It's been getting better.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

- 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...

There are lots of people in their 30s and 40s working on their first startup/business idea. You're ahead of them.

Focus on where you're going.

26 is young, just make the most of your at bats, keep on top of your procrastination and 'make it happen'.

Don't look back, focus, go get it.

If you'd have started at 25 (that was a year ago), 21 you were enjoying university life, 19 you were a kid still.

26 is the perfect launching point, go get it.

I now believe, firmly, that being intensively competitive with everyone like that, constantly comparing yourself to others, will greatly increase your chances of failure. People who accomplish truly great things, technology, sports, politics, philosophy, whatever... get so invested in their vision that they pay zero attention to what others are doing except in a practical sense, and they definitely don't measure themselves by other's external standards.

I mean, if I were an investor or something, and I knew that all you really cared about was success for the sake of success, I would get out real quick.

You should do some introspecting, make some tough changes, and get rid of a stifling mindset like that.

The work you wish you'd done sooner (1 to 6 years ago), would have been done with that year's tech. Starting an app 6 years ago, whatever idea, would have been harder to do. Early versions of mature frameworks we enjoy now weren't as easy to deal with. In the last few years things have gotten much faster.

It's easy to see how easy work is to do today and look back and say, "If only I had those lost years!" but that's not the case, that work would have been different by it's nature, due to the tech.

If only you'd started your app 15 years ago! You could have gone through the fresh hell of flash, php, hand writing deployment and basically being a sysadmin!

This theoretical regret about a progress bar to presumed "answers" assumes that the "question" was not changed by your life experience.

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

It's only procrastination if you fail to trust your own choices and find the inevitable lessons therein.

A haunting thought: what if your subconscious was seeking something while "procrastinating"? What if you already found it?

There are a ton of things I like to do outside of work, and 99% of them involve 0 coding/architecture/programming. I don't have any notion of what a programmer "should" be, and, after working at a bunch of different places, I know that there is no one definition of who a programmer is.

You're putting this pressure on yourself because you're reading sensationalized articles. This is no different than a little girl seeing a wicked skinny model and becoming anorexic in hopes of being that. The people pumping out tons of great code and projects are anomalies. The headlines you see relating to them are all to get you to click on someone's blog or website, to use their project, or to tell you why you should hire them. It's all marketing.

My advice to you would be to stop worrying about this stuff. It's completely pointless in the end. You're not going to be on your deathbed thinking "oh I should've created more open source projects." This point in your life could be something you totally forget about. You've only been working professionally for, what, 3 or 4 years?

I hate the Packers, but Aaron Rodgers had some good advice in a press conference last year: R-E-L-A-X

1. I'm 25. I still have like... 60 years left. That's a long time.

2. "There were never any good old days, they are today, they are tomorrow" - that's a line from a Gogol Bordello song that's always resonated with me and helps me put that feeling of having wasted my life so far into perspective.

(Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aZwFQbeD1k)

I've probably accomplished more than some: I'm the co-author of 3 tech books on jQuery Mobile, I have a number of 1000+ star projects on GitHub, I do contract work on the side and more. Yet I still feel that I'm not doing enough.

The thing is that you have to feel okay with what you're doing. If you want to do more, then do it. If you'd rather take time and chill on the couch, then go for it. You probably work hard during the day.

1) Don't worry too much about what others have done because in some way you are still ahead of the curve if it matters.

2) Focus on the work you can somehow find interesting. The work does not have to be challenging to be interesting.

3) Don't work too much but when you work block your time for one or two hours sprints. Try to put some music on auto-replay.

4) Reward yourself every few hours like by taking a walk or just stepping back to reflect.

5) Remember if you have a problem there are tons of other people who would have the same problem.

6) Find a meetup that you can really find your place in and regularly go to the meetings. Focus on the quality of friendships you can make.

7) Nobody is genuinely happy in whatever condition they are in. Everyone has a story. And that's ok.

8) If we all would be genuinely happy there would not be much to live for.

9) Try not to hold grudges. We only have a limited number of our brain CPU cycles. Try not to waste them especially at peak time.

10) If you have a lot of interesting ideas to work on that's super cool. Don't get too carried away with the popular notion of being focused. It sounds good to say but nobody knows what they are talking about.

Last but not least, don't read too much especially the blogosphere. Write your own story. Get a blog up. And it's OK to be in conflict with oneself.

When you're back from vacation, you can plot a new course for success, with reasonable milestones.

edit: to answer the question in the title: When you find people that are better than yourself, write to them with two simple points: 1: let them know what exactly it is that you admire in their work 2. politely ask for specific resources/advice with regard to that thing.

When you find someone that is better than yourself, it should be reassuring rather than stressful because 1) it proves that it is possible to be that good and 2) it provides you an example to learn from. You can build upon the work they've done. You don't have to start from scratch/reinvent the wheel - you are actually at the advantage.

Coincidentally this was on the imgur fp http://imgur.com/gallery/OLB8s and the comments are mostly of people who worked hard and did what they wanted, and in their eyes, they're the success they wanted themselves to be and that they just never gave up and kept working on what they wanted to be.

Stop thinking about work. Start thinking about life. You're in your 20's. You have the rest of your entire life to think about work. Take your savings, grab a friend/family member, or go it solo, and go travel.

Right now. Before you get a second older. Before you start another job or think you don't have enough money. Before you have kids. Before you think about more work. Tomorrow you'll wake up and be 30 something, with kids, a fat mortgage and real life expenses and you won't have the freedom you clearly do at this point.

Take the chance of a life time and go travel. Go recharge. Go create a life altering experience. Do it with someone you love. Because when our time is at an end the things that matter are the people you love and the experiences you shared. Not what you built, not your HN posts, not your code, not your company or projects.

People remember people and maybe along the way you'll learn about yourself. This is the goal everyone shares.

Do what makes you happy. Ultimately, your subconscious is going to work against you until you are aligned with your true desires. Better to wake up and realize that sooner rather than later. Ultimately, the life you think you want to lead is probably out of alignment with the life you actually want to lead.

Honestly, you sound like me. Being the best is just super hard work, and I've recognized that I'm not. I'm 38 and I've just returned to software development after a 10 year hiatus in management during which I wrote maybe two small perl programs. Now I'm happy just to be back writing code, and I don't feel like I have to change the world any more.

So you're not the best. You pick up and continue. Honestly, your anxieties look ridiculous to a 38 year old, just like my anxieties must look ridiculous to a 50 year old. You could die tomorrow. Live life in the way that brings you the most joy.

I think vijucat is right that you probably still need to figure out what you even want out of life. Just, for every answer you come up with, then ask yourself "and then what will I have?" And if the cycle doesn't end somewhere with "happiness", then you're not on the right track.

It's important to decide on your own metrics for success and not let others dictate it to you. Who are you working for, anyway? I mean, in the most basic sense, are you working to make a life for yourself or a life for these other people? What should their opinion on your success matter?

Then get really fucking honest with yourself. If you really, truly love software development, and you're goofing off on HN all the time, yeah, you're a piece of shit. Don't hide from that fact. Get it wedged deeply into your head "I've spent the last 3 hours trawling HN for content, I am a piece of shit." And maybe you'll learn to have some respect for your time.

Speaking of respect for your time, I also find that forcing myself to not work outside of work hours makes the work hours more "real" to me, and I get a lot more done during that time. I try to guard my time: this over hear is the time I spend goofing off, this over hear is the time I work, I don't want work to encroach on my goofing off, so I don't let goofing off encroach on my work.

Part of that comes from understanding that there is effectively an infinite amount of work. The work will always be there, and I will die before it is done. There is no sense in burning my entire life away without any enjoyment on a fool's errand. Unless you're a fire-fighter or an emergency room doctor, there is no such thing as urgency to work, it is all an invented construct. So don't let other people force it on you.

Don't develop an ambition just because others have it. You have decades left in you. You seem to be unhappy now.

Glass half-full, or half-empty ? Upto you.

You are a top-10 CS - that pretty much means you know a lot. Shouldn't be overly reading those technical articles. You are denying, or discounting knowledge that you have in you. Have patience with yourself. Back yourself.

Whether you are ambitious or not - you will get there. As long as you don't become a veggie, or an addict. Your skills and talent will take you places without overloading your anxious psyche with fake ambition. Things will happen if you stay away from the wrong places and the wrong times. Takes time - no, I am not saying you need to wait till 41 (or 42 ..). Decades sooner.

I don't expect my behavior to change any time soon.

I think if you have have the attitude that learning is only something you do to prepare for work, but then when work starts, you don't have to learn as much as you did before, then you're going to get frustrated really soon.

What you know now will be half as useful in 5 years, and practically useless in 10 -- for the most part.

But if you embrace life-long learning, you will adjust how you live your life. You'll allocate time to do, and allocate time to learn. Give yourself goals such as, "learn a new programming language each year" -- or whatever your passion is. If you're a DBA, then learn a new Database each year.

The mistake a lot of people make is they only learn things that they believe they need for their immediate job rather than learn things for the sake of learning. The latter is when you get the "aha" moments, that bit of spark that makes you realize you've not only learned something new, but something that can be practical in your daily job.

As one example, last year I spent time learning Haskell. It has made me a better C# and JavaScript developer.

Don't beat yourself up for watching TV. Just set small achievable goals with a reasonable time-frame, and stick to it. You say you don't have a fancy web-site, well make it your goal to create the best one you can possibly create in 2015. Make the goal real. Tell yourself that you'll blog about it and talk about it at local meet-ups in 2016 -- talk about your experience creating it.. from the initial goals all the way to completion, including what you've learned from the experience. Then it becomes something real and tangible.

I am 30 - I only started professionally coding almost 2 1/2 years ago. Compared to some of the younger hotshots out there, I'm behind, and that's ok - I accept that. The important thing is to learn new things, and from whatever you can. What other people do doesn't matter when it comes to improving yourself because all you can do is control your life.

I think the reality of the situation could be that you are afraid that if you actually focused on a project and put a lot of time and your best effort into it, it would still fail.

And, to protect yourself from that potential outcome, you sabotage your efforts with procrastination and then tell yourself a convenient fiction after the fact: "If I had only focused, I, too, could be a hotshot."

Possible solutions include learning to accept mediocrity, bracing for failure and going for it anyway, and therapy.

Or maybe you just need a partner (or team) to help you stay focused and motivated? That helps me.

What technical article? About the latest js fad? About the latest "Software Craftsmanship" pointless discussion?

You went to CS, you know the fundamentals, the rest is syntactic sugar, small differences and tradeoffs.

Yeah, a lot of unfinished projects. Or maybe not, some of them I used for a certain purpose, or even some I use pretty much always.

Don't try to catch up with everybody which is what you're doing.

Meanwhile someone is doing the next billion dollar project in PHP and MySQL (or maybe node.js and MongoDb) without using a Docker container...

1) never ever compare yourself to others, especially based on age. do your thing. for you.

2) wanting to achieve things in life is great but how young you do them really doesn't matter nearly as much as you think it does

3) wanting to achieve things in life is great but the way you treat people day-to-day trumps any achievement

4) go with where your energy is and let your goals emerge from that rather than expect the other way around. Don't set a goal of running a marathon if you hate running.

I have also Youtube, 9GAG and other websites "for fun". I tried so much ways to break with "fun sitting", but I have no success with it.

So, in one day I've noticed, that only one way to stop wasting time is remove all the unuseful stuff from subscriptions and make some body exercises (really!).

I've had this trouble. Now I'm trying to resolve it.

And. One thing from me... I live in poor family. One thing that really spins my gears is terrifying future - I don't want that my kids will be living like I. So, I should take care on my future to make it better.

For me, 26 was an age where I started to focus on my general productivity. My most productive time initially was in my teens, where I learned and achieved a lot from the age of 15 to 19, so much that it put me well ahead of others my age and really carried me through a comfortable career until I was 26. During those years of working I didn't have a computer at home. I went out, I was rarely at home, I partied a lot, I dated and I developed a lot of social and cultural skills at that time. I did things that didn't count as successful projects, but developed and educated me in so many ways, just like spending years on HN will let you grow a wide body of knowledge but you might end up with nothing to show for it. After 26 I also had enough work experience to land jobs where I had both the skill plus the autonomy to take on interesting and useful projects at work that I could get stuck into. It's only deep into my 30s that I developed the ability to focus and complete projects outside of my working hours.

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

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

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

    THE NEED TO WIN

    When an archer is shooting for nothing
    He has all his skill.
    If he shoots for a brass buckle
    He is already nervous.
    If he shoots for a prize of gold
    He goes blind
    Or sees two targets—
    He is out of his mind!

    His skill has not changed. But the prize
    Divides him. He cares.
    He thinks more of winning
    Than of shooting—
    And the need to win
    Drains him of power. 

At the same time, ask yourself why you procrastinate. Come up with a list of reasons for that as well. Probably a strong reason is that you're afraid of failure (since you need successful accomplishments so badly to feel self worth). Only when the anxiety of not finishing anything outweighs the anxiety of failing something do you not procrastinate. This is what happens when your primary motivator is anxiety.

Thirdly, ask yourself why in particular minimizing (age/accomplishments) is so important to you. If you live an average lifespan, you still have 2/3 of your life left to accomplish what you want. If you started from scratch now, you could still make major contributions to most fields in under 10 years time. If you're worried about declining brain health with age, do things which minimize the decline (avoiding excessive anxiety is probably a good place to start).

Consider that most people regret not spending enough time with friends and family, not fully appreciating life, and not communicating how they really feel, when they die. They don't regret not working more.

In almost every field there is some type of prodigal-genius, and its bearers find a lot of success at a very young age. Society is in general enamored with these stories, because by and large most 25 year olds have accomplished little to nothing of note (these days, even accomplishing financial independence by that age is a coup). These people get an outsized amount of attention because of their precocious talent and drive. Because we talk about them so much, they loom much larger in our minds than they do in the real world. There aren't as many of them as you perceive there to be, and they can also be prone to burning brightly until they burn out (especially in the arts). Coverage of these people tends to ignore: the role luck often plays, and the costs that sometimes come with going so fast and achieving success so early (i.e., the things they've ignored, the blind spots they can only fill with maturity, and the struggles these will cause as they grow old enough that no one's willing to overlook these flaws anymore).

In almost every field there's another type of genius that is borne more like new leather; it takes a while to break in. It takes experience, maturity and much wear for its bearers to grow comfortable with and capable of showing it off in the world.

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

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

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

What you seem to care about is working on a "great project" as defined by others rather than something you think is interesting and therefore great all by itself no matter what anyone else thinks. This is classic lack of self-confidence.

And as for finding motivation to overcome procrastination, sometimes you need to merely be disciplined to overcome it. You have to recognize, and trust your assessment of the proper priority of a task, and when it's important enough you just do that task as a matter of discipline, not as a function of enjoying it. And sometimes you need to plot procrastination and just enjoy it.

When you're 80, I pretty much guarantee you you're not going to say, "fuck me man, I wish I would have worked more."

I've been working hard on my first big project, and I expect it's going to be a great one.

It's probably not going to be a great one (especially if it's your first). Don't build things for the success, you'll always be disappointed. Build them because you want to solve a problem and enjoy the actual work. If all you enjoy is potential future rewards of success, you probably won't be able to suffer through the long, thankless work it takes to get there.

Would you like to create and maintain useful projects that you love to write and people love to use? Then it's not to late at all! Edward Kmett maintains a ton of widely used haskell libraries. He had a successful career as a software developer, went back and got his master's degree in his 30's, learned haskell, and became a leading figure in the community. Not just as a hacker, but he gained a deep knowledge of the mathematics behind haskell and made numerous contributions.

Think about that. At 26, you may not even have found the thing that you'll become famous for yet. You may not even know anything about the field that it'll be found in. The only way to get better is to push yourself, and little by little you'll become more disciplined, and learn more.

Read, push yourself, code, learn. You aren't dead yet, and don't let the achievements of people younger than you make you feel like you are.

I must say, it sounds like you're being VERY hard on yourself. Having a CS degree degree from a top 10 school and enough money in the bank to freelance for a few years puts you in a really good position.

Stop constantly comparing yourself to others. Set some realistic goals for yourself. Those goals should be based on what will make you happy, not what will make you feel like you measure up to others.

When was the last time you took a vacation? You may be a bit burned out. This will definitely cause you to procrastinate. Take some time off to refresh and recharge your battery.

Also, do you suffer from depression or anxiety? If so you may want to consider doing some therapy. Do you have a social life? Do you do fun things on a regular basis? If not, start making time to improve the quality of your life. I suspect that most of your problems are not career problems but side effects of general unhappiness. When you find happiness it will solve the other problems.

One last piece of advice. Going "indie" is not for everyone. I have a feeling it's not for you. You may find that you will flourish in a staff job that you truly love.

Best of luck friend!

It was a learning experience and i'm really considering about sharing my experience with others when i'm more successfull then now ( i have my own small company now, but not enough to talk about it)... I do plan to talk about it though... ( when i earn more ).

If anyone would be interested (this seems like a nice place to put it), there is a newly subscription list on http://goo.gl/forms/Ck1kK7YuhJ - I called it "Moving away from reaching too high - when to pick a stable income".

I cancelled plans (for now) on creating a web application without knowing it has a future (= income) and i'm planning to get a more stable income (already happening and i'm only 1 year further -- i have a full time job also - so i have no pressure).

I really hope you enjoy what you do though... 99% of the mass never create a successfull web application.

-jayce

2) You need to understand that there is always going to be somebody better, more talented and/or more hardworking. Remember to play the market, assess yourself objectivly, understand your strengths, understand the context, see the real problem, know where to push and get good at timing your pushes. Don't bruteforce, be sophisticated, precise and elegant. And most importantly, understand that the alternative to "The Constant Grind" is NOT being a couch potato. Remember that beating yourself accomplishes nothing. Be prepared to accept that if the procastination is too deep maybie, just maybie, you might just be lying to youself when you say you "love" what you are doing.

3) Read Patrick Mckenzie's blog: http://www.kalzumeus.com/

I can't claim that I don't ever feel the way you do. But honestly, those feelings come to me only rarely now.

Behind the things you have written is a motivation you don't realize. You are trying to win the approval of other people.

At some point in your life you will realize there is not much point in impressing people. They are just like you. Mostly they are concerned about their own lives. No matter what you do, people will only think about you for a small moment of time, and then their own lives will be most important again. So why do you care so much about these external things that impress other people for only a short moment in time? Anyone that is famous, that writes about fame, admits its kind of a burden and not much benefit.

The primary benefit of fame and notoriety is in finding mates and collaborators. But even with modest levels of success you can cultivate those things, without the psychic burden of trying to impress people all the time.

Trying to impress everyone is an endless treadmill. Even if you get some success, there will be a little man in your head that tells you that you are successful only because of luck. You'll want to reach up for the next rung on the ladder.

26 is a fantastic age. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise! I would literally part with my right testicle if I could be 26 again, knowing what I know now. The chances are very, very good that you are more attractive, intelligent, and energetic than you realize. Most 20-somethings don't have the life experience to put these things in proper perspective. Just as sure that you're not as good a driver as you think, you've got a lot more going for you than you realize.

> Whenever I encounter a technical article, I immediately and compulsively investigate the author's age.

There are so many ways of being awesome, just like there are so many ways of making money. You don't have to be what other people are.

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

That doesn't exist, except in people's minds, especially yours. Just do something now.

> But I can't help but feel that if I had started in earnest at 25, at 21, at 19

Late 40's here. I know how you feel. Take it from me: You have no business feeling like that!

I did this for a while and it really helped to motivate me because it was different type of work, but it puts you in a position where literally all you have to do is write the code. You have a production stack, a launch pad so to speak, everythings nice and pretty, now all you have to do is build a rocket. Don't try to build a fantastic one on the first iteration, just do it. I find using Python for initial versions of anything is a good idea because it's quick to code. After that find the bottlenecks and micro-service using languages that seem appropriate for the various bottlenecks.

Start small man. Don't focus on the light at the very end of the tunnel, you will think it's too far and get discouraged, especially if you're watching everyone else. Focus on the beta launch and the minimal set of features required. You'll be surprised after you see it running how inspiring it will be to start cranking out code.

The solution to the depression was external and not related to my 'career' (I'm self-employeed) or better self-organisation. Instead, the solution came with long-distance running, positive thinking and yoga. I healed mentally and now I'm much more stable. I use this guy and his success as a measure of how healthy I am. If I don't care - that means I'm ok. If I care about his 'success' - that means I should rest more, spend more time on open air or eat healthier food.

So I would recommend you to invest more in your mental health.

P.S. I work on several software projects but it's not a matter of amibiton, I just like what I make and want to made it better.

Someone who at 25 was smarter than my 25 year old self (whether at the same time or decades apart) will probably be smarter at 45 than my 45 year old self.

Someone who wasn't smarter than me at 25 will probably not catch my 45 year old me at 45 either.

You're driving yourself with the concurrent comparison: people who are currently younger. That is fallacious. Someone who was smarter than you at your age or younger historically also counts.

For instance, someone in 1969 could have been a brilliant hacker at age 17; better than you are now. Do you discount that person today because he or she is currently older than you?

Basically, you should compare yourself to historically good people. When you do that, you probably don't stack up. So, get over it and move on.

Future-wise, also. Someone not even born until after you die will be better than you.

1. There is a nice startup wisdom that you really shouldn't worry about competition, you just need to be the best version of yourself. The competition has their own problems that they don't talk about, so any fancy project out there is probably not as fancy after all and has its own problems. It all looks nice and pretty on the surface, but most concepts are just not viable, same in startups as in dev projects.

2.All the other projects that others have are based on years and years of unsuccessful work. They had to work hard, so rather try learning from them than being jealous and one day, you might be successful, too.

3. There is always someone younger, prettier, faster, better, bit I think that is a very beautiful thing. How boring it would be if you were the youngest, prettiest, best one already?

At 26, you are at the BEST age to start a startup, just out of Uni and not kids yet, how awesome is that. So now you have seed funding probably over $100k from what your runway tells me and now you got around 3-4 years without major responsibilites to start a startup.

Perhaps you recognise that peer-pressure & comparison is a huge motivator for you (it's probably what got you through your CS degree) you are trying to use that stick to force you to work more. However it's having an adverse effect on you. You cease to enjoy anything.

Try and make something small, just for you, just for fun. Focus on being happy instead of perceived success. What if you just let yourself enjoy your TV show or browsing HN? You may feel freer to enjoy your work.

You are not behind or in front, you are exactly where you are at right now.

You can't run a race if you're busy looking over your shoulder.

Your mention of feeling jealous reminds me of a quote from Mary Schmich when talking about advice she would give to the younger generation.

"Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself."

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

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

Hope this helps.

In the creative world, these voices are sometimes referred to as "witches." Everyone has this. They are not always about procrastination and failing either. People can also get insane "visions of grandeur" voices too! You may have thoughts about being the greatest programmer that has ever lived or the best writer ever. That type of thing. These thoughts are the flotsam and jetsam of the creative process. Icky foam. (Okay, no more ocean metaphors)

The mistake is listening to them. They are not helpful and are just impediments to working in the present. Think of them as intrusive guests that will leave if they are ignored. Let them rise and fall without worrying too much about it. Worrying about them can start a vicious cycle that is also an impediment.

The only place that work happens is today, now. This is the same for everyone. Even the people that you admire have to work in the present.

I don't care to keep up on everything any more. I remain intensely curious and "keep up" in a general fashion, reading articles, playing with code samples etc with an eye to being able to converse with my colleagues about what they're doing, not with the idea that we're competing to be the alpha geek.

Some of the other posters here have suggested you find something you're actually interested in and spend time on that, or that you find cause you can volunteer for and to that. Those are good suggestions. Find something outside your head you can do and commit to it. Part of your anxiety is because your world is narrowing because of the concentration on what is in reality a little area and you see others doing "better", whatever that means to you. Get out of that world for a bit.

Understand that time will pass and whatever technologies you get to know well will pass out of the market sweet spot. Maybe you'll be ready for that and maybe you won't. The question is will you have enjoyed your life when you realize this? Tech is a tool. One you use to make a living, one your employers of whatever stripe will try to use to make money. It is not a reason to get up and breathe.

I started out quite young myself, writing software for gameboy advance at 15, and I did plenty of public-facing work: articles, coding competitions, etc. After uni I joined a big corporation, and while I was learning plenty and doing a lot of very influential work, there was much less personal credit for what I was doing.

While this is less related to age, don't be too impressed by how you see the work of others represented. I've seen plenty of fancy videos (and TED talks) for people who just had vapour. You're always going to view yourself with all your perceived shortcomings, but you'll see others as the public persona they have meticulously crafted.

Two favorite piece I like to re-read when I have these moments.

+ The Secret to Success (this one is my all time favorite): http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/5/30/secret-to-succes...

+ Daring Greatly by Brene Brown (http://www.amazon.com/Daring-Greatly-Courage-Vulnerable-Tran...)

I can already see that you have so many of the skills described in Brene Brown's book. Keep fighting the good fight.

Can you find a question (not an answer) that can help you look at things differently? Who is it who is jealous? How does it feel to be jealous? What's going on right now?

Back around 2000, I got my dream job: I started working at Spümcø, the animation studio responsible for "Ren & Stimpy". At one point I was working closely with Jim Smith, whose work is amazing - I normally don't give a shit about the big muscle dudes he loves to draw, but he does it with such grace and fluidity that these big beefchunks become beautiful.

I was in awe of his casual knowledge of every single muscle in the human body, and the ability to deploy that knowledge in his art. I would never measure up.

Then one day he brought in some old work. Kid work, teenage work. I looked at it and a lot of it was terrible - awkward posing, horrible proportions, a whole bunch of general classes of errors that I recognized from looking back at my teenage drawings.

I looked at the dates. These drawings were older than I am. And it was like a light was switched on in the back of my head: of course Jim could draw rings around me with half his brain tied behind his back; he'd started before I was even born.

Since then, I have looked at artists who are better than me at one thing or another with occasional envy in my eyes. And then it instantly dissipates, because I know I could learn to do what they do better if I want to spend a few years on it - do I want that in my toolset bad enough?

And that realization freed me. I was able to look coldly at my work and decide that, yes, I'm good enough to get hired, I'm better at cartooning than like 90% of the people out there. I had the confidence then to embark on a year-long art project (drawing a Tarot deck), and then to move on to a four-year project (drawing a graphic novel) that I'm almost done with. I can't say I've worked on the comic every day by any means. But more often than not, I make myself spend at least a half hour on it. There's always something I can do without having to load the entire story into my head to turn it over and think about the shape it should be. And if I've only spent a half hour at the end of a day, it's still a half hour closer to being done than if I'd just spent the day playing video games.

Step outside of the fear of failure, the envy of younger, more successful people. Look at them as things your brain is doing and ask yourself why; treat it as a programming problem if that metaphor works for you. And find a way to make time for your own projects, even if it's just a half hour in the morning most days.

Let go, slack off, unclench your brain.

The way you describe yourself (ambitious; so many great ideas; big project) suggest that your self-esteem is high. However it might be unstable due to lack of evidence ("Experience-wise, I'm still a junior dev") that is convincing for you (as a result of constant comparisons with others).

In such situation (high but unstable self-esteem) auto-handicap is a common strategy to preserve the self-esteem by avoiding situations that could lower it and providing some rationalizations instead. It feels nasty but we people keep doing it.

One of many ways to cope with it is identify the sources we use to build our self-esteem and give them right proportions. Usually it comes down to rethinking the influence of other's opinions.

I didn't start coding in earnest till 25. I don't count my cs degree. I lamented my choice to go to architecture school after graduation. I COULD have gone to CMU or MIT most likely on scholarship. I regretted my choice deeply until recently when I realized I use the thought processes learned in my design lab more than anything I learned from my cs degree.

Recently I ve been hyper productive and am slowly marching towards my first product.

Meditate a bit, take stock of what you want to work on, and come up with a reasonable plan to get there. Take the time to figure out how you best work.

It's all going to be ok.

You're not to old, you're too young. Too young to even realize how young and immature you are.

I have hard time distinguishing you from a teenager, and wonder why so many people are taking this post seriously.

Here's some free life advice: Sell your television.

The obvious solution to this is to reduce entropy, and slow things down. Stay without the internet and television for a week, since these are the primary ways in which you procrastinate, think of it as rehab therapy. Eliminate all sources of deviations, and try to systematically lengthen your attention span. I would suggest meditating every day for an hour[1].

Secondly, stop reading the news. It's a complete waste of time. The set of all thought sequences you can have between time A and time B should be small. Watching the news, or reading HN greatly increases the number of irrelevant thoughts you can have. A perfect Bayesian with a utility function like "maximize knowledge gained" would not read the news at all. It is always a good idea to ponder about what a perfect Bayesian with your chosen utility function would do.

It's true that the only thing stopping yourself is you. And it's also true that you can do amazing things if you spend long enough on any particular thing[2]. I would suggest making an Excel sheet with the time spent doing productive work per day, and optimize for that.

I went from averaging around 30 minutes a week when I started measuring my productivity (I'm a college freshman .. so I'm free the entire day) to around 4 hours in the last week.

---

[1] Music I find helpful for meditation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPni755-Krg

[2] Einstein spent an entire decade on General Relativity. Andrew Wiles spent 7 years trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Persistence is the most important trait anyone can have.

But I can't help but feel that if I had started in earnest at 25, at 21, at 19 — then maybe the list of accomplishments at the end of my life will be longer.

Even if you did, there is no reason why you wouldn't have felt the same. I met someone of my age who had made an excellent game and was one of the winners of Github Game-Off. I felt envious, I struggled and finally made my own game with free art [1]. When I finished, did I feel any sense of accomplishment? Yes, sort of, but few days hence, I was in the same hole feeling shitty about my game being mediocre and having done nothing significant.

I have a reason to believe, that even many accomplished people, feel that they have missed so much, things could have been better and they could have achieved more.

[1]: http://coffeecoder.net/penguin-walk/

Lately, I have been dealing with cutting back on what I do as opposed to piling stuff on; focusing on no more than 3 things (for example), rolling off of less compelling projects, creating space. Give yourself, your days, some space and see what happens. Listen to your heart!

Think critically about what is and is not serving you and adjust accordingly. Expect nothing. You are divine! Look at all these people who want you to succeed! You are on the front page of Hacker News...certainly if there is nothing else that must be a sign that you are on the right path, especially as a tech professional

Great good wishes to you my friend

It sounds like you have developed an irrational fear around the concept of ageism. The less you worry about what others think the more productive and creative you will be.

Imho, society, in my case: software development culture, (to some extent) is sick. Many of us probably believe we need all to be Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon Musks. Insanity. I suggest you take a step back and find out what you really want. Perhaps a time off for centering yourself might be a good suggestion.

Someone said: A lack of ambition is a wonderful thing. That's probably true. Please relax. ;)

The fact that you read about person X or Y or Z, then feel inferior.... ugh. You don't have much imagination. Stop reading about other people - you should be able to feel inferior without reading the specifics of anyone else. But you can also feel... accomplished(?) both to your earlier self and to some others if you choose to.

Once you start to realize that, you'll hopefully have a different (and better) perspective on things.

You can't accomplish anything with a conflicted, unfocused mind. Without kindness to yourself, you can't be healthy enough to be productive. If you want to unlock the stamina and inspiration to build the life you're aspiring towards, you need to understand yourself and your mind and how you work and how to make it work. It sounds like you're trying to dictate when maybe a listening and trial/error approach with a kinder and gentler disposition would be more effective.

    <meta>Threads like these make me with I could save comments.</meta>

Furthermore, in some ways you are ahead. Having a "normal" young life is a good thing. In some ways I pity young successes like Evan Spiegal: they never had the camaraderie and joy of e.g. scratching together some money with friends for some beer and steak for a BBQ. In a nutshell, success is about improving your life, not replacing it. One day you'll value the days when you had the ability to procrastinate.

Also, exercise. Put aside 3 hours a week and run/bike/do anything. It will give you energy in ways you won't expect! You probably are 100% there already, but for me it wasn't obvious and so I wanted to include it.

Decrease your expectations and you will be much better off. Seriously. It sounds like you are probably in the top 1-2% in the world in wealth. Enjoy that and don't let the expectations that holds affect you.

Working really, really hard is technically one of those things, but it's generally a really bad use of time. Especially if you don't have an overriding passion for it.

If you are 26 and have money in the bank...your options are wide open. My advice: Immediately quit your job and go contemplate life from an exotic beach or a remote mountain top. Meet some people, see the world.

If the only things you've done in life are school and work, it's not very surprising that you haven't found your passion yet.

Go have fun!!

Also, it doesn't matter whether you hit it big or not. Big is something other people will call you, or not. After you have wasted your youth, and you can feel the years in you, you will feel their indifference toward other peoples' judgment. All you have are a stream of seconds that are filled with your own thoughts. That doesn't change no matter how famous you get.

You should focus on the things that enliven you, not the projects of great promise that will make you famous if someone notices. In the end, that feeling of being alive will be all you had.

Through this one-year degree, I made it to a one-year internship, so I'll be commencing my first full-time programming job at 34. This will also be the first time in my life I haven't lived month to month, money wise.

The fact that at the age of 26 you have savings enough to actually stop working full-time and go indie already gives you more opportunity than nearly everyone on the planet, and you are by default successful than most people will be in their life. You are normalized to the high salary of a (I presume US-based) developer and have very realistically probably already made more money than I have in 10 years.

On an 'absolute scale of success', I have accomplished precisely nothing - no money saved, no full-time job, debts to pay. By my own metric of success, I wouldn't have changed a thing except for 'choosing myself' more often (yes, read some James Altucher :P)

This is not supposed to be a "you don't know how lucky you are" admonishment - because, for over five years before going back to school, I thought about it, but agonized that I was 'too old', and so instead took the grand option of doing -nothing- instead.

Procrastinating or choosing nothing is not a choice.

Now, (almost) out the other end, I can say I was never too old. However, I was indecisive, permanently going crazy inside my mind trying to think of "what I should do next". I would, and still do, read every single thing on new technology I can find, obsessively compare and try to make the 'best choice' on what I should be spending my time doing - terrified to waste any time, and by the same token wasting the most amount of time possible.

The hardest part for you is always to actually -choose something- (be that what technology to learn next, what course to enroll in, what to work on for the next hour or year) and actually stick at it. You -will- sometimes choose wrong. But it doesn't matter -at all- later if your choice is wrong. The most important thing is that you made a choice.

Some philosopher said it's about "climbing down from the realm of infinite possibilities and immersing yourself in work".

If this is all slightly OT, it's because I'm extending this metaphor basically to my current situation of choosing the next programming language to learn! And am, in fact procrastinating by writing this.

So to try and give some practical advice on actually taming this feeling and -working-, here's some random things I've found really useful on both removing that awful feeling and also actually being more productive:

- (think this is from James Altucher again...) Keep a notepad in front of your computer. Each day, write down three small things you will get done on the computer that day. They will invariably be too big and you will never complete one. Make them smaller and smaller until you actually do one. The sense of achievement will make you do the rest.

- Read 'The Power of Now' - yes it's Oprah-recommended (and I usually pride myself on reading difficult books) but it actually has practical advice for resolving the anxiety you feel right now about your past felt mistakes. Just ignore it when 'energy' is mentioned - goddamit I was with that book until that page.

- Actually withdraw forcefully from internet-based updates as much as possible - a developer in my old job told me that the more he advanced as a developer, the less he tried to withdraw from all extraneous technology, including not owning a phone, because the information overload was just too much, and overall detrimental. At the time I thought he was actually insane.

I haven't quite gone that far, but I have taken his advice in relation to internet updates - I am now continually on the prowl for 'unsubscribe' in my emails, to try and not spend my entire time reading on my phone all day about all the things I should be learning (which reading about learning, unless it is a tutorial where I am doing practical coding, in fact does not teach me anything practical). Then just pick one thing and stick to it.

- Use the Pomodoro technique. I'm more productive in 25 minutes when I know exactly when they'll end then I am in 5 hours when I'm sitting at the computer and 'just click those few Quora links from today's email' first....now my evening, as with most of my other evenings (when I don't employ these techniques, which I need to learn over and over - discipline is training) has gone.

- RescueTime is also a great app for seeing where you're inadvertently wasting most time, and you'll find after blocking enough sites like Buzzfeed in your .hosts file that you actually start to run out of time wasting activities...

I hope maybe you get something useful out of these thoughts...!

The greatest irony of our lives is that we spend a lot of time and energy looking for that utopian place where people appear happy, thinking that if we reach there, we'll be happy. Instead we should look for the place that makes us happy and then strive to make that the best place to work for.

I think the rest of HN can give sufficient answers to your direct question, but I truly encourage you to think now about the underlying worry you mentioned of what you will have accomplished at the end of your life. Your priorities at that time are highly unlikely to be related to what you have coded.

Yes -- it's human nature. All you can do is focus on one thing at a time. If you are focused on what's important, then you are allowed to not feel guilty. A great man once said "take so much action your conscious brain doesn't have time to fall into its default patterns of worrying".

For help on focusing on one thing at a time, and taking so much action you don't have time to feel bad: http://focusr.co

As much as some of my engineering friends hate to admit it, life is a self-graded test. If you're happy with where you are, ain't nobody can tell you you're wrong. If you're not, you are failing. And if you're not happy with what you've got, continuing to do the same thing won't help: you'll just get more of it.

talent management and business success are different problems. talent management is about pursuing what gives you juice. business is about connecting your labor to other people, in a one to many type network so your labor can be remunerative. both tasks require continuously figuring out how to do a better job.

You will stop procrastinating when you believe and when you spontaneously feel what you are doing is more important, and more fun, than your distractions. procrastination is evidence of competing values, competing interests. you'll have more success by orthogonally including these competing values in your labors than by trying to shut them out and criticizing yourself because what you think you should be interested in is different than what you are interested in. you can align your values and desires towards your goals, but only so much. you will be much more successful if you align your efforts towards your values and interests. As you want business success and have a curious mind (hence the distractions) you have to thread your own curious solution.

But it's never really "late" to do anything career wise. Other's may have issues with age, but you can always learn new skills, work on projects, start businesses and more. There's no age limit on taking action.

It's easier now, more than ever, to pick up a framework to action on something and just do it.

I'm 33 (and still feel extremely young in what I do). I just read The Launch Pad and was a little disappointed that to 'succeed', you need to be mortgage free, no kids, be prepared to relocate and have a co-founder you share your entire life with; generally traits of an unattached 20 year old with close friends. I would fail all those, but would that put me off trying a startup - hell no! Do I believe I could be part of the 0.1% of those that succeed? Of course. But will I feel like a failure if I'm not. Absolutely not!

I focus on the following. Do I have more experience, wisdom and understanding than I did 2 years ago? Am I enjoying the projects that I work on? Do I have vision for where I want to get to? I also know that there will always be people who are better and smarter than me. If that bothers me, learn from them, but don't envy them. They are no more 'special' than anyone else.

If I could go back 10 years, what would I do with that abundance of time I once had? Honestly, it wouldn't matter as I know I was not 'ready' to succeed at that age. At that age I hand't found the passion for what I do and hadn't seen enough of the world's problems first hand.

The problem I have is that I find it hard to focus on a single project and I'm overcommitted in my work (I work for a startup and two organically grown businesses). I have an endless stack of side projects that need my focus. But I only stop working on one because I find more passion for another. I'm okay with this - to a point. This is my challenge which I am working on by breaking down the goals into much smaller, more manageable deliverables. Celebrate the small wins as the big win is just a collection of smaller ones.

My advice to you. Forget about age. It doesn't matter if the other person is 18 or 68. I'd say to write down on post it notes the top 10 things you want to achieve in the next 30 days. Pick the top one to start with, then throw out the other 9 post it notes - they are just a distraction.

Once you get there, what you'll actually feel is that it doesn't really matter (there are more vital/core important things in life) and then, ironically enough... you'll work better.

I felt the same way. My problem was I pressured myself so much I never finished a single thing. I guess you have to somewhat break free from yourself.

i also like to compare myself to what others around my age have achieved and i would set silly target for myself ('if they achieve that at the age of x, i will surely achieve that as well when i turn x'). i know this is toxic mindset, but i just cant get rid of it. i'm currently working in a very promising startup now. i know i should be grateful with what i have right now but i can't help thinking how little i have achieved and how i can get kicked out easily once new bright young devs come in.

this couple of week, i'm starting to come to terms with myself, rethinking my life goals and cutting off the unrealistic ones. i'm still mentally exhausted though and currently contemplating of taking sabbatical break just to try to enjoy life again. hope that you too will find your solace and i wish you all the best for your new project.

ps: not sure about this, but i always assume that my problem will solve itself if i can get a girlfriend. it will be great to have someone by your side that support and acknowledge you. it also helps you to think less about yourself as you shift your focus and attention to her. i'm not so lucky to have one though...

It's easy to look at people who are doing great. (I went to high school with a self-made billionaire.) It's easy to forget that there are a lot of talented people who aren't doing well by external measures. Then again, who knows what is going on inside people's head?

A lot of these people whom you're fixating on now are complete shitshows. You're looking at the public persona of unmitigated success and awesomeness. The reality is almost always not so rosy.

Think about what you want to do when you grow up. Turn your computer off and go cut grass, hike, swim, or whatever for a weekend.

instead of analysing you and give you some meta advice, i will give you some hands on things to do. (my quaterlife crises lasted a whole decade, but it laid the groundwork for the awesome life i have right now)

a) stop with whatever you are doing now, just stop, don't tell yourself you can't as you have to do so much stuff, just stop.

b) and then start travelling. 9 months, a year, the longer the better. do not prepare too much, you will not need it, travel alone.

only take a kindle and a crappy underpowered smartphone with you (i.e. a firefoxOX device),

if you haven't travelled before, start with thailand, it's a safe and easy country to start travelling, take it from there.

c) do not talk to the same people as you would talk at home, if you are american, don't talk to americans, if you are european, talk to americans, .... relax this rule after some time

d) return

you will not be the same person as you have before, and you will laugh at the person you were before

the whole process is called "getting some perspective"

you can do it at home, too, but well, it's easier if you are physically away and on the road

This is definitely not advice, consider this a commiserating post.

Ten years ago, I started learning to play Go (the board game). At the time, I was obsessed with the game, and I was very sad that I didn't get to know/ learn the game earlier. I wanted to play Go professionally, and I thought that it was too late for me to ever be one of the top players in the world (context: I was 16 at the time, and to play Go professionally, you have to be really good. Most pro started playing when their age is in the single digit). 10 years passed by, and I'm not sure what changed, but that certainly doesn't seem to matter anymore. I still love the game, but now looking back, I don't feel dreadful that I didn't learn the game earlier. This might sound unrelated, but I'm sure that 10 years from now, we will look back and laugh at ourselves if we think this is too late to do X, Y or Z.

There are a saying (paraphrase by me) that goes along the line: when you're 20, you're mostly a product of your family, environment, upbringing, friends etc... but when you're 30, you're a product of yourself. That is to say that in our younger years, in a sense a lot of it comes down to "luck", you might stumble in something you like to do young enough that you get some success, got motivated, didn't waste time on video games (along with the usual notion of "luck" involving one's upbringing and family, obviously). Teenagers and young adults are mostly idiots, to no one fault, and only some of us were fortunate enough to skip that period. The world is choked full of distractions, and while I used to think that I have unlimited will power, I also thought that I was invulnerable, so well ...

Life is long, and one of the things I've realized is that almost no one runs full speed for their whole life. The few that do are probably thousands in a billion. I think it was Bill Gates that commented Jobs to be the rare one who has the fire his whole life. A lot of the people who are massively successful in their youth will slow down (it's stressful to be ambitious, after all). So well, if we want to catch up, I guess we already spent our shares of "relaxing time", and just have to look down and plow through things now. Just think about it as we doing things a bit backward. It's gonna work out fine (I hope!). We can't make up the last 10 years, and likely won't get to the top of the world. But I believe anything under that is still up for grab.

There are also the aspect that at least for me, it (work, ambition, success) is a really personal and emotional thing, and chance are our judgements right now are terrible (emotional == irrational) -- maybe a few years from now we would have realized that the "TV watching time" was us exhausting from work, and that we couldn't actually programming 14 hours a day anyway. Just to point out a seemingly irrational thing in your post, you're 26 now, and hoping that you would have started in earnest at ... 25 is a bit odd, isn't it? One year, while valuable, won't make that much of a difference.

Write your worry down. I don't know why, but as soon as I write things down, it feels like I'm taking it off my head. I guess now there is a reminder of my mistake on paper, and I don't have to constantly remind my self.

Also, booze helps, a bit of drunken state helps me slogging through side projects. Although extreme moderation is advised.

My email is in the profile, if you're looking for someone to commiserate from time to time ;)

Also, I would consider having enough savings to live without work for a few years to be pretty great! I am certain there are many of us who would welcome that (me included). Perhaps you should take time out to travel and see the world to put it into perspective instead of running the rat race?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3685

This is a trap - and one you need to be really careful not to fall into, or it will destroy your life.

You're all over the place. You have no idea what you want. You're looking to everyone else to shape your vision of what success is. Your problem is not that you're getting older, its that you are unfocused and lazy.

Sorry to be so blunt but if you want to change your life you need to understand that you are doing it wrong.

The good news is that you recognize that whatever you are doing, it isn't working for you. The past is gone and the present is rapidly slipping into the past so focus on the future where anything is possible. It sucks to know that you are the problem... but its great to realize that you don't have to force or convince anyone else to change in order to solve it. You only need to force or convince yourself.

First thing, write down your goals. If you don't have goals that are so clear to you that you can just sit and write them down, you need to figure that out right away. Write on paper, with ink. Doing that changes your goal from a nebulous "maybe someday" in your mind to something that is tangible, in the real world.

Your goals should become your external motivator. You haven't identified what you really want, so you don't feel motivated. Once you know the destination, just treat it like you would any other trip... plan out the route and walk in that direction. When you feel that "gnawing in your chest", use it as a reminder to ask yourself "how is whatever I am doing right now getting me closer to where I want to go?"

And listen, turn off the television. Altogether. If you have a gun you might want to consider shooting it up. That shit is designed to make you feel like an inferior piece of crap so that you go out and buy some actual useless crap that they tell you will make you happy. You'd be better of smoking weed until your eyes are so crossed that everything looks like one of those Magic Eye posters.

I know it sounds cliche, but it is literally true that today is the first day of the rest of your life. You can constantly compare yourself to the "hot-shot young dev" and find differences, but one thing that will always be in common between you is that the future only exists in your mind. It is up to you to decide what that future will be, and if you want to make it real. So just decide who the future "you" is, and start walking like that person right away. The future "you" is depending on it.

To add insult to an insult he was good looking, he was surfing and his website displayed in IE chromeless window which before that I wasn't even aware to be possible. And I though of myself as knowing almost all of the tricks.

The way I removed myself from mentally competing with this guy was thinking that this guy probably had a father, rich one probably, probably entrepreneur while I was raised by single working mom and a grandfather who was a tinkerer.

That softened the blow enough to just work out an acceptance of the fact that, at no fault of mine, world is filled with a lot more awesome people than me. It is. If you are one in a million, there are thousands of people like you or better on this globe.

Now I'm 36 and I'm feeling way better now. After years of bummming around as a lone wolf I got hired by corporation few years ago. It turned out to be much more profitable and way easier than freelancing. I pumped up my self esteem and my account by showing me how high rates I can demand for my work and I stopped feeling pressure to strike gold.

Surely everybody would want to be Marcus Persson but people like him are so lucky that you can't compete with that in any capacity. It's as if you'd compare your salary with somebody's lottery win. "This guy made a 10 million dollars in a day and what I got? Few hundreds?"

If I at any point in my life get this combination of luck, opportunity, skill and time to launch me way above everything I could build myself then great. If not ... that's perfectly fine. I'm perfectly satisfied with gradually moving towards places that earn me more and bore me less and in the off time playing with whatever I find interesting without thinking whether it's profitable in any way or not.

On more practical note... Try to pick jobs that pay the most. Try to stay on those jobs only as long as you are surrounded by the people you learn from and you are forced to learn. But avoid long hours.

You'll notice that that your brain will be more awake. Instead of watching TV or reading internet you'll be prototyping new technology in your free time, just because you'll feel like it.

If you start getting bored you'll see yourself to be doing in your free time more and more mindless things. Most mindless is TV so the only way you can go from where you are is up.

As you get older you'll probably give less of a shit about people's age. That and you'll see how young, stupid and naive the people who are younger than you really are :)

many nights I end up vegging out in front of the TV or aimlessly clicking around on the internet

An Adderall prescription works well for this. Also a standing desk. I find standing so much work I don't like browsing news sites while doing it, I just want to get my work done and take a break, lol.

In the real long run, we're all dead, and nothing we do matters. All we can do is try to live a good life while we're here.

Your ego is handicapping you from doing anything. Throw it away. Stop comparing yourself to others. And just work and be the best you can be.

In other words, time passes and before you know it you are 50 and you don't get those years back.

So how are you going to spend your life.

Worry about that before you worry about other people.

Medication has made me 10xs the entrepreneur I was prior. I feel like I am now my fullest self.

Get to the doctor :) Modern medicine is a wonderful thing.

Don't be afraid to fail. Push ahead and you'll see failure is temporary.

Do I want to push something out quickly and get feedback, or do I want to take the time to write the right code for it.

Food for thought

36 isn't to late... much less 26.

25 is not old. The industry is somewhat young-people-worshipping now, but that's because computation has gotten incredibly popular now, and that is the age of a lot of people - most of the people I've worked with are older than that, and that's fine. Experience is great. There will be a ton of older folks making awesome things long into the distant future. I find the idea (it seems a little bay-area centric) that 25 is old to be, well, insane, but perhaps that's just what people of every generation do.

I started my first startup at 33 or so, really, there's nothing magically about this (many parts of it totally suck!), and it's just as good to work for a large company. Because someone started something at an earlier age is really meaningless. Heck, just thinking about a great idea for 5 years and then finally making it into a thing is valuable, so your time isn't wasted. We are basically a culmination of all of our experiences, and how we use that information. More experience is better.

The best thing you can do is build cool things that you enjoy, but there's also no point in trying to "win" the game or be better than anyone else.

I think the general ideas about attachment or desire for greater things breeding suffering are more or less correct. Build things that you enjoy, and enjoy them for you. It's similar to "more money, more problems". Fame from past projects or accomplishments will fade too, technology gets replaced daily. You can be happy with today, but if you are always focusing on tomorrow, you really can't be. Also, if you don't enjoy building things, do something you do enjoy as well. Helping people matters. Everything else? Building a really shiny ecommerce webpage? Not so much.

I guess what I'm saying is, those things don't matter. There's no benchmark. There's only whether you are happy, and you can actually change what makes you happy. And it's also ok if you don't know what that is yet.

But yeah, if you want to do good stuff, keep doing more stuff. Better just happens. (And to bring it back to the quote -- everybody takes bad photos, the trick is to just not upload the bad ones. Everybody writes bad code too!).

Ultimately I think HN focuses on people who get lucky and make the big bugs on startup exits or big CEO salaries WAAAY too much. It messes up people's value systems. Money is not all that matters - not by a longshot. It's also true you can do really well without being one of those extremely lucky people.

A very beneficial approach to take is objectivity. The state of other people does not influence the objective reality of your worth. If you were a runner, for example, your ability to run a 4 minute mile remains regardless of whether other runners are faster or slower. You could either look at yourself and say 'I am slower than other runners', or you could look at yourself and say 'I can run a 4 minute mile.' One is contingent upon other people, and the other is an objective measure which can not be influenced by people.

An objective basis of self worth, an inventory of skills and accomplishments based on actual personal history, will also change your goals. Instead of setting a nebulous goal of 'I want to be faster than other runners' which you will never believe you have accomplished (as you get faster you will simply change to looking at another group of faster runners and feel you have made little or no progress), you will set goals like 'I want to run a mile in 3 minutes and 45 seconds' which is definite, testable, achievable, and which has a clear path towards accomplishing it. Concerning yourself with objective truth rather than relative measures is tremendously freeing. It builds your self worth from successes which nothing can take away from you. Chasing a goal like 'I want to be a better programmer' is fundamentally different from chasing something like 'I want to implement the LZW data compression algorithm.' The first provides no direction, and provides no sense of accomplishment because you can always be 'better'. The second is something you can work toward and accomplish and which will produce an artifact you can point to and say 'I built that.'

Make no mistake, this is not simple, especially changing your thinking after adolescence, but it is very rewarding. You would have to consciously fight against your intuition, which, rewarding though it inevitably is, some people are very uncomfortable in doing. Eventually, the tendency to judge objectively rather than relative to others or reliant upon their opinions will come naturally and make you happier.

One contributor is that I feel lucky I didn't get "tracked" when I was in my 20s.

I had time to explore the world and take in a lot of experiences and learn a lot of things about being a human, instead of just being "the best" along some metrics that everyone else might have said mattered.

Now maybe I'm just making myself feel better and there's little truth to all that, tho I feel that's unlikely.

I think if you have taken the time to understand things, you will be more effective than people who haven’t.

A reason is because in order to be successful you have to keep making successful choices, a one-off doesn’t cut it. And there’s no way to do that with luck because the probabilities multiply, meaning you’re exponentially less likely to make a string of successful choices if you’re just lucky with patchy understanding, than if you’ve actually cultivated your understanding, and can reproduce it.

So taking the time to observe, learn and reflect, instead of just copying, coding and competing, is actually doing a lot more for your future trackrecord than you might have thought.

One time someone asked Picasso why they should pay him for a sketch it took him 2 seconds to complete. Picasso replied, “You’re not paying for the two seconds, you’re paying for the 40 years I spent to get here.”

You’re worried about time. Don’t be. It’s not important. The important thing is your understanding, not the time you have, or even spend coding. Most of the great products did not launch with something that would take 1000s of hours of coding to create -- mostly, they became successful because their business model, their marketing and their product market fit worked. And all these things came to exist, because of the understanding, and the resulting choices, of the product’s creators.

How did Zuck make FB so successful? Is it because he locked himself in his room and was a coding-Einstein? I don't think so. I think it's because he understood a few things about marketing and people, and could build something, and kept making choices that worked based on that understanding. That made FB what it is.

Did FB grow because it was a far superior technical product encompassing 1000s of hours of work? No. It grew because your friends were on it, so you got on it too. To get people on it, they hand crafted course timetables for each college, and worked to make it useful. They original FB didn't even have photos. Ahahaha. How lacking is that? And yet just over 10 years ago, college kids were signing up to it. So Zuck and his friends knew something from their own experience, and they put that understanding into how they built and sold their work.

So think not on the 100s of hours you wished you’d spend coding. Think instead on the time you invested developing your intuition so you could make choices (about product, marketing and life) that are going to work.

Even PageRank is not a complex algorithm -- the iteration itself is basic. It’s not likely that the biggest contributor to ROI for Larry Page’s time came from hundreds of hours A/B testing and hacking this algorithm. It’s likely that the biggest ROI came from Page and Brin’s deep understanding of the value of citations in establishing credibility and relevance, and that, a little bit tongue in cheek, they decided to make a search engine for the web on the same principle they’d observed operating in academia. And then, the understanding that they had, and kept, cultivating created that they made a string of successful choices around hiring, and around business model.

So before you can create some awesome product, you've got to create yourself and your understanding because, if you're not real, then your subsequent choices, even if the initial product is successful, will not bear out that success in the long term. So whether you become an expert in a relevant part of the world through intensive academics, or hanging around and having fun, the thing that matters is that instead of caring about what everyone else is chasing (being “tracked”) you care about what you care about, and observe and experiment and gain understanding.

And this sounds like what you’ve been doing all along. Instead of focusing on work, you’ve been focusing on yourself, and at the same time keeping one eye firmly on your great ambitions.

So even as you’ve talked like you’ve wasted your time, like time is your enemy, like procrastination is this big evil, I’m feeling like time and how you chose to spend it is actually your asset. You’ve invested that time in learning and observing which has put you ahead of the people who were too busy chasing the “dashboards in their mind” about their career and “achievements”, to really take the time to understand maybe in order to make an original contribution you have to be an original person, first.

And when you get down to building your awesome and great product, it's won’t be about the code, or the algorithms, nor is it, as we can see by looking at Amazon, Google or even, yes, FB, about the UI aesthetics. It’s about the real value you provide people (product market fit/UX), how you share that value (marketing), and how you capture value for yourself from what you create (business model).

Maybe you feel "How do those things apply? They’re business concepts.” I’d say, it works to consider if they’re irrelevant or if they’re actually they’re like thermodynamic fundamentals of how the world works.

The market is just the statistical aggregate of people’s choices on the grand scale, like temperature. A business model is how you make sure you keep doing the stuff you like, like conservation of energy. And marketing is anything that increases the probability that a significant portion of people will choose your product, like a catalyst. And real value is not something you’re likely to search your way to through A/B testing, which partly exists because people have spent so much time becoming experts at work, they’re not experts at where they want their work to have an impact, the world, so instead of being able to have convictions about the world, they choose to A/B test their way across the decision landscape, and such a search only going to leave them more likely atop a molehill than an Everest. Though in the long term, pivoting plus A/B search can be a strategy which works on average, which doesn't mean convictions and the choice to have them are without value. You choose to develop convictions, and when you deploy them in a decision, maybe they get you to Everest faster than if you had only relied on pivoting and A/B search. That's an advantage. Sometime the advantage is so great that while every AB searches over the rolling hills of planet Groupthink, you are already landing pretty close to the highest point on planet Awesome because you chose to develop and deploy your convictions.

So all that time you spent unstructured, untracked, that’s your greatest asset. Anyone can learn to code, anyone can copy your idea, but only you can keep making the choices which it has been your own unique experience’s gift to you to make. So, before you lock yourself in your room again, chasing some metric -- maybe consider that it works for you to keep observing more, and get back to what you’ve been doing so well, but feeling so unnecessarily guilty about, just hanging out and learning, because that's really the foundation of your future success, far more than any coding is. :)

(<3 you Phil)

Go to a psychiatrist and get yourself evaluated. It would help you a lot. My 2 cents.

what are you trying to prove? who are you trying to prove it to?

Also you're not older, you're just a kid with kid moods, which is perfectly appropriate when you're a kid, so... good (edited to emphasize, good as in there's nothing wrong with you, not good you're unhappy). You'll know you're actually old "for real" when your self doubt switches entirely over to "Why did I waste my life on screen time, doing stuff I don't care about to earn extra money I don't need to buy stuff I don't want to impress people I don't know who won't care anyway, when I could have been doing something meaningful like (playing with the kids, watching that eclipse, climbing that mountain, dating that person, taking that class, learning that skill, reading that book, watching that live music event, building that thing...). All I really remember from the youthful age of 26 was the fun of dating my future wife and to my regret wasting too much time on work and business and computers, its the mood switch that's how you can tell I'm old(er), not necessarily the memory loss LOL.

There are also serious educational issues, looking at something like the greek philosophical ideal of balance being the goal and lack of balance inherently being wrong in and of it self, I can assume if you're only freaking out about financial success and fame, then your musical listening and instrument playing is going really well, you're reading some cool lit, and you're up to date with exciting recent developments in philosophy and science, eating great food, exercise is going well, and all that other "well rounded human" stuff. There are Eastern outlooks that say basically the same thing with totally different words. Seeking balance seems an almost inherent part of being human. So you didn't get a good education, even if you got excellent vocational training or on the job training. The only way to make that bad situation worse is to not work on being more well rounded.

Note the common mythological trope of some dude who focuses entirely on one thing, gets really good about it, and ends up having a really shitty life (struck down by lightning by the greek gods for hubris, chained to a boulder while vultures eat his liver for all eternity, wings melt in the sun and drown in the ocean, etc). I think the ancients might be trying to give you some life advice about the inevitable result of deciding to be a little too focused on one aspect of life.

So best of luck, you're very young and have plenty of time to figure it all out. It would be way more tragic if your post claimed you're 62 instead of 26 and you're just starting to figure out life. You'll do fine if you're already that far at this young age.

I find it very hard to sit down and work on a project without an external motivator, and on many nights I end up vegging out in front of the TV or aimlessly clicking around on the internet.

This is a classic environment type problem. If you're committed to creating great work, then you have to carve out time for yourself. This means having a specific routine. Talk to people who train in sports and they'll tell you– they don't rely on any particular sort of motivation (external or internal). Rather, they have a routine where everyday at 6am they lace up their shoes and go for their run, like it or not. Read Stephen Pressfield's The War Of Art– he talks about Going Pro. You don't wait for motivation. You do the work every day. Sometimes inspiration will come, sometimes it won't.

Every day, I read an article by some hot-shot young dev who has a handful of fancy projects behind his belt

These folks are exceptions. They're exeptionally good and they're exceptionally lucky. You'd be better off not reading any articles at all.

It's a constant, irrepressible gnawing in my chest.

I experience this intermittently. IMHO, I experience it when I haven't been doing work. The solution is literally to sit down and do work. The gnawing is a reminder that you are working, not doing.

even though I still end up on HN half the time

Turn off the Internet?

I have so many great ideas, and knowing that the main obstacle between them and me is only myself keeps me in an endless state of panic

This, together with your vegging out / aimless clicking, suggests to me that you're framing the problem too broadly.

The main obstacle between you and your goals might be you, but it also might be, you know. One quant of work, followed by another, and another. Baby steps, man. Do one thing at a time.

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

This is the venomous, compounding problem about obsessing about sunk costs. Listen– life isn't a linear thing. Some of these folks younger than you will get into car accidents and die. Others will get distracted, end up in horrible marriages, all sorts of nasty things will happen. Life doesn't progress nearly as linearly as you think.

What you need to do is really sit down and go, "Yes. I have burnt a decade. I have some unknown amount of time in front of me. I have today." What are you going to do with today? Why do you want to spend today agonizing about yesterday?

I'm a 41 y.o. management consultant for tech companies. Am I successful now? Because I published my second book last month, some think I am successful. But I feel like I am only getting "warmed up" and, at best, I am at 30-50% of my potential. Do I compare myself to others and feel regret? I do. For example, I look at what Eric Ries has accomplished. I admire him a lot, and I think he deserves all the success he has achieved, but ask myself why I didn't do more in my 30s. Another person I admire is Nir Eyal. Seeing what he's accomplished, I wonder why I didn't do more in my 20s and 30s! Actually, I got to interview Nir a few months ago, and discovered he's a normal human being, not a superhuman creature.

Here's some advice. (BTW, my training and expertise is in industrial-organizational psychology. It's not clinical psychology but the psychology of: individual performance, team performance, motivation, engagement, etc.)

Plenty of successful people struggle with self-doubt, self-criticism, and anxiety. For example, I struggled with depression in my 20s. Whatever your pain, it is your cross to bear. Learn to manage your condition, and you will become a stronger person, and better able to help others who struggle like you did.

Learn to deal with setbacks and disappointments without freaking out. Learn to meet adversity and hardships with equanimity -- with an even mind. Keep driving towards your goal but be ready to change your plans as you go. When I was 34, my dad died quite suddenly. It was terrible. But from that hardship, I decided to take action toward my goal of becoming a management consultant. I started down that new path. Three years later, I got my Masters degree in industrial-organizational psychology, and was excited about starting my new career. Weeks after my graduation, our youngest child was diagnosed with a chronic condition for which there is no cure. I had to change my plans around for four years mostly because I needed to learn to care for my daughter. She's doing well today because we put her health and well-being first.

Self-compassion is important. You can be compassionate with yourself while continuing to work and get progress made each week. You may want a coach or a professional counselor to help you sort through this.

Some will tell you to "have no regrets at all" because they want to help -- ie. get you to stop worrying so much. Actually research tells us that some degree of regret can serve a useful purpose. The problem is overwhelming regret and shame. Again, the solution and antidote to all of this is self-acceptance and self-compassion.

If you want to be successful, the research points to success being determined by how many people you help to become successful, and how much talent you multiply in others in your community of peers and your network. Look at ways to keep improving your own skills but help others get more skilled and successful too. Read the book "Give and Take" by Adam Grant.

Last but not least, you can't stop your mind from comparing your achievements to others. But you can learn to observe your mind and your thinking, without "buying into it" or being a slave to that train of thought. Take a course in mindfulness meditation. You have many good years ahead of you.

I'm 38. I didn't go to college out of high school, I went into the Marines. I wanted to be a Journalist, but I didn't score high enough on the ASVAB apparently and got stuck with an Audio/Video job. I was far from a Valedictorian, I scraped by with Bs and Cs. Fast forward years later, having worked many other jobs from factories/warehouses to gas stations; I grew weary and went to college. I was 27. How did you think I felt after little to no career success? I switched Majors three times. Started with the intention of doing Physical Therapy, switched to Pre-Pharmacy, then Biochemistry - struggled immensely, and finally went CS, sort of. I picked a CIS degree because it would have been another year of college to do the CS (the math would have added much of that).

I graduated at 31. I'm not a ninja programmer, and compared to much of HN I'd have to agree I'm pretty mediocre.

So there you have it, one additional perspective in this enjoyable thread. One more data point to show you that you have more than you think, and shouldn't always compare yourself to the extreme outliers.

Edit: for what it's worth, I'm relatively happy with myself as a person if not super proud of my current situation in my career (making much less than I could be).

We all want to be Tony Stark. A captain of industry, successful philanthropist and daring philanderer.

The truth is, this is about as realistic an outcome as winning the lottery. Doesn`t stop hordes of people from becoming addicted to the possibility and wasting their time and money on that impossible outcome.

Stop fantasizing about becoming Tony Stark, and start living your own life. Maybe programming doesn`t really make you happy, and its just a means to an end. That`s perfectly fine. Find a position with solid work life balance that allows you to enjoy your life outside of work.

The HN crowd tends to idolize a tiny sliver of programmers who enjoy writing code for the sake of it. I know very, very few people who can`t think of anything better to do with their free time than to write code. For most of us, its just a trade that pays well and is somewhat enjoyable. It`s a means to an end.

Sure, we can fantasize about building the next PayPal, but in all honesty there`s plenty to enjoy in life without having a net worth in the billions.

Stop measuring yourself using absurd metrics. You`re falling into the trap of an internet world. It would be like comparing yourself to the King of England a few hundred years ago. Unrealistic and absurd.

The world is not meritocratic, and it sure as hell isn`t equal opportunity. You`re alive, you`re healthy, and you`re relatively smart. Enjoy that while it lasts, and fuck the rest.

I was born in a very poor area of a country called Brazil. I probably make now as much as my whole street. I can't compare myself with somebody richer, or that had better education at home and school.

I feel very successful and one in a million. Today I work in Germany and my parents are very proud of me.

I think you have to first understand HOW DID YOU START, then WHY YOU ARE WHERE YOU ARE. Maybe you don't find computing interesting as somebody of 17 years old that is a 'genius'. You have a different life from them but that doesn't make you better or worse, you are just looking at a very blind angle, which is age.

I feel that it's ok if you just do your job, maybe write some software every once in a while at your home and enjoy life: marry someone, try to respect others(this is harder and more important than being the best on your field), play video games, listen to music, cook something, learn another skill...

Actually, the more I reach closer to the top, the less I want it. I don't want to deal with the people from the top, they usually lack a lot of things like respect, they are usually very egocentric and so on, which is something that doesn't inspire me at all.

You need to have a broader view of what a people do instead of looking just at the age. Maybe by doing that all that bad feelings you have will go away. I also have it but you need to learn to tame this monster. What if you let it take over you and then you become this guy that writes articles and is all famous and important but have a very negative impact in the world and the lives of people that are close to him?

Take it easy.

Then, next week, you never hear about them again. Well, maybe a couple of them you will, a year later, but not the others. They're forgotten.

Do what you want to do and quit relying on other people's stories to make you miserable. They aren't you and there are plenty of people, here on HN, who wish they were in your position.

Strive to be happy.

on many nights I end up vegging out in front of the TV or aimlessly clicking around on the internet.

An hour or two per day of that is not a big deal. You need to relax. As long as you're doing well at your job and getting enough exercise, it's fine to watch an hour of TV. One warning: assume that once you start watching TV or junk internet, you probably won't do anything else for the rest of the day, so don't start until you've accomplished enough that you'd be OK with that. Also, keep a set bedtime. The problem with staying up late with TV or junk internet is that your judgment gets worse as it gets later and you're not as good a judge of "Is this really more valuable than an hour of sleep?" at 12:00 as at 10:00.

You shouldn't beat yourself up over needing an hour per day of "do nothing" time. That's completely normal.

I am crippled by the feeling that it's "too late".

As Ed Kmett says in this very good (and accessible) talk on how to learn (link: https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-le... ) your career is going to be a lot longer than you think. It's far from too late.

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

Well... a few of those people were just single-minded and focused, but many of them were also produced. Evan Spiegel's a billionaire at 24, but he's a product. He was picked by aging venture capitalists, facing irrelevance and acting out of fear, to match their idea of what Millennials look like. Twenty years from now, these products (Lucas Duplan, Evan Spiegel) won't be relevant. Take the same attitude toward those "30 Under 30" lists. They have the same problem as the "holistic" component of college admissions: they're middle-aged C-players trying to separate the A+ from the A players among the young. (The middle-aged A/A+ players are out kicking ass and therefore too busy to give a shit about "30 Under 30".) They're just not capable of making meaningful selections, so you should view it as irrelevant celebrity noise and ignore it.

Trust me that very few people half a decade younger than you (that's 21) are producing fundamental work. Young people do get a lot more recognition for accomplishments that would be mediocre by an adult standard, and those "golden child" types get addicted to the recognition and don't improve. The people your age who will be kicking ass 20 years from now are, most likely, not even on your radar right now.

Some young people are producing fundamental work, and that's awesome, but they aren't numerous enough to represent a competitive threat. The people who are producing fundamental technology are generally not peaking in their 20s, but 40s to 50s and sometimes later. You have time to catch up. Some people have incredible focus even at 17; most of us take some time to get our shit together and that's OK. Fuck, I had a 9-year trolling habit (17 to 26, or 2000-09).

Whenever I encounter a technical article, I immediately and compulsively investigate the author's age.

Stop doing that. If you can't, see a psychiatrist. If it's an actual compulsion, then medication will help you.

For the first time in my life, my procrastination is starting to get tamed.

It will probably continue to get better. The ability to plan and project yourself into the future is sub-optimal from ages 12 to 25. In other words, it's normal to take that long to get your shit together.

But I can't help but feel that if I had started in earnest at 25, at 21, at 19 — then maybe the list of accomplishments at the end of my life will be longer.

Who knows? It's not worth fretting. You know kids who are straight-edge rule-followers in high school and go completely apeshit (and not always funny apeshit, but sometimes scary apeshit, like the guy who got to a near-fatal 0.37% BAC) with the first taste of freedom in college?That happens a lot to people who are "on the rails" in their early 20s. And the ones who get huge amounts of recognition (e.g. "30 Under 30" types) tend to fall the hardest because the recognition from "above" gets them used to looking up, and when they actually have to lead, they're not up to the challenge.

Does anybody else have this problem? How do you deal with it?

Look, everyone has these insecurities. I would be lying if I said that I didn't. It won't prevent you from doing a good job. Just get out there and build. Don't expect the insecurity to go away; just work in spite of it. From Game of Thrones:

    Bran: Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?
    Ned: That is the only time a man can be brave.

Tell your parents NOT to impose their ambition and frustration on you!

I'm 51, and I still don't know what I'm going to do when I grow up.

When I was 26, I was writing a test tool and a test plan for MacTCP 1.2. Not long before that I was very excited at first to have saved enough money to purchase a used 700 MB - yes megabyte! - SCSI drive USED from the Usenet News, then quite a while after that, I managed to save up enough money to purchase the second megabyte of memory for my Mac Plus, thereby enabling me to run Multifinder on Mac OS System 6.

But for my next job, I was the Product Development Manager at Working Software, I had an office with a door I could shut, I had a direct report, and the very finest Mac in the entire company. A few months after I started at WSI, I shipped my very first shrinkwrap retail product, a keystroke recorder called "Last Resort". It wasn't for espionage but was a useful tool for saving valuable text in the event of power failure, system crashes &c.

So you are 26 and your life has been a complete waste.

When I was 27, I shipped my very first product that sold like hotcakes at $9.99.

You are comparing yourself to people like Mark Zuckerberg. Consider that he was paid by some upperclassmen to write The Facebook under contract; he later settled with them after they sued him for stealing their work. He went on to quite openly state - in a very public way - that one should not hire older employees. I don't clearly remember but I think he said one should never hire anyone older than 25.

In the US, it is a civil offense to discriminate for reasons of employment against anyone over the age of 40.

I write quite a lot of good, working code around the time that I was your age, but even so these days I do not regard myself as having had much of a clue at the time. For example I was completely unaware of the existence of C's assert() macro. I spent a lot of time in the MacsBug machine debugger that would have been quite unnecessary had I used assertions rather than single-stepping assembly code and looking at CPU registers.

Looking over my entire career, I regard myself as having really come into my own as a coder right around June 2000. It was then that I figured out how to write C++ code that was completely free of memory leaks or pointer errors, however it wasn't until a couple years after that that I really took automated testing seriously.

In early 2002, the head coder for my Bahamian Hedge Fund client said to me "Your code is by far the best in our codebase". That particular code went into production with no known bugs; a year later, no bugs at all had been found. When asked to implement what I later delivered myself, the original author of that 100 engineer-year Windows executable asserted that "it couldn't be done".

So I got pretty good in 2000, when I was 36 - ten years older than you are now - but awesomely good when I was twelve years older than you.

Give yourself time.

My concern these days is, for the most part, how rich I'm going to get, what product I might ship, whether I can ever vest any stock that turns out to be worth more than one square of single-ply toilet paper.

No.

My concern these days, is what software I can write, that will still be in use ten thousand years from now.

I want to be remembered after I'm gone, you see.

My ex-wife Bonita Hatcher, a devout Shambhala Buddhist, pointed out many times that I would never know whether I had been remembered, seeing as how I was dead.

But I do know very well that when I lay on my deathbed looking back on a life well-lived, I wasn't going to wish that I had shipped more product.