in jail or the IRS has taken your stuff. You have to work and pay your rent, because it's tough to paint when you're homeless and worrying about your next meal and whether you'll survive the night. And so forth. There's a lot of shit that has to get done just to place yourself in a position where you can regularly put brush to canvas.

When I started my own business that was my experience. Writing the code was the fun part. Effortless, you might say. I was compelled to write it - it was harder to stay away from it than it was to work on it. But I went through hell just to be able to write that code - I worked long hours at my day job so that I could pay the bills, I often had to choose between writing code and having a social life, and so on. And prior to even starting that venture, it took me years of hard work and college education just to develop the skills that allowed me to write that code.

Your advice is, at best, useful only to those who already have their basic needs provided for. Trust-fund babies and the like.

But the quality of energy will be different when you are shovelling the coal if YOU chose where the ship is going, if the dream of what lies on the other shore is yours. That vision (in your case, of starting your own business) is what fuelled your efforts, IMHO.

Why does he want to waste time on HN? Somewhere inside his heart is screaming a voice, "No, I don't want to do this". He's not lazy (CS top 10 school). It's just that the self-flagellation stops working for many people once they hit 20.

The difficulty is that the outer actions of someone like you (self-motivated) and someone like him (self-flagellating) may be the same. So the poor guy (or gal) tries to be like you and suffers.

The OP said: >>"CS degree from a top-10, worked at a startup and a large company, enough savings to last a few years of solo development."

Most of commenters on this site are software engineers — and this profession usually pays pretty well, to the point that we can safely assume that if the person is a capable software engineer, he has his basic needs provided for.

Which is why everyone must strive to have a side income/early retirement plan because you need to experience true freedom to enjoy things in life.

Once you have financial independence you can do anything you want, take unlimited vacations, learn music, go hiking, ride a motorcycle all day, heck you can even code all day and work on interesting projects without the fear of getting fired, denied a raise or whatever.

Work you like makes you happy, but not free.

Believe me when I say that there's nothing more I'd rather do than what I'm doing right now. Not even in question. I love programming, I love the project I'm working on, and I love the ideas that are waiting to be worked on in my future. My heart fills with joy when I think about holding those finished products in my hands. When I get into the flow, I can zone out for days and work on my projects with hardly a break for food and sleep.

However, I have a natural weakness towards idleness. Like any negative personality trait, I have faith that it can be worked on. (If you're depressed or socially anxious, you wouldn't just accept these as the way you are, would you?) Internally, when I run into this problem, it doesn't feel like swimming against the tide; it feels like a massive speed bump that needs to be overcome, but that I know from experience has a smooth road ahead of it. I think it is a mistake to believe that every ambitious person is naturally driven, from beginning to end, solely by their ambition. Sometimes it's not enough.

Were I to succumb to my personality, I would sit in front of the TV, depressed and unfulfilled, for literally decades. That is not an option.

Have you considered that you might have an anxiety problem?

You mention being crippled by fear. You mention a constant gnawing. You mention a daily rehearsal of a major anxiety, your always feeling behind, frequently feeling exhausted and terrified, an endless state of panic, and being endlessly haunted. That is a whole lot of anxiety, and there are other kinds of anxiety disorder besides social anxiety.

My tip for you: find a therapist you like and go regularly. You've got two problems here: you are trapped in a behavioral loop, struggling for context. And, being young, you don't have enough life experience to see as many patterns as somebody older, especially somebody who spends all day talking with people. Regularly seeing a good therapist will help with both of those. They can also help you consider whether your level of anxiety is unusual, and what your options are.

I should add that when I was your age, I was too arrogant to do that. I was sure that by dint of raw smarts I would figure it out on my own. Which was both true and dumb: reinventing psychology from scratch would in some sense be an achievement, but like most reinventing of the wheel, it's not an achievement that anybody cares about, not even me.

Anyhow, I have worked out an anxiety-related checklist over time. Now when I notice anxious feelings, the things I wonder:

* Am I getting enough exercise? 30-60 mins cardio 3-4x week is about right for me.

* Am I carrying a lot of stress in my body? Yoga, massage, and hot tubs are helpful.

* Are there environmental factors? E.g., noisy environment, messy living space.

* What am I eating? My mood is most stable on foods with low glycemic index, worst with junk food.

* Am I getting enough sleep? I do best with ~7.5 hours on a very regular schedule.

* What's my drug intake? More than 100mg caffeine or 2 drinks alcohol and my mood will be less stable the next day.

* Am I taking my vitamins? This could be placebo, but I take a B-100, a sublingual B12, and some fish oil. My doctor recommended them for reducing the effects of stress.

For me, my procrastination is directly driven by feelings of anxiety. The more chill I am, the more I get done.

I live in Japan, most of the time holed up in my apartment and hardly interacting with anyone. On the rare occasions I get to enjoy a true fun interaction with someone, it really helps improve mood and reduce anxiety.

In England the BACP are the registration body you should look for if you go private.

Short courses of CBT for anxiety should be available on the NHS - either see your GP (and you may need to push this) or self-refer. A web-search of your county and terms like "IAPT" (improved access to psychological therapies) or "talking therapies" should return your local number.

You might find good results after a short course - 8 to 14 weeks.

Here's the NICE guidance for anxiety disorders: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs53

It's easy to think of anxiety as being a mild disorder, but it can become pretty severe. OCD is an anxiety disorder and that can hospitalise people.

I like your list of lifestyle interventions.

I actually never realized how anxious I was, I just never knew I had it. It was really crippling. I've been trying to elevate my anxiety and as a result I've been more productive. I use my github page as indicator, it was empty for 2 years until recently. Almost two months now of me working on new frameworks and my projects.

Just work on your project and be happy with your accomplishments. Find something to give meaning to your life like volunteering for a charity. It's vanishingly unlikely anyone will care about your (or the vast majority of peoples') legacies 100 years from now. Honestly, just enjoy your work, help others, and stop thinking it's a competition.

edit: I'm significantly older than you, so 1) I have some perspective on this and 2) sorry if this was less sensitive than what your generational peers might say or lacked trigger warnings.

The problem is not how to become "successful" it's how to stop caring about it.

I'm a little older than you, so I'll give some advice about how to deal with our personality "flaw." Embrace it. Be aware of it, be OK with it, and learn how to make it a positive thing. A few years ago I stopped worrying about being better than some programming idol. You're probably a pretty creative, innovative type if you're anything like me. You can't teach that, in my opinion, and that's a big advantage. You have this skill, programming, and you enjoy it, mostly. You also enjoy some down time. Use your down time how you wish, but always be thinking about the next big idea be it a business, a technology, or a new library. When you find the right idea, it will give you a jolt. "Holy sh#t, no one else has done that yet?" These moments are the ones that catapult me back into that driven, ambitious mode that makes me so productive.

Just remember that no one expects more of you than you. Don't be so hard on yourself. Know yourself and learn how to take advantage of your natural traits.

To be honest, I do struggle with procrastination, and it hurts me to think that by now, I could have finished that miniproject that I've been working on or that other one, etc, and I use some of that as motivation to push me back into the act. I'm an introvert (which has it's own downsides), and I leverage that to spend my free time on my projects and learning. I do however try to minimize the "souless fun" time and maximize doing things that I find fun but I see as productive. The reason I even try is I believe I can overcome my procrastinating personality and become much more productive.

If I believe you, then I give up on that desire to better myself. should I? Perhaps it is different for different people?

EDIT: My final statement sounds challenging, but if you think it is healthier for me to not fight that part of me, then that's fine. I welcome your point of view; I want a discussion, not validation or an apology.

I had a rather romantic and gifted English teacher in my first year of college who claimed that procrastination is a part of the creative process, likening it hatching an egg, she claimed that procrastinating helped mature ideas before you put pen to paper, similar to the idea to use procrastination time to fully develop a solution to a problem, as you said. Yes, there is a correlation of my hearing of her doctrine and my increased procrastination, but I can't blame her for it.

After a decade of roller-coaster productivity, I finally went to see a therapist to discuss these issues. That was the best decision of my professional life. I was able to talk through my issues, but after a few months of behavioral changes (light box therapy, exercise, mindfulness, etc.), the issue, while better, was not fixed. So I was referred to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me with ADHD. I got a prescription for Adderall, which I've been on for the past 4-5 years now. It has turned my productivity and career around. I'm making twice what I was making 5 years ago and finally am seeing a lot of the potential that I and others saw in me finally being realized.

ADD (ADHD is the technical diagnosis, but I have no "HD" symptoms at all) isn't really about "having the attention span of a gnat"; it's about inability to sustain focused attention long term, about not being as excited by the last 20% of the project as you are about the first 80%, about not being able to get started--but once you did, it's usually interesting enough to keep your attention for the rest of the day. That definition certainly fit me.

The OP said a couple of comments above: "If you're depressed or socially anxious, you wouldn't just accept these as the way you are, would you?" Chances are that if you are depressed or socially anxious to a point that it affects your life in negative ways, you'd see a professional about the issue and may end up with medication to help with the issue. You don't just wish those conditions away; nor do you wish ADD symptoms away. I'd recommend considering talking to someone about your issues with productivity.

I'm not saying that it's for everybody, nor do I believe in overmedication, but from my experience, which sounds exactly like the OP's, it was the right choice for both me and my career.

I also agree with jeletonskelly here: to a certain extent, embrace your "laziness"... laziness leads to working smarter, not harder. Know your strengths and flaws and come up with a way to use both of them to your advantage.

I'd say find out what is important to you. What is important to you is not what you'd rather do or even what you love. What do you think is important for the world, for your life? Do you want to raise a child? Do you want to help society communicate? Do you want to solve a problem? If you couldn't do any "thing" what idea is the most important to you?

Idleness isn't a weakness. It's a response. Idleness is what your mind craves when it is under too much stress. Stress is mostly internal, you can be idle and still be under a lot of stress because you hate the fact that you're idle, this can be paralyzing.

However, if you didn't feel that idleness was bad, you would not feel that stress, and you wouldn't be trapped in idleness. You'd still be idle, but it would be easier to take action.

You focus on what you haven't done. This is the worst. You aren't excited by the cool things that those programmers have done, you are disappointed that you didn't do them.

Instead you should focus on the things that you are doing. Don't "force yourself" to go and work on something, that only reinforces that feeling and will cause you to retreat from that stress as soon as you can.

One thing I do in this sort of circumstance is try to do nothing. Simply be idle, but don't go and distract myself with the Internet, just do absolutely nothing, get a tea and stare out the window, do this for a few hours. Any feeling of things I have to do, I just let them go away. Pretty soon, there will be things that I really want to do. When I'm at that point then I'll go to work.

TV and Internet are terrible though, you go to them because you're looking to be idle, but they're just stimulating enough to keep you from relaxing. But it's not idleness that's bad. The desire to be idle is a response, and it's healthy, just learn to do it efficiently. Don't do it in front of the Internet or the TV because they distract you from actually being idle.

It's great that you have a passion for programming and you get into the flow of working on something you actually enjoy. I can promise you that most - if not all - devs go through such period of flow and not being in the flow. Sometimes you lock on to a project and spend days on it, other times you don't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole for days. I don't think that is bad unless it is harming some important end goal like a company deadline or life goals.

Are there other things you are interested in? If so, you can fill your so-called idle times with those. HN here, going outside and meeting people (if that's your thing), a hobby or two that you can naturally flow into as well.

If programming is your only passion, then you can fill a good chunk of idle time with other programming-related problems you find interesting. Random library you want to write? Go for it. If charity is your thing, find some group for social good that can benefit from your dev skills - make their website better, write an app for them, improve their inventory system, etc.

That said, it takes conscious effort to not be swallowed by the stuff that makes the news. Forget about those who seem to be starting $90000 billion businesses at 23. They've found something they like and it worked out well for them, great! Find your own interests and work on cultivating and growing those instead.

> “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

> “Every sun casts a shadow, and genius's shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul's call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We're not alone if we've been mowed down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us. And here's the biggest bitch: We don't even know what hit us. I never did. From age twenty-four to thirty-two, Resistance kicked my ass from East Coast to West and back again thirteen times and I never even knew it existed. I looked everywhere for the enemy and failed to see it right in front of my face.”

That book is a treasure trove in how to change your thinking and defeat this. But it does require changing your thinking and a great deal of discipline.

  You only live twice
  Or so it seems
  One life for yourself
  And one for your dreams

  Between the idea
  And the reality 
  Between the motion 
  And the act
  Falls the shadow

  Between the conception 
  And the creation 
  Between the emotion 
  And the response 
  Falls the shadow

  Between the desire
  And the spasm 
  Between the potency
  And the existence
  Between the essence
  And the descent
  Falls the Shadow

Please don't do this : "for days and work on my projects with hardly a break for food and sleep"...At least, question yourself : how much of driving oneself is excessive? Generally, we don't pause to think about these things, and that's why, when you take a break, you crash. The pendulum swings to the other extreme, tortoise and hare, yada yada... you get it. With a handle like "tastyface", I know you get it :-))

(I'm just kidding with you. Please don't take this as an offensive statement)

Long-term problem: Comparing yourself to others. When done in modest amounts this can be a huge source of inspiration. But taken too far and it becomes a sure path to anxiety. Beyond that threshold the only person you should be comparing yourself to is the "you" from yesterday.

Short-term problem: Sounds like you have an addiction to distraction. I suffer from this also and just started reading this[0]. Too early into it to tell if it will help but so far it looks promising. I've also found the Pomodoro technique helpful.

[0]http://www.amazon.com/The-Distraction-Addiction-Information-...

While studying, I used to beat myself up about the fact that I could not get into the habit of reading every night, and studying a few hours every day.

Sure, sometimes if I just go and start doing the task I need to do, then it starts to flow, but mostly if my head is not in the right place to do it, then what you get is lackluster output.

Some people are the "Work steadily on a regular basis" on a project, others are the "18h days for 5 days and then done with the whole thing".

The concerning part of your post is that you feel you would sit in front of the TV depressed. Have you checked with your doctor if you are actually depressed?

Beyond that, it took me until my early 30s to realise that I should not beat myself up for not operating the way I assumed everyone else does. Ironically, people are under the impression that I work non-stop all the time or that I studied every night, because that is how they perceive that I must be doing things. Once I found this out from talking to people that I was in awe of, only to find they thought I was doing fairly well and must be working my butt off, I realised that even though I have a tendency to beat myself up about my work patterns, I should perhaps give myself a little more leeway and look at the results.

Perhaps it comes down to pressure as well, some people work very badly under deadline pressure, others are unable to be productive until they have the deadline pressure, but have had all the details in their minds for the rest of the project.

2. Yes, yesterday is gone...but think about all the other people you are ahead of...half the planet isn't even on the internet yet. Probably less than a fraction of 1% of the world is a junior dev. You are literally ahead of 99% of the world. Don't lose your dominance and fall behind more people...youll never be ahead of everyone...but you can stay ahead of almost everyone!

This has happened before, back during the Industrial Revolution. Factories and mechanical automation enabled workers to leap in productivity over their craftsmen predecessors, and factory owners divorced their compensation from the value of the work. Eventually, whole families had to work extremely long hours 6 or 7 days a week just to be able to afford to eat. Society let this happen because they saw the workers as not deserving of a share of the value they were creating because 'a machine was really doing the work and the owner paid for the machine'. Things eventually reached a breaking point and society forced factory owners to pay a single person enough to raise an entire family on for 40 hours of work in a week. This was a monumental change. Whereas previously about 3 incomes with each working 60+ hours a week was necessary to raise a family, 1 income from 40 hours reaching the same amount was not a minor adjustment.

Social change takes time. Mental workers being a large group is really quite new, and society hasn't yet figured out how to handle them best. They're trying to just treat them the same as physical workers, which will inevitably fail simply because the human brain is not built for decades of constant mental work.

I'm a very ambitious and motivated person. I love stupid hard, nitty gritty problems. I've been writing code since I was 8. I landed my first coding job when I was 16 (working for the USAF Research Laboratory, no less). I'm now 29.

Growing up I was always driven by my interests. If I wasn't interested, I wasn't going to do it. If I was interested there was no stopping me from doing it. I was smart enough that I coasted through high school, but when I hit college I very nearly flunked out.

The problem was that my interests ran hot and cold. One day/minute/hour I'd be deeply interested in some subject, and the next I couldn't care less. This would happen with topics which I knew were captivating to me in a general sense. Sometimes I'd get so interested in some project I'd skip other classes for a week or more because I couldn't stop thinking about it.

However most of the time I'd find that without exercising hurculean amounts of discipline there was no way I was going to be able to stay on track well enough to study and finish homework/projects.

I'd sit down for a lecture with all kinds of ambition to focus and absorb the material. 20 minutes in my brain was somewhere else and the margins of my notebook were filled with mindless doodles.

When my grades dropped low enough my school's intervention programs kicked in. It was suggested that I go get checked out for learning disabilities. Since I felt somewhat compelled to show I was making an effort, I did.

I figured I didnt have any kind of disorder - especially ADHD. I wasn't hyper, and when I was "in the zone" it was nearly impossible for me to shake my focus.

It turns out that having ADHD doesn't necessarily mean that you are never focused. It just means you have a very difficult time choosing to be focused. In fact, hyperfocusing (marked by losing track of time, forgetting to eat, etc) is a common symptom.

Occasionally I go mine my old college notes for some obscure detail. With a single glance you can easily tell if a page was written pre-medication or if it was written post-medication.

If you think this story echos your own experiences and struggles, do yourself a favor and go have a chat with a psychiatrist or neurologist. It may just change your life in a huge, incredible way.

Finally, do try to stop comparing yourself to others in such a destructive way. Success stories are a bit like airbrushed models in lingerie ads. They don't give you the whole story. They're there to capture your eyeballs with hopes that they can be monetized, marketed to, or both.

Try to focus on incremental goals, instead. Scope these goals with a focus on finishing rather than perfection, and don't beat yourself up for not being superhuman. Specifically, try your best to fight the thought that success is predicated upon the kind of hard work that produces exhaustion. Success comes from routinely focusing on well-scoped, iterative goals.

On medication (assuming some kind of CNS stimulant?) do you find that you're less prone to get excited about new things, and spend more time on things you're already invested in?

For me, it's really easy to get excited about new things. I throw a lot of stuff at the wall. Some of it sticks, most of it doesn't. But the more things that manage to find their way into my interests, the less time I have to focus on any single one of them.

I've been able to work around this to a certain extent with some pretty strict scheduling, but no matter what I'm working on, there's always a piece of me that REALLY wants to be focusing on something else.

Absolutely, but this may be unique to me. I find complex things interesting. If I can't maintain focus long enough to get a certain level of complexity all loaded into the forefront of my consciousness, I find that I don't become interested when I otherwise would.

> do you find that you're less prone to get excited about new things, and spend more time on things you're already invested in?

No, and yes, respectively.

I am still subject to distraction while medicated, especially from new and interesting things. I'd guess that new things are as likely to pique my interest whether or not I'm medicated.

The difference is that medication makes it easier for me to decide on a scope for my current activities and makes it so that a conscious decision is required in order to react to a stimulus or tangent which would take me out of that intended scope. Without medication I don't usually have direct control over this choice, and I'm very infrequently conscious of it.

> there's always a piece of me that REALLY wants to be focusing on something else

I experience this whether or not I'm medicated, but medication makes that voice in my head shut up once I get moving on an unrelated task.

First step: Finding your zone. This is a matter of conditioning and conditioning doesn't come easily. Find something that puts you in a zone of focus. It doesn't matter what the focus is on, it doesn't matter what that zone is - the key is finding focus and maintaining it for longer and longer periods until you can easily maintain focus for a number of hours at a time [I'm told there are drugs that do this very effectively, but I personally try to avoid drugs wherever possible]. Whatever it is should be something that doesn't allow you to lose your focus or give up, even when the going gets tough and every instinct in you is telling you to throw in the towel.

For me it was cycling - totally unrelated to programming. It was better for me than being in a gym because if I decide to stop pedaling, I stop going anywhere. In a gym, this means just getting off the bike and I'm no further behind. If you're 10 miles from home and stop pedaling, you're 10 miles from home and the only way back home is to get back on your bike and start pedaling again. Sitting on the side of the road procrastinating isn't going to help, nor is it going to be in any way enticing to sit there. After 40 miles, you could be exhausted and realizing you still have a 5 mile climb ahead of you before you can put your bike down; there's no way around it, you just have to get on and do it.

I've set up a playlist on my phone of music that runs around 130-140 bpm [that's approximately the speed of club music that makes you wanna dance] and will run without looping for the duration of my ride. I listen to the same playlist every ride. You might get sick of it, but you listen anyway. After a few weeks of agony and wanting to throw in the towel but doing it anyway you start to find peace in the pain and it becomes a meditation, you don't even hear the music consciously any more but the beat drives you forward, you find the zone and it's just you, the pain and the road and before you know it the circuit is over. For me this process took a number of weeks, but now, if I put that playlist on, even if I'm not on my bike, my brain snaps into that zone. It's been conditioned to focus when that playlist comes on, just like Pavlov's dog salivating when the bell rings. [This requires ongoing maintenance]

Step 2: Remove necessary distractions. When I say necessary, I mean unavoidable things that will need doing and will break your focus when they are required to be done because you didn't take the preemptive strike of killing them off first. Things like important phone calls to your accountant or the bank. If you can't focus while you have a messy desk, clean your desk, get your coffee, eat your breakfast, do all of these unavoidable things first.

Step 3: Understand the problem intimately, ensure that you can recite it inside outside, upside down and backwards. You don't want to have to keep going back to ensure you understand the problem, this will break your focus. If you need to pester someone to help you understand the problem, pester them until you have fully digested every nuance of what it is you're trying to achieve.

Step 4: Understand the solution to that problem intimately. Ensure that you understand every single step that will take you from where are right now to where you need to be. Any pieces you don't understand, go back and reread step 4. If you keep having to come back and figure stuff out, this will break your focus. Again, pester whoever you need to in order to completely understand the path to the solution.

Steps 3 and 4 are my biggest triggers for procrastination. If I don't understand the problem or the solution to that problem well enough, I can't maintain focus. It might take me days to get down to it if I let myself skip either of these steps - so I don't.

Step 5: Everything else can wait: No Facebook, no Hacker News, no Blinkfeed, no Quora, no email, no phone calls, no text messages, no whatever else it is you like to waste time with. Put them all aside and have the discipline to stay away from them until you're finished this step. Now, do whatever it was from Step 1 that puts you into your focused zone. Get on with completing the steps you've laid out in Step 4.

Step 6: You're done, go reward yourself with all those other distractions that you put aside to complete Step 5. Congratulations.

> When my grades dropped low enough my school's intervention programs kicked in. It was suggested that I go get checked out for learning disabilities. Since I felt somewhat compelled to show I was making an effort, I did.

This is where the stories diverge though. My college's intervention program was basically them calling me lazy and forcing me to sign a paper agreeing that I would improve. I knew I couldn't accomplish that, so I didn't re-enroll the next semester.

I had always accepted that I was very lazy and learned to work around/with it. But over the past few years I feel like it has been getting much worse. My passions are starting to feel like chores. I used to practice the guitar for several hours each day, but now it's closer to an hour each month. Even sitting down to watch a whole movie on Netflix can be tough. I'm not sure if I've watched even a single movie in it's entirety at all this year.

But of course, I won't even notice myself spending 4 hours aimlessly browsing the web without leaving my chair until I realize that I've wasted my night...

It's gotten so bad that I have considered it might not just be laziness and comments like yours are really encouraging. But I don't know where I'd begin. And, frankly, the idea of seeing a specialist for help or medication really scares me.

Do I just google for psychiatrists near me and give one a call? Would I need to find one that specializes in ADHD? Are there any websites that can help direct me?

I really appreciate you taking the time to write this comment by the way.

Don't let it. You're seeking help voluntarily. Assuming something is actually wrong with your brain, it's worth it to address it head-on. Worst case, you wind up with a bad doctor and you have to go find a new one. Best case, you gain some tools to help you gain a much higher degree of control over your life.

> Do I just google for psychiatrists near me and give one a call? Would I need to find one that specializes in ADHD? Are there any websites that can help direct me?

What country are you in? If you're in the states, I'd start with your insurance company. Most insurance companies have directories of in-network specialists. If your insurance is shit and doesn't cover specialist visits, then yeah - I'd just Google around. Absent recommendations, look for somebody board-certified [1]. I happened to luck into a doctor who had both psychiatric and neurological specialities.

In New Zealand you must start off by asking your GP for a referral to a psychiatrist (you may need to do this in the USA if your insurance requires a referral). Explain your concerns with concentration, and that you'd like to be screened for ADHD and other related conditions. At this point if they're well-informed they'll likely ask you a few questions about it and offer some advice, but since you're asking to see a specialist they should be willing to make a referral. If they're not well-informed, they'll either skip the questions & counsel or tell you to piss off. If you get the referral, you'll go see a psychiatrist. I have no idea what the diagnosis process is like here, however - I was diagnosed in the states. However, when you are diagnosed your psych will receive a special authority number. Eventually this number will be transferred over to your GP once your treatment regimen is stabilized.

Aside: In the states it's not likely that your GP will tell you to piss off when asking for a psych/neuro referral. Also in the states GPs may offer to treat you directly w/o a specialist. This is illegal in New Zealand, as general physicians aren't typically qualified in this area. Really - go see a specialist.

The diagnosis process is nothing to be worried about, though it could take a bit of time. The process can take a few hours, or a few 1-2 hour sessions. If I recall correctly, they did an ADHD questionnaire, the MMPI [2], an IQ test, an "IQ achievement test," a few very brief visual/spatial tests which supposedly look for neurological symptoms schizophrenia, and a session or two of discussion with a psychologist about what my goals for improvement were, where I felt I was failing, etc. I think my range of testing was a bit more in depth than usual, as they were looking for a bunch of different learning disorders. After all this they discussed the results of each of the tests with me, explained my diagnosis, and set me up with the psychiatrist to begin a treatment regimen.

1: http://www.abms.org/board-certification/ 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personali...

Have you tried waking up early? I find that I will similarly veg out from 5pm onward. For the past few months I've been faithfully getting out of bed at 5:45 every morning (with the help of a clock radio). The peace hours between 6 and 9 are my favorite part of the day now.

I have 3 hours to myself to work on projects, work on a MOOC, do a self-check and orient myself to deal with the day.

  “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
  ― Chuck Close

It's harder to drive yourself to the finish line than it is to drive projects for an employer. I can't speak for everyone else, but for me at least, I have zero sense of obligation to myself - if I ditch a personal project because I lose interest or because I find a better solution or just because I don't feel like it, my reputation isn't at stake. It's easy to walk away from and leave it on a shelf gathering dust with few (if any) consequences; whereas I feel a deep sense of obligation to see paid projects through to the bitter end, however bitter that may be. You don't want to damage your reputation for delivering on your promises. This is a constant struggle in my life.

There are something to be said about habit and discipline. Certainly, one should never pursue something they have no interest in whatsoever. But for any thing we want to accomplish in life, there are tangent, chores, and generally "schlep" that you can't avoid. An extreme reading of your comment would mean that we should give up at the first road block. How do you differentiate between lacks of internal motivation, and great motivation being thwarted by fear of unpleasant tasks? In an ideal world, that shouldn't be an issue, in the real world, it's a lot harder to know.

When you're playing an instrument, if you've practiced a piece few hundreds times, you don't think your playing is good anymore. You know when you're making mistake, but even when you're playing perfectly, your perception of the piece you're playing would be a lot more "meh" comparing to the perception of some outside listener -- after all, you've heard that piece a lot of times. Motivated or not, without discipline it's unlikely you can keep doing things over and over.

When I was younger, I've always thought that great people doing great things by just focusing on their genuine interest, ie a physicist just want to understand the nature of the universe, and not particularly care whether his work is gonna have any impact or effect. It turns out that interest might not be the full picture: people who do great work might actually be conscious in wanting to be great, too. One of the example would be Richard Hamming, mentioned in his "You and Your Research" essay (which just popped up on HN lately, actually), even Feynman's biography mentioned that he need introspection during the period when he wasn't being productive as a physicist.

> In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'' Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do something significant.'' -- Richard Hamming, You and Your Research.

Right, there's no need to get all New Age enlightenment-ish about it. I am not even in disagreement with the Richard Hamming quote. All I'm stressing on is that it's title is "YOU and YOUR Research". It's not "YOU and WHAT-YOU-THINK-YOU-SHOULD-RESEARCH-ON Research".

I struggled with the exact same confusion about "it's supposed to be natural" vs. "real life == effort" for many years till I understood : you do what it takes when it's your vision. You put in the outer effort, but there is no inner friction. And this can happen across years of "effort".

For example, if you envision clearly that you want to provide your child with a home, and at the same time decide that you're not going to work 12 hours a day for it, and forego a Google job in preference for a more "boring" employer who pays lower but allows flexibility while still paying enough for the mortgage to be paid, why not? It will still look like dreary effort to the hotshot Stanford grad, but to you, each day, which is part of a designed self-directed life, will be lovely. So what if it involves some amount of will-power to deal with an abusive colleague, etc;? You'll live, because it's within YOUR parameters of tolerance. The same thing could work the other way round : you cannot IMAGINE working for Google, but for someone for whom it's been a lifelong dream puts in the "effort".

This is so true. It's odd that we celebrate butterflies and crush caterpillars. I think it was Les Brown who said something along the lines of– if you want to achieve uncommon, unreasonable results, you have to be an uncommon, unreasonable person putting in uncommon, unreasonable amounts of effort.

The whole "luck descended upon them" is a coping strategy. The narrative of luck makes people feel less bad about their lack of fortitude.

  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.

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?

Contrary to whatever you think 'chance' plays a huge role in every one's success. When luck meets hard work, the returns compound. When hard work meets back luck, a person feels they were treated unfairly.But chance matters in a way far more than you realize. Heck, a Human is born out of sheer luck.

People don't realize how important luck is, until despite all their hard work they fail. A few people fail over and over again despite giving their best all in the while watching people doing way little win.

It's not a nice thing to go through. It will take nothing short of a disaster to make you believe in a miracle.

Ultimately, I think, the kind of luck that matters most is the lack of bad luck. You can be the hardest working person in the world, but if you get hit by a car and spend two years recovering, that's gonna be a problem.

My point is, success compounds. At one point it starts looking like pure luck.

Unfortunately that's not true. People will the lottery every week. In business that happens too. Look at all the well funded startups which never amount to anything, and factor in the prestige, earnings and opportunity those companies afford their participants. Plenty of people are early employees of hot startups simply via friendships and connections. Many of them leave or are fired. Many of those people become vastly wealthy.

Moreover look at all the one-hit wonders and luck is an even greater factor. If people who are smart, talented and able can reproduce their success why are they so rare? When someone never manages to get close to their initial success lack is often in play. It's not that they weren't clever, or didn't work hard, but it can be that luck picked them from a field of very similar people.

That shouldn't of course change your behavior. Luck is beyond our locus of control and planning for it, or around it, is like planning around a potential meteorite strike, or rain.

Anything you can force via effort isn't luck which is why people get confused. You can achieve against the odds via hard work alone which is why working hard is worthwhile.

You can also scale your success. The difference between making a living, making a million and being Mark Zuckerberg can all be attracted to work and wit without the need to factor luck into the equation at all.

Finally we're all focused on good-luck. Bad luck is the real enemy. To be diagnosed with a serious illness, or to be unable to take an opportunity due to factors you cannot effect will cut the legs out from underneath you however hard you work. Sometimes your good luck is invisible unless you're aware of the bad luck of those who'd otherwise take your place.

Not all hardworking people are successful and not all successful people are hardworking.

I do hope this is an extreme case of misdiagnosis: it's implying that the OP is not an achiever, and lacking ambition - just because there are a few small hurdles in the way of his getting things done!

Here's an alternative diagnosis: if you focus too much on your peers, you're poisoning your own motivation. Of course you'll spend all day on HN, if the alternative is staring at an editor with a voice in your head scolding you for not being a success. Fix that and you'll have fixed your procrastination (easier said than done, probably, but still). A reading tip: Mastery, by George Leonard.

Taking the first part of quote out of context makes it seem harsh, but the second half of the quote provides justification.

>> You will NEVER have the energy that the people whom you compare with have. Because they are being themselves, and are connected to the natural wellspring of motivation that comes from genuine interest, while you are the salmon swimming upstream, aping societal ideals and trying to be someone you are not.

The quote assumes that your peers are focusing all of their energy on being themselves. If you are spending your energy concerning yourself with the efforts of others, you arent spending _all_ of your energy focusing on being yourself and doing your best. Seems very much in line with your diagnosis.

> Seems very much in line with your diagnosis.

I think you gave the grandparent post a very charitable reading :)

But we probably do agree that constantly comparing oneself to others is not good for emotional well-being.

My advice to OP: don't focus on outcomes (ie, 'this 22 year-old did X, why haven't I?), focus on the process. Your goal should be to each day do work and spend your time in a way of which you would be proud. Avoid the hot and cold cycle of overwork / burnout and procrastination.

I would argue against that statement. What makes you say that? Passion is the necessary driving force to keep someone motivated enough to follow through.

You're probably looking at this from inside the SV bubble, but I could make a similar case there, too. Plenty of apps just ride the latest trend, and would pivot in a heart beat if it made if it makes business sense.

The problem wasn't the work, it was the environment. I had allowed myself to get into a situation where I was spending all of my creative energy on someone else: my employer.

I did a brief stint back as an employee at another place for a while, just because I had gotten desperate for cash and it was the only opportunity that came my way for a while. But I eventually went freelance and now I only work part-time for my client. The rest of the time I spend working for myself.

Moral of the story: you are correct, you do need to just cut and run sometimes, but just be careful not to confuse the impact of environment on your feelings about your activities with your actual feelings about your activities.

What if I am not interested in anything? I don't really want anything; I think that drive of wanting stuff has all but dried up in the past 5 years.

I'm wasting my life away counting days. What now?

One way to deal with this is similar to how people meditate: 1) focus on being aware of nothing, or 2) focus on being aware of everything (while not becoming distracted). Either way, employing single-minded attentiveness will reboot your brain and help you generate your own thoughts again. A sense of purpose can arise only after you stop being distracted by the trivial racket of the world outside.

To begin, sit and do nothing for as long as it takes, til you get antsy enough that you just have to do something. Whatever that something is, it rose to the top of your list of stuff you felt the need to do, so that alone makes it important. So act on it. If later you run out of ideas again, then sit down and return to doing nothing until the cluelessness passes.

But whatever you do, DON'T mindlessly tune in, and STOP doing ten things at once. Those paths lead nowhere.

Once you figure out what you're curious about, throw yourself into learning everything you can.

That, and serve others. Volunteer. Ask yourself– what do you wish you had when you were a kid, that you didn't? What do you know now that you wish you knew before? Then seek out people who're struggling with that problem, and help them. It feels good.

In the tragedy of the commons, the person with the shortest time preference wins. I desire long-term goals like college funds for the children and retirement funds for the parents. The spouse always desires a house with one more room in it than the one we currently occupy, a vehicle newer than the ones we currently drive, furniture more comfortable and attractive than that which we currently own.

For a full decade, I have spent nearly nothing upon my own interests. I dare not spend even $5 for a fast-food sandwich, for fear that $5 will add to "our" debts. I find that my interests have waned, and my ambition has withered. What good is wanting that which you cannot have? Why take a risk when you can realize no benefit from the reward?

Then I realized that this is what it must be like to live in poverty. Desire begets misery. Merely existing incurs debt. The only treatment for the despair is apathy, but that is like taking heroin for a headache.

But now that I no longer care about anything, now that I have stuffed all my dreams into a sack and thrown them in the river to drown, now that I no longer feel pleasure in anything that am able to do myself, I have fallen into the trap of nihilism. Everything is pointless, including attempts to become a non-nihilist.

It's too late for us. Our only purpose now is to serve as a cautionary tale for others. The lesson to be learned is to never allow the course of your life to be directed by others, or you will lose the ability to direct it yourself.

I did, of course, tell a teensy little lie previously in this post. I have discovered a passionate desire to write fiction, and take pleasure in devising schemes by which the system of the world may be altered to become less cruel to those subjected to it.

Just force yourself to try new things until the things you do no longer seem obligatory. Just yesterday, I saw a video on YouTube where the subject, who had miniscule pedagogical talent, demonstrated the creation of a longbow in ten minutes, using less than $10 in materials that are readily available from any home improvement store. Longbows are largely obsolete. Why would anyone make one from modern materials? You can't even use something like that for historical reenactments. You can buy bows made from modern materials that work better for hunting or target shooting. Why would you make a video of yourself making one?

The answer to all those irrelevant questions is that this guy likes making bows, and he wants to share his enjoyment with others. You and I can also do that, no matter what it is we do.

How the hell did he even figure out that he liked doing that? Making bows is hardly a commonplace activity. Apparently, he just did something that he had never done before, and simply kept on doing it. Stop counting days and start doing things. Anything.

That's also what it's like to live in depression. Everything about your comment sounds like depression to me.

The facts remain that ancestor post needs to do something not part of the ordinary routine, and that I ought to finish that first book instead of posting on HN.

This is really easy to say and hard to do, if you've been pushed, prodded, poked into some direction or the other, by well meaning adults/role-models.

Being able to hear your inner motivations is very close to listening to your own thoughts == form of mindfulness.

Very very powerful idea, very very hard to stick to, in our present society of instant-everything, and addictive news cycles.

https://mobile.twitter.com/pestaa/status/585740222450819072

All I have to show for it? A 9 month gap to explain in my resume.

Simply one should make peace with being considered an utter failure by everyone and then proceed to do what they love nonetheless. All else is poor imitation.

It's important for me to work on my own terms and to do something I find meaningful, and so I enjoyed riding along with the crowd that follows the above mentality. However, I'm also good at critical thinking and sometimes I ask myself about the people and what we're doing. Why are we all chasing the startup dream? Can we really all achieve great success? I think a big part of "why" is the pack mentality, ironically, that drives young people like me to this "don't join the workforce, don't listen to the man, do whatever you want", because so many people are encouraging us to chase our dreams. But I've come to the conclusion that for most people, it's simply not feasible to achieve that dream of making enough money doing your own thing. You need to be very, very good, or be lucky enough to have an excellent idea (and execution!!). Sadly, most people and ideas (and luck) are merely mediocre and not the top 5% or whatever needed, simply by definition.

Fortunately while we are young we'll fall softly and, as a software engineer, will likely able to find a job even if we meet failure. But sometimes I do worry not only for the feasibility of my own dreams, but also the other young people around me, and it's certainly something to think about before we encourage everyone to jump "into their dreams".

I agree with a lot of your points. The "don't go to university" / "dropouts are successful" meme is particularly alarming to me. Unless your achievement are stupendous, most employers, even startups, judge you based on your level of education, your Uni's ranking, etc; Why discard that data?

1. My own responsibility towards myself and my life weighs a lot more heavily on me at 29 than it did at 22. At 22 I had faith that it would work out, somehow. I think that's a feeling to be taken advantage of while you still have it.

2. Conversely, I also realize now that I won't be successful at something that I don't like, and that doing something I like is worth more than money. Obviously this only works to a certain extent, I still need to live. But it seems more and more that as long as you are pursuing you believe in and enjoy, you aren't poor in spirit.

My point being: maybe don't worry so much for the feasibility of your dreams at this moment in your life.

Now, are we still in disagreement, Sven? :-)

It takes discipline to exercise regularly.

It takes effort to try something new that seems appealing but unfamiliar.

We are old, and I think we forget how hard it was to crawl and then walk.

On a similar vein, consider looking at these two titles from Crimethinc:

"Days of War, Nights of Love" http://www.crimethinc.com/books/days.html

"Work" http://www.crimethinc.com/books/work.html

1. It's an interesting hobby, like crocheting, writing poetry, or solving tricky integrals.

Sometimes it's hard work, but that's enjoyable too, maybe that's when it's the most enjoyable. If it feels like drudgery, maybe you're just tired; knitting is extremely repetitive, yet kind of nice.

The degree to which you stretch yourself by attempting grander things is up to you. Some people enjoy working on intricate projects for years; some prefer to do something quick over a weekend.

If you make something useful, that's very nice, but not required. If one of your creations makes a nice Christmas gift, cool!

2. It's a way to configure computers to do things for you and your friends. This opens up interesting opportunities.

Someone who doesn't know anything about programming is limited to computer use within the parameters already provided by applications. But even that is very powerful, because what programs do—should do—is enable people to do things that they want to do.

For example, WordPress, while technically not that fascinating, has had a massive impact on the world. You don't need to be a programmer to set up WordPress—but if you can program, you can do more things with it. You can more easily make it look like you want it to look or do what you want it to do.

3. It's an arena of self-expression and demonstration of ambition.

The original poster mentions being in his mid-twenties. The significance he finds in this has to do with an idea that by that time, one "should" have accomplished lots. But maybe the real significance is that this age intensifies feelings of ambition. That's probably not a cultural universal, but it's some kind of phenomenon. It doesn't have that much to do with programming; a welder, nurse, or writer might feel the same thing. Cultural ideas of careers and individualism play into it.

The flip side of this kind of ambition (forgive the off-hand philosophizing) is the fear that deep down, I am nothing, I am a fraud, I am useless to the world. That might be a motivating fear. You mentioned J. Krish, there's also the Buddhist idea of three kinds of deceit: the idea that I am better than others, the idea that I am worse than others, and the idea that I am equal to others. That seems to leave little option. But, um, think about it.

4. A kind of synthesis. If you dial down the intensity of tractionless ambition a little bit, you may realize that a little bit of programming can go a long way. And steady, patient work is more sustainable than striving, and more fun. There is no intrinsic, cosmic reason that you must create a new JavaScript framework if you don't feel like it. An animation of a bouncing lolcat might do you more good than three years of dreaming about neural networks.

This website right here is so simple you could code it in a week. Forget about web scale; if your thing gets used by a dozen people, and they actually like it, you're a wizard already. You are not a failure for not winning the VC lottery and even AirBnB is just a forum for letting people crash on your couch. "I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after wind."

Flight of the Eagle: short and comprehensive.

Freedom from the Known: short and practical.

I love coding Ruby. But all the design and front end work? From HTML5 to CSS. Forget it. But if I focused on "effortless" Rails coding only -- this would get me absolutely nowhere. Not to mention unix skills, administration, making customers happy, etc.

Sure, would be easier to work for a big corp and do Rails coding only. But then there are other hard or intolerable things there (intolerable to me!). Like bosses proud they can't code with BA's in Political Science. Or lazy coworkers. Or whatever else.

Life is hard and then you die. If you can find happiness in this sentence (and I can!), if you can still find sense in all of that and be happy somehow. That's happiness. Because sh*t always happens.

And all these rich young kids. They might have problems on their own too. They might have no social live. They might have had no childhood. They may have nobody candid to them to hang out with. They may be poor as far as their people relations go or as far as their free time goes. What's so awesome about working 24/7 and all the money when you have no time to enjoy it? This is being really poor. It's exactly like not being able to afford going to vacation because of lack of money. You can't go period. No money or no time, both make you poor. As lack of social live does.

I myself am very goal oriented. I always have to feel as if I'm moving forward on something. It took me years to realize what I enjoy most about games is the feeling of accomplishment you get from finishing them and I'm actively more productive in other areas of my life when I limit my game playing time. Not because I'm "wasting time", but because emotionally I'm not satisfied and find myself constantly working and building other things.

Your question made me smile. Are you having fun? I'm having lots of fun, and have had throughout my career. There was a time in my 20's where I felt exactly the way you do.

Don't sweat it. Live life, and it will come to you. Focus instead on making memories that will make you smile when you're 80.

But none of that really matters. Don't plan for the next three years. Life is long, plan for that.

Many of the people I worked with in the '90s achieved a sort of fame like the fame the people you see achieve today. But when their achievements were superceded, they didn't go and do new amazing things. Instead they didn't do much at all, or did things that were completely tangential to their skill set, things they couldn't really excel at.

Part of the reason was that, having worked their way to huge XP, they couldn't start at 0 when they needed to restart the game. So they just didn't play. But we all start back at 0 when we do something new. We progress faster the second and further times around. We talk about learning from failure and doing better the second time around. These people couldn't learn from success.

So now I admire most the people who can achieve thing after thing, even if each of those things is not fame-worthy, not so much the people who have done a single thing, even if that thing gets a TechCrunch headline. The turtle, not the hare. I think the turtles do more good over their lifetimes than the hares, and that people who continue to be productive year in and year out are much, much happier.

My fears now are a different sort: do I still have time to accomplish the things I want to accomplish? Then I remind myself that I still have another 30 or 40 years of work left, as much in front of me as behind me. I encourage you to think that way: you have another 60 years of work left...what can you do over the course of 60 years? Pick a long-term goal (interstellar flight, artificial intelligence, peace on earth, whatever), break it into manageable projects, then start.

Let's think strategically: if your first project is curing aging and achieving immortality, then every other project after that is just a matter of time. Just sayin'.

Actually, if you "cure mortality" first, you will exacerbate all the other problems related to population overshot, environmental damage, wealth distributions, etc. Then elf-style immortality will find itself cured, at gunpoint, or in more gruesome ways.

On the other hand, you can accept that both of us (along with every human alive today) will die. Once you are free of that burden, you may identify a worthy project, push it as further as possible within your lifetime, and take the time to train some younger replacements that can take over later on.

And of course, I might be wrong, so you might end up enjoying amazingly extended lifecycle. I just don't think it is a good idea to count on it.

Why should I accept this? Humanity hasn't been improved by accepting that it was natural for people to die of smallpox, or be crippled by polio. The belief that such diseases could be eradicated was the first step in doing so.

Our limited lifespan is just another thing for us to defeat as a species. I like to imagine some far-off future where parents tell their children about our mortality in the same manner that we are told about diseases like smallpox.

Regarding immortality, you have to remember that every time a major death cause has been neutralized, the probability distribution reorganizes itself and other death causes raise to pick up the slack, even causes which used to be unknown/negligible a few decades ago. That's to say, every life that has been "saved" from smallpox, polio or whatever was not really saved - strictly speaking those people still died (or will eventually die) anyways of a different cause.

That's not to say that life expectancy cannot be extended, or that that is not a worthy goal in itself. But there is still the practical issue that the clock is ticking for every one of us. According to current data, I am expected to live another 40 years or so. During that time, the line can maybe pushed another 10 years, and combined with positive lifestyle changes, having won the genetic lottery in the form of my family having a track record of many long lived members, and a bit of luck too, I don't think it is unreasonable to think that I personally might make it to 100 years in a relatively dignified state. However, that's it, I will already be old and wasted by then, and the only hope I can think on how to extend that even further would be Deux ex Machina.

Now consider the scenario for a baby born today. Maybe those 100 years will give him plenty of time for science to progress and fix a lot of things during his own time... assuming no major threats raise caused by our increasingly industrialized lifestyles, which is doubtful. Maybe all the things considered he will live to see a time when 150 is the average, and he may be able to push it to 170 by being smart and having a lifestyle healthier than average... but that's it.

If I were extremely optimistic, which I find hard to be these days, I would say this trend will stagnate around the 300's due to the law of diminishing returns. So, our descendants might see a time when dying at mere 100 years old is a tragedy, but there is a world of difference from that and actual elf-style immortality (never age or die but by an act of violence that destroys your physical anchoring to this world).

Great comment. It alludes to 'iterating on yourself'. It's difficult when you feel like you're competing with others, rather than working to satisfy your own essential self.

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.

And yet having kids is wonderful.

I joked to my friend it is like Stockholm Syndrome. You have no choice. You made your bed and must now live in it. Of course you are going to enjoy your kids, it is biologically wired into you and you also have to do it, regardless of how overwhelmed every other part of your life has become because of that one decision.

It has also become very trendy in the last decade or two to devote your entire life to your kids and to never leave them alone, to invade every aspect of their day to the detriment of a parent living their own lives. Extreme detriment. Constant parental involvement. Vicariously living life through your children. It's actually fairly distressing to see adults so subservient to their children. A very modern malaise, this was not how parents acted 20 years ago.

Never trust a parent telling you having kids is great.

I am personally undecided, but I'm deadly serious, never trust a parent saying having kids is great. It's quite literally like they're some sort of possessed zombie, everything they say is basically "HELP! HELP! This is AWFUL! All joy apart from worshipping my child has been DESTROYED!". And yet they all say "Oh, it's wonderful!" in the next breath.

Also, about not having control and not having any time after becoming a parent. I struggled a lot with this myself until I read a passage in a book which shifted my perspective:

"In the past I used to look at my time as if it were divided into several parts. One part I reserved for Joey, another part was for Sue, another part to help with Ana, another part for household work. The time left over I considered my own. I could read, write, do research, go for walks. But now I try not to divide time into parts anymore. I consider my time with Joey and Sue as my own time. When I help Joey with his homework, I try to find ways of seeing his time as my own time. I go through his lesson with him, sharing his presence and finding ways to be interested in what we do during that time. The time for him becomes my own time. The remarkable thing is that now I have unlimited time for myself."

Having kids is a totally subjective decision. There are plenty of parents who hate their children, who felt forced into having them by family or society, and end up making their kids' lives terrible (or, in some really extreme cases, murdering them). If you feel pressured into anything, it's probably a bad start.

I'm 32 and I have 3 kids, but I meant to have them. There was no accident, and certainly no regret. I had my first kid, my daughter, when I was 24.

Then again, I never had feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness. I just wanted to have kids while I was young enough to roughhouse with them if they wanted. I grew up with too many friends with OLD parents (who are now dead, generally) who couldn't do anything with us because their back was out or their knees were busted. It's a sad thing to see.

This is one of the many incredible things I discovered when daughter was an infant, and even into her toddler years.

There were days where she was pretty awful, crying and not sleeping, and when she did sleep it wasn't more than an hour. I was upset and distressed, but not once did I ever blame her or get angry, which is a complete departure from my usual "someone has to pay for this" anger that I direct everywhere every day. I'm an incredibly selfish and somewhat unempathetic person.

I had a number of self-aware moments, where I was actively questioning why I wasn't angry at my baby, or at least tired of her, but my only answer was that looking at her, holding her, taking care her, filled me with such joy. And when I was distressed, I was distressed for her sake, concerned for her wellbeing. But never mad at her.

Now I have homework, bed time, bath kids and all the other stuff.

So when a non-parent friend says "We're going to see this amazing band for $$$ we'll be back at 3am" It is VERY tempting to say "Oh my life, my poor life, you guys are so lucky." Because you do feel a little bit like that. For a nano second. And because your mates don't want to hear "Well I HAVE KIDS AND THEY'RE AMAZING!!" so. There's that.

So you (the non-parent) hear part of the story. You are working (as I was a few years ago) on part of the information. It is a lot easier for us parents to talk 'my kids is amazing' at school drop off, or over a cup of tea at lunch time.

Re: "devote your entire life to your kids and to never leave them alone" that is a hard one, your kids NEED YOU. So you can't just drop them off at the park and go to the pub. Also, all your old friends don't want to play football with the kids, so your kids start to be your new friends. Which is weird.

Why not? I used to play in a park with other friends all the effing time after around 2nd grade or so.

I guess though, that the US has a far lower "implicit layer of support" though -- if anyone in our community saw kids going somewhere they weren't supposed to, they wouldn't bat an eyelid at hauling us up and taking us back to our homes. In th US if it's someone's else's kid, you automatically go into "NOT MY PROBLEM" mode :)

If your friends are doing nothing, and they aren't a single parent, it's their fault - because they would rather be with their kids, or doing something else. It doesn't take two people to watch/play with a kid.

I have one and it isn't so bad. I'm more productive at work because my time is more accounted for. Things are a bit hectic but it's not like I'm in some coal mine in Siberia. Life is mostly the same.

We can't do all night 5am ragers, but we can individually show up and go home around midnight. My wife still does happy hour once a week. I usually get some extra time on weekends to play some games.

A friend of ours still watches 2 movies/week in the movie theatre, because that's what she really enjoyed. Another goes to brunch every sunday, because it's a tradition with her friends.

Basically, you pick what you care about the most, and cut the things that don't matter as much to you.

You stuck your penis in someone (assuming you are male). That's all you did. And then did all the exact same things that billions of other parents do, feed, burp, clothe, ship 'em off to be educated by someone else. Statistically speaking, you're probably not a fantastic parent, just another average Dad. One of literally billions of parents.

So why are your kids 'better' than anything you've done? Almost anyone can do it. It is probably one of the least impressive achievements any human can do, yet a large amount of parents list it as a major lifetime achievement, often as their only achievement. It's another one of those 'zombie' phrases, there is nothing at all, absolutely nothing, remarkable about raising a child. It is one of the most ordinary, banal things, a human can do. And yet so many people are proud of doing it.

I simply can't understand, looking from this side of the mirror, not having kids. But can you understand just how utterly unremarkable and unimpressive it is having kids? From this side of the mirror?

Call your parents, folks. Go check on the kids too, if you've got them. There's pretty much no higher human activity than either of those two things. As long as they keep happening, everything will be alright. The rest is just icing on the cake ..

You can say "So what, all you did was run 26 miles, lots of people do that, some even run hundreds, or walk cross country, what you did isn't that special."

Well, yeah, it's not, but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel good to look at your accomplishments and feel awe that you completed it.

It's like that with kids. You pass off the whole raising them with "feed, burp, clothe, ship 'em off to be educated by someone else" which is just sad and insulting. You gloss over the sleep deprivation, the worry that wake you up in the middle of the night, the laughter and tears of the kids, and parents teach kids more than you give them credit for.

Absolutely. This is exactly how I and a whole lot of people remember feeling before having kids. This is part of the thing that makes it so remarkable: before having kids, I couldn't imagine myself being so enamored with it, and yet here I am, victim of some kind of strange brainwashing that turns out to make the incredible, incredible pain in the ass of it all worth it. And not merely worth it in a "this is tolerable" way, but worth it in a "omg I have to tell other people about this" way. It's ridiculous, I know. But it happens. I'm of the opinion that this delusion is inextricably linked to the survival of our species, because in your worst moments, it's what keeps you from letting the screaming little bastards die.

I can sort of understand how you might not understand it if you have no idea what's involved in being a parent.

But you do seem to be ignoring some stuff:

i) The biological imperative. Not everyone has this, and it's important not to stigmatise people who just don't want to be parents. But it's strongly there for many people, so having children seems to be important.

ii) "You stuck your penis in someone (assuming you are male). That's all you did." well, it's not that easy. For some parents it's a lot more difficult than that; and a few adopting parents don't even have the stage involving biological gloop.

http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/2295.aspx?CategoryID=54

> Most couples (about 84 out of every 100) will get pregnant within a year if they have regular sex and don’t use contraception. However, women become less fertile as they get older. A recent study has found that couples having regular unprotected sex:

> aged 19-26 - 92% will conceive after one year and 98% after two years

> aged 35-39 - 82% will conceive after one year and 90% after two years

iii) For most parents it's a big step. They make a concious choice to stop contraception and to start trying for a child; or they start the adoption process. It's not like buying a car or changing job - both of which are pretty significant life changes for some people.

iv) Oxytocin

v) sleep deprivation and some form of domestic Stockholm Syndrome. You have to give up so much for a child, and your life totally changes in ways that you can't fully predict until it happens. So you kind of have to say how brilliant it is.

vi) The fresh perspective a child has will teach you about the world. You learn most when you teach someone else. Watching a child learn how to manipulate a toy or learn to read is enriching.

And so many people repeat this - that children radically change their lives, and that their children are the best thing they've ever done - that I'm surprised you haven't considered whether it might be more significant than just "You stuck your penis in someone".

(I don't know much about adoption but I do know some very kind, loving, great parents who adopted so I'm trying to be inclusive of their experiences.)

Random, but I think there's a correlation between "age > 30" and capitalization of folder names.

What separates us from (other) animals, is our ability to alter our environment. Use your big brain to figure our some combination of the parameters in your life (work/environment/free time/etc.) that makes you happy and change your environment to optimize for that. Have the self esteem to follow your own path. Don't feel compelled to impress others or live up to some freakishly high standard.

For what it is worth, I've been programming longer than you've been alive and if I keep doing it another 30 years I doubt I will be acclaimed for my coding skills - and that doesn't bother me a bit.

Choose your own parameters for success (suggestions: joy, self-betterment, improving humanity's situation by your own standards. Money or fame is just a means to an end - focus on the end and not the means for maximum flexibility and quickest success) and then work out how to achieve them. Here's where your critical thinking skills (the most useful thing I learned at my top-10 university) come in handy.

Recall that skillsets are supposed to be tools towards achieving an end. Choose your own adventure, sharpen the tools you care about & think will be useful, and set out. Try not to be daunted when circumstances force a detour, a tool turns out to be less useful than anticipated, or your path (goals) literally change underneath you. That is living, and that is what we all must succeed at.

Thank you for writing this, it is very inspiring. I have heard so many times that good devs are young people that makes me wonder about my future even if I'm very passionated about my career. At this point in my life I think I will love programming in the next 30 years, I hope I could live from that as well.

Thank you for sharing.

There isn't a high score table.

The balm for this kind of ambition is to visit a suitable big-city graveyard or cathederal and have a look for the largest, most elaborate tomb with the longest list of achievements on. Unless this is a former world leader there's a good chance it's someone you've never heard of. On the way back, look at every house you pass. The person who lives there is almost certainly less remarkable. Ponder the size of the world for a bit.

The ambition/procrastination loop is an anxiety disorder common to people identified as "bright" from an early age. You can retrain yourself out of that in a number of ways, but the simplest one is scheduling. Put half an hour of work in every day. Possibly if you have time bracket it with daily light exercise. This is how the marathon runners do it: one step at a time, with years of repetition behind them.

There are two truths I try to keep in mind whenever I start feeling this way:

1. There are countless people who are so much better at programming and so much more motivated than me, that I could work my entire life and never be as good as they are right now.

2. There are countless people who are so much worse at programming than me, that they could work their entire lives and never be as good as I am right now even if they were more highly motivated.

Its a continuum, a hill. Feel for the gradient, walk uphill.

Are you sure about that? There seems to be a lot of evidence to the contrary. One of the most important lessons I've learned so far is that ambition is not wanting money and recognition; it's a desire for constant challenge, pressure and responsibility. A lot of people don't want those things, they just want the cash.

It's actually possible to find niches where you can earn good money rather than 'fuck you money', but without all the stress. That's a much better prospect in my (somewhat unambitious) opinion.

The problem here, in my opinion, is that the "default" goals one sees in the "start-up culture" (or the banking culture, that I'm better familiar with) are bland, spoon-fed and vulgar: "Hey, this guy has shitloads of money, imitate this guy! What? You still aren't rich? Then you're not doing it HARD enough." All in all, it just seems like a self-help book gone way, way wrong.

I think the reason OP can't motivate himself to do these things, is because they are only superficial, exogenous goals to him.

It's weird to say "I am ambitious and I waste time vegging out watching TV" in the same breath– chances are the "I am ambitious" statement is really identity performance.

OP wants to be seen as ambitious (not just by his others, but by himself as well). It's a comforting narrative to hold, but it's also damaging (kinda like a cigarette addiction– you enjoy the pleasure of the cigarettes but you start noticing that your health is going downhill).

The gnawing pain that OP feels in his chest– I'm sorry that there's no nice way to put it– is the realization that he's a fraud [1]. It's the dissonance between "I am ambitious" and "I am wasting my time". One of those things have to go.

And we're all frauds to some degree, because we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves that feel good. OP is working himself up into a brilliant, painful frenzy, and in a sense it's likely that he enjoys it in a twisted sense– just like how some groups of people enjoy the drama of social relations, and keep perpetuating it.

BTW, just for fun (but seriously, too)– the most accomplished people like this tend to be writers. Balzac, Proust, Dostoeyvsky– all of them did this whole agonizing woe-is-me thing, or represented it powerfully in their work. OP, you might just make a great novelist. Write a modern day Lost Illusions with yourself as the title character, and you might just achieve the success you were hoping for!

Holy judgment, Batman! I think the gnawing pain he's experiencing is the FEAR that he's a fraud (which I think is far from a decided matter). What an awful thing to call him when all you've got to go on is a couple of paragraphs.

And honestly, I think ambition is probably a prerequisite for feeling the way he feels. Unambitious people are likely immune to feeling like they're wasting time.

Working on something original, that you're the sole creator of, that you're solely responsible for, is a TERRIFYING prospect no matter how much you love the work you put into it and no matter how ambitious you are.

Calling him a fraud because he hasn't figured out how to crack the existential barrier between what he wants to be doing and what he's doing is such an oversimplification of how people work that I'm actually a little offended FOR him.

Comments along these lines only perpetuate Great Man worldviews (which I also consider a gross oversimplification of how people operate).

How about without using the word fraud, which can be a little more loaded than I intended, I simply stick to the line afterwards– that we feel gnawing pains, etc whenever our actions are not consistent with the beliefs we hold (or claim to hold).

If he weren't ambitious, then watching TV wouldn't be a waste of time. It would just be something he enjoys doing. The fact that he has some ambition is what causes him to feel guilty when he's not being productive. No ambition, no guilt.

There are also some nice Zen-sounding arguments that you can't fully realize your ambitions until you relinquish your desire to be ambitious– because you suffer from all sorts of perfectionism and performance anxieties, etc. But it's possible to argue either way– talk is cheap, actions are the differentiator.

    "Above all, don't lie to yourself." --The Brothers Karamazov

1. "You are failing (at what you say you want to do)" != "You are a failure."

2. I disagree (but this is a matter of intepretation) that a novelist's subject matter is entirely uncorrelated with their person. Writing is a very personal pursuit, and I think every writer puts something of themselves into their work. But would be happy to disagree about this, and to hear your counterpoint.

3. Re: the Brothers Karamzov quote, I think it's very common for writers to write about things that they can envision but not necessarily enact. They're more like directives than lived experiences. A person can live a life "full of sin" and then write a novel advocating "sainthood". Do as I say, not as I do, so as to speak. But again, would be happy to hear your thoughts.

Surely everyone around me is reading these articles as well, and looking at me, and thinking "ah, he's not bad, but obviously not in that class"... right? Or old habits left over from a parent who was constantly comparing your "trajectory" in school to classmates, older siblings, whatever. It's not actually meaningful, though; that sort of thing is a manipulation intended to help you, but if it's making you miserable, work on discarding it.

To the OP -- try to look directly at what's worrying you. Write it down, if that helps. Zoom out, zoom in, ask "how do I know that", walk through actual worst-case scenarios in detail, and try to see if it's actually useful to worry about it.

Worry can be a motivator, but it's not a good one, and it drains you at the same time as it pushes.

I used to run for meditation, but with having a baby at home I've let it slip, my family bring me a lot of peace and feeling of well being, and belonging, but running for meditation desperately needs to become a part of my life again.

The note about "preparing to be happy without actually being happy" struck me too, I'm always working, growing, fighting for the next thing, and I never take time to appreciate my successes, we're meeting with some fundraisers for the company we bootstrapped later today, and if we're successful, I'm taking a week off to spend with my family, not see the internet, and appreciate that shortly before turning 30, I might have bootstrapped my own company far enough to take a serious investor round.. why at 29.5 yrs old is that important… I don't know… imposed ageism I speculate.

That realization sounds a lot like the TED talk I saw recently from Shawn Achor. He likens it to always moving the goalposts on your own happiness. (FYI - you can get the same amount of info from this TED Talk as you can from his book. Not worth $7.)

http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_bet...

Here's a nice list, and the age at which they got their big hit:

Paul Graham (31, Viaweb), Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp), Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp), Ev Williams (34, Twitter), Jack Dorsey (33, Square), Elon Musk (32, Tesla), Garrett Camp (30, Uber), Travis Kalanick (32, Uber), Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb), Reed Hastings (37, Netflix), Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon), Andrew Mason (29, Groupon), Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn), Jack Ma (35, Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon), Jerry Sanders (33, AMD), Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce), Peter Norton (39, Norton), Larry Ellison (33, Oracle), Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus), Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco), Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco), Gordon Moore (39, Intel), Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com), Scott Cook (31, Intuit), Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari), Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm), David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft), Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems), John McAfee (42, McAfee), Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec), Scott McNealy (28, Sun), Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay), Rich Barton (29 for Expedia, 38 for Zillow), Jim Clark (38 for SGI, and 49 for Netscape), Charles Wang (32, CA), David Packard (27, HP), John Warnock (42, Adobe), Robert Noyce (30 at Fairchild, 41 for Intel), Rod Canion (37, Compaq), Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia), Eli Harari (41, SanDisk), Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk), Al Shugart (48, Seagate), Finis Conner (34, Seagate), Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom), Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom), Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring), William Shockley (45, Shockley), John Walker (32, Autodesk), Halsey Minor (30, CNet), David Filo (28, Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp), David Hitz (28, NetApp), Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom), Tim Westergren (35, Pandora), Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify), Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye), Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick), Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek), Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor), Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials), Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments), Richard Egan (43, EMC), Hasso Plattner (28, SAP), Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks), Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com), Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com), Tom Anderson (33, MySpace), Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace), Caterina Fake (34, Flickr), Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr), Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper), Peter Thiel (37, Palantir), Jay Walker (42, priceline.com), Pony Ma (27, Tencent), Robin Li (32, Baidu), Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com), Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi), Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei), Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex), Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten), Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Zip2

$22 million at 28

There are other entrepreneurs on the list with smaller successes prior to their big hits (a lot of them in fact). In my post I included the text "the age at which they got their big hit" to cover that aspect.

> Every day, I read an article by some hot-shot young dev who has a handful of fancy projects behind his belt (not to mention a great website and design sensibility) while I have exactly zero

This is going to keep happening. The only thing you can do is find something you love and grind it. That's what most of them have done. They (or at least most of them) don't just pop out a new smash hit every night. Most of those articles still take time to put together.

I didn't even start my career until I was 28 (while I was working on my MS). My daughter was born a year later, and it took me 2 years to get my blog going. (I foolishly thought I could write a CMS. I ended up building something clean and minimal with a static site generator.) It takes me forever to get a post together, but that's ok. I work at the speed I can. I'm happy because I'm still making progress.

Not everyone gets to be a rockstar all the time, and you have to jam in the garage before you get to take the stage.

There are two things that I do that might help you though:

1. I only read NH when I'm not working (i.e. mornings or evenings). That means I can focus on my work rather than get involved with something else.

2. When I read about a new exciting technology, unless it's relevant to what I am working on at the moment, I bookmark the page, in case it becomes relevant in the future. In the process I realised a lot of it is trends. People on HN get excited about something and a year later they're excited about something new, and then the old gets criticised. So basically, I saved myself a few hours learning something that wasn't so important to know after all.

Edit: formatting

But ya, procrastination is another issue entirely. It's a common problem. Here is my advice... accept that you can't do everything. (This is reality and it catches up with you soon enough anyway). Find out what is important and focus on that. Just that. Don't worry about what other people are doing. It has absolutely zero impact on what you are doing. In life, people will make more money than you. Others will make less. Some will be happier, some less happy. It doesn't matter. At all. It's you that you should be concerned about. Why are you chasing tech? What is the end game? That's the question.

Do one thing, or a few things, and do them well. If you aren't going to do that, then don't do these things and accept that you aren't going to do them and don't worry about it. Don't flit. There is a cost associated with switching tasks and that makes the whole thing harder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders

Who wants to read about a 50-60 yo professional CEO who just sold his Nth company doing some boring-as-ass Java enterprise thing? No one. Not in the TC crowd. There's nothing to fantasize about.

The teens gets print because they're absurd outliers; you don't hear about the 56 year old finding big success with his startup not because it doesn't happen, but because it happens regular enough to be too boring to mention.

http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/infographic-great-co...

- Barack Obama

When I talk to younger people about what it is to be a professional programmer, I ask them "Do you like learning? Are you prepared to learn something new every day? Are you prepared to do a job where your task is to quickly learn and apply that learning constantly?"

That is what a programmer is. We all learn from each other. From the stackoverflow copy/paste crowd to the most senior computer scientists you have ever heard of. Some of them have original thoughts, original applications, but mostly we're just this big crowd learning off each other to get things we enjoy doing or are paid to do (and ideally both), done.

Procrastination is your subconscious saying "I really don't want to do this". You either listen to it, or you start telling your subconscious why you do. It's OK to move onto another project. Maybe no projects appeal to you right now. Maybe you need to talk to somebody about anxiety and depression, as you have some of the symptoms.

It's almost hopeless to compete with others without a narrow playing field that, say, sports offers. Due to the fact that everyone has vastly different resources/talent/starting points.

Henry Ford was 40 when he finally won. Ray Croc was 52. (Colonel) Harland Sanders was 62, Jon Hamm (Don Draper) was 36, JK Rowling was 32, Thomas Siebel (Seibel Systems) was 41, Reid Hoffman was 35, Robert Noyce (Intel) was 40, Dave Duffield (Peoplesoft) was 46, John Pemberton (Coca-cola) was 55, Henry Kaiser was 63, and Charles Darwin was 50.

You've got plenty of time.

Not every kid is lucky enough to have a rich uncle or show up at the top of the App store. Its just the lucky or privileged or self-identified entrepeneurs few that you see in the news. And it is partially slanted towards articles about young people because that is a more interesting article.

I mentioned 'self-identified entrepeneur' because I think identity has a role to play in this. The person that you really believe you are subconsciously influences your behavior to reinforce that outcome.

So if deep down you think you are a great UI designer and an important app or open source developer, you are likely to put yourself in that position and do things that perpetuate it. For example, you might sleep the couch of a wealthy friend (accelerator) and spend all of your waking hours on your website and startup rather than working a corporate job.

Anyway I think that we create our own cages. Some of them are very easy to fall into, like taking a regular job or watching TV after coming home from work. But if you have a self-image which creates a strong subconscious belief in a different lifestyle, that can help you make choices that will move in that direction.

People accomplish things by dedicating time and effort to them. Its not easy to become famous or make a superior website or project.

Then I got into the devel world and I started doing the same as you do. But maybe because I became father in between, maybe something else ... I end up turnning off the media noise and add some behaviours:

1. Kill your ego, it just don't help you get better. 2. Read news about tech you find interesting, but just read them, if you feel like, just try them. 3. Start getting off the screen, walk around (meditate, sports, just walk surrounded by nature) 4. Start paying attention around you, what the people close to you struggle with, and maybe help them. 5. Don't reinvent, if you have a tech ich, just browse around, you might find a nice project you can use (open sourced) and maybe start helping there maybe not. 6. Just create a dynamic in you that gets you where you like to be.

After you get this kind of movement in you, success is a question of being in the right place at the right time.

From my side, just followed that list some time ago. Now I'm checking potential things about domotica and it might get me somewhere, might not ... but something I know, I'm moving because I have an ich. And I'm learning a lot!

The rest is just noise you can simply reduce.

  If you compare yourself with others,
  you may become vain and bitter;
  for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
  Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

From https://imagineer7.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/the-most-importa...

  Feynman wrote one word, in capitals: DISREGARD on his
  notepad when he read that. This word became his motto.
  That, he said, was the whole point. That was what he had
  forgotten, and why he had been making so little progress.
  The way for thinkers like himself to make a breakthrough
  was to be ignorant of what everybody else was doing and
  make their own interpretations and guesses.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/1cv2gr/payed_off_210...

I warmly recommend The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, both books that affected me deeply and improved my life.

Here is the table of contents (from a PDF) from the latter. I recommend getting a hardcopy — it is a short book, to read once a year.

  Authors's Note                                      3
  1. The Function of Education                        4
  2. The Problem of Freedom                           12
  3. Freedom and Love                                 19
  4. Listening                                        28
  5. Creative Discontent                              35
  6. The Wholeness of Life                            42
  7. Ambition                                         49
  8. Orderly Thinking                                 56
  9. An Open Mind                                     64
  10. Inward Beauty                                   71
  11. Conformity and Revolt                           79
  12. The Confidence of Innocence                     87
  13. Equality and Freedom                            95
  14. Self Discipline                                 102
  15. Cooperation and Sharing                         109
  16. Renewing the Mind                               119
  17. The River of Life                               127
  18. The Attentive Mind                              135
  19. Knowledge and Tradition                         144
  20. To Be Religious Is to Be Sensitive to Reality   153
  21. The Purpose of Learning                         161
  22. The Simplicity of Love                          169
  23. The Need to Be Alone                            179
  24. The Energy of Life                              188
  25. To Live Effortlessly                            197
  26. The Mind Is Not Everything                      205

Sure it is useful every once in a while to check out what other people do so as not to re-invent the wheel, but that is about it. Concentrate on what YOU do. Observing other people may end up yielding you nothing.

Basically I struggled with these problems for most of my 20's. Then a year ago I started going into therapy with a psychologist, got tested for ADHD and was diagnosed. Meds changed everything when it came to procrastination. It used to be the cause of so much anguish in my life and today it's almost a non-issue.

Therapy really helped me decouple from the narcissism that had warped me into a compulsive fixation with benchmarking myself against other people. Humbling yourself is important. Spending time on non-code hobbies, with family, away from work and tech industry noise is important.

Not everyone can or should be running a software product, and that's ok. Not everyone is successful in their career at age 26. When your life is surrounded by these skewed values, all this survivor bias, it seems like not being on the frontpage of Product Hunt is a mark of failure. If you head out of the tech bubble, go somewhere with friends or family that have no association with this world, you'll realize that this value system isn't normal.

Also, keep in mind that the people who do run successful projects are often unhappy. Running a product is a lot of work and can be extremely stressful and exhausting. Success is a double-edged sword.

Edit: replaced a rant about wanting to be a successful entrepreneur. This guy just wants to be a good coder, I missed that.

First, this sounds like typical ADHD behavior to me. Have you considered the possibility that you may have ADHD? If not, they research it a bit. (Right now -- Go ahead, I'll wait ;-)

Also, you seem to have a constant feeling of insecurity, of being "less than". Even though you have obviously accomplished a lot, you are still in a panic over not accomplishing enough. This is just a guess, but I'd bet it has affected your life in a a lot of ways far beyond your programming career. That's OK, you are certainly not alone, but just something else to mull over in your mind, and why I think mindfulness and metta meditation might be especially useful for you. Check out "Pragmatic Buddhism", as well as Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Tara Brach, Shinzen Young, and simiplar teachers.

I'm stressing meditation because I've found it to be the most effective way to deal with similar issues in my life. It's not fast, or easy, but it seems to be the most effective thing so far.

I look at it like I'm only at the halfway point in my career - and currently trying to decide the best course for the next 20 years (and beyond, hopefully). I've tried to choose side projects that are aligned to the tech I use in the day job - use them to try out new things and get a better grounding in stuff that I don't necessarily work on full time (android, ios, AWS, etc). Aside from being interesting I've found it a great discussion point in interviews. Hopefully one of the projects might grow into something bigger, but if not - it's no biggie - I've already gained from it.

I've found that releasing stuff early and often keeps me motivated to keep things ticking along. I use JIRA as my organiser/mental notepad to put tasks in as I think of them, and try and grab half an hour every morning, and whatever time at weekends I can to just keep pushing things along. Work when I'm in the mood, and accept there will be weeks/months when I won't have the time or inclination. Over time I find it really satisfying to see things slowly take shape. I'm not too worried about getting anything finished quickly - as I've got the contracting work. If that dries up, or I get any bench time - I've got the side projects to jump into more.

I think visiting sites like HN although interesting, don't help too much with this since you see everyday new projects and ideas, and it makes you feel like you are doing nothing with your time.

Why Procrastinators Procrastinate http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastin...

How to Beat Procrastination http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.ht...

1. Impact of Achievements does not relate to time as much as we think. Someone can start with 50 and make more impact than the most talented programmer made in 30 years of hard work. Maybe you need 2-3 years to get up to speed, but for longer time periods there are too many other factors involved. So if you are really as good as you think (most programmers do, but we can't all be better than all the others) taking your time and working on something that is interesting to work on might be more interesting than a comparison with a guy 10 years younger.

2. Start small. That is even more true for side projects. Do a very tiny thing. Then you can finish it. And if you have more motivation add a second small thing to it. This way even if you lose some motivation you still have something to show for it.

3. Code on something you need. I'm certainly a below average coder, but my best side project is something that started without planning because I wanted to automate a tedious task of mine. I'm working on it from time to time for years now and gradually it becomes more and more useful and nice to use. It's not on Github. It might not help anybody else. But I'm really proud of it, and it really helps me a lot on an almost daily basis.

4. That also means the code itself has no value, but what the program helps you do has value. If you don't code something that does something useful, than your project is meaningless. And by far the easiest person to please is yourself.

5. The most valuable programmers and the ones who have achieved something in the eyes of the public are not the same. Your mother might think Steve Jobs must have been a much better programmer than you. But he's not even a programmer at all. Public recognition is not what we think it is as 20 somethings.

1) The examples you see are biased in the extreme. The most sucessful are held up to an extreme degree, so that the average of what you see is six or seven sigma ability. This is not even close to being the actual average.

By having a couple years of savings, you are probably actually 3 or 4 sigmas ahead.

2) We all wish we started earlier. The truth is that I am not who I was 5 years ago. That person was an idiot and if I had started a business then I wouldn't have been successful. The person who was me 5 years before that was a complete lunatic and I am surprised I ever had any friends then. That person fortunately hadn't moved out from home yet, or I wouldn't have gotten anything to eat.

So you see I couldn't have started earlier, because I didn't exist. Sure the person with my DNA who walked around existed and I have that persons memories, that persons scars (in some cases literally), etc but he isn't me.

Therefore wishing I had started earlier is as productive as wishing I had been born a millionare.

Thinking about death is a great thing to identify what is important in life. Also traveling. In India I saw a bus filled of kids that had been mutilated ON PURPOSE for asking money to tourist.

I mean today there are kids in India whose eyes are being burned, or bones being crushed, so someone else could profit from it. This puts all your problems in perspective.

At the end of your life if you look back what would you be proud of? Of a beautiful website?. Fancy projects? glory? money? I don't think so.

There is a reason for procastination. Your subconscious is a great BS detector.

Read or listen "the Now habit" audiobook to understand it from experts in the area.

Nobody can do everything. There are things that you hate to do and some you love, and the solution is not you forcing yourself to do what you abhor. The solution is to find someone who loves doing what you hate.

Companies naturally do mix different people so they complement each other, the sum is much bigger than its parts. This is the problem of indies, going alone could meant paralysis because you hate so much a (small) part of your journey that blocks you.

The reason you hate to do something is normally your personality type. There is a reason there are different personality types: all of them are better for different things.

People tend to rationalize their own personality as the best and undervalue all others. E.g If you are chaotic, fast problem solver you could despise perfectionist low paced problem solvers. Big error.

I bet there are things on your work that you better would love not to do. Get rid of them getting someone to do it as fast as you can. You won't need tv when your job is the best thing you can do at any given moment.

One day you will have children and you will come to realise that raising the next generation is an absolute joy and often the greatest lasting achievement many of us have. As long as you have some ability to provide for your family, then the adoring faces of your kids make for a great fallback position.

There are countless people out there who have a mundane and unremarkable working life but, in accepting that, have a lot more spare time to enjoy their life in progress.

I imagine like many of us here, you enjoy a lot about the process of working on side projects, so make sure that enjoyment is as much a part of it as any concerns about potential success.

Find ways to start enjoying life now. Don't let pride get into the way. Your ego may demand you to live up to an unrealistic identity. Compare yourself to your old self and not others. That being said, it's easier said than done. But if you habitually and intentionally change the way you view yourself (like how a recovering anorexic looks at him/herself in the mirror), your change in thoughts will change the way how you feel. It'll take time but you'll eventually get there.

Set manageable goals for yourself and strive to achieve those. Over time you'll hit those goals and be able to set yourself another. They can be short term goals (wake up every morning at 6:00) and long term (learn x language), but the main thing is that you focus on them and strive to achieving them rather than comparing yourself to others.

Take one of these[2] when comparing youself to other people. If you had spent time to brand yourself, you'd probably look at least twice as good as "hot-shot young dev with handful of fancy projects". Public image and developer prowess aren't necessarily related.[3]

If, like many devs, your procrastination issues were related to.. hm.. illicit substances-well, you know the answer to that: "Pan metron ariston"[4] ~= "moderation is everything".

> Mentally, I've resigned to the fact that I've procrastinated away a decade of valuable time, and it just endlessly haunts me.

It hardly sounds like you've done that. So you didn't reach your max. potential in this "procrastination decade". Guess what: nobody does.

Don't let shit haunt you. The past is immutable. Change your present and future.

[1] https://class.coursera.org/learning-003/

[2] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Chill+Pill I sure as f- need them.

[3] If you gave yourself the mini-project: "Let's make this X bad dev look good", you'd probably succeed for most X. If you care about your public perception, make that your mini project and you'll find that when you're done, your image will be A+++ - as you're not a bad dev.

[4] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/642841-pan-metron-ariston-ev...