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?

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

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

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

(Affiliate Link): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007C17AJE/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you considered that you might have an anxiety problem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, and yes, respectively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> Seems very much in line with your diagnosis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It takes discipline to exercise regularly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flight of the Eagle: short and comprehensive.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet having kids is wonderful.

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

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

Never trust a parent telling you having kids is great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you do seem to be ignoring some stuff:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iv) Oxytocin

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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!

  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.

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 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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?

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