Find something meaningful and pursue it relentlessly. Here is my story, I'm 25 and have successfully raised VC funding for an Open Source database. I also took

Find something meaningful and pursue it relentlessly. Here is my story, I'm 25 and have successfully raised VC funding for an Open Source database. I also took an odd route to life, I found the woman of my dreams, bought a house together, married her, and started having kids. This may sound boring, but because we are young, we can live life fully and do crazy things - backpacking through Europe (specifically, Cinque Terre), visiting Africa, discovering house parties in Canada, doing a 30 day road trip up and down the West Coast, illegally but safely climbing radio towers, or doing rock climbing. Never worry about society, live life fully, always give and love to people (Open Source is very important in this way). Trail blaze your own route in life, and people will come to you as the authority and want to pay you. Shoot high, so that way if you fail, at least you land on Everest. If you do what everybody else does, you won't have leverage. If you do what other people do, you won't discover something new. So as a result: Never take advice from other people, especially me. Choose your own, and own it, this will be your most important skill in life. And especially never listen to haters. And I can tell you are already doing it well ;) you are on top of HackerNews building your personal brand. Keep doing that, unfortunately, cleverness like that goes a lot further for career improvement than actually being incrementally better at coding. :/ Keep networking!