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Not...really? I'm 22, turning 23. I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published p

Not...really? I'm 22, turning 23. I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless). Never had any of that or knew how to do it.

saagarjha 8y ago
> I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless). For each of those people there are a hundred that haven't done anything like that. "Ability" is a continuum: there are levels between "not doing anything" and "at the top of everything". Join your local research lab, try some competitive programming, do some open source work–just try your best and see what you can do! Not everyone can be the very best (though, it's entirely possible that you can, if you work hard and get lucky, so I don't want to close that off to you), but that doesn't make you unable to do cool things. (FWIW, I'm in a middling undergraduate program, have no patents or papers in my name, and while I've competed in olympiads I have probably not done so at the level you're thinking of; I still feel that I've done cool things. YMMV, but if you want to chat personally feel free to shoot me an email.)
com2kid 8y ago
I helped design/write an embedded runtime when I was ~29. Got a lot of patents out of it. If I'd done it at 22, it'd have been a crappy OS. Getting software patents is easy. I used to take time to file one whenever I had a 6 hour or more flight. Boredom and all that. Also my employer's patent bonus paid for my airfare. You have decades of life left. One of my mentors had the time of his life programming in his 50s, putting his mark as a leader on multiple amazing products that sold in numbers ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions upon millions. Up until then? Rather uneventful. If I remember, lots of years working on test equipment.
- pauljurczak 8y ago
  Thank you for clogging the patent pipeline for the rest of us! ;-)
  - com2kid 8y ago
    No problem! If you are willing, for only a few thousand I'm willing to sit down and write a 1 page draft on a variety of topics! Semi-seriously, my team did solve a lot of very hard problems in a very resource constrained environment, and we didn't competitors sueing us to oblivion, so... patent everything! :/
tntn 8y ago
Are you dying soon? If not, there's no deadline. If the people you know did a cool thing at 20 or 21, and you do a cool thing at 24 or 25 (or 45 or 55 or 65 or ...), it is still cool, is it not? It seems clear that you aren't actually interested primarily in sound the cool things, but doing more cool things earlier than peers.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  Not as far as I know, but there’s only 1 real chance to be a “Harvard man” or an “MIT man”.
  - toomanyrichies 8y ago
    If having the “Harvard man” label is your one metric of success vs. failure, and if that isn’t likely to change, then so be it. But if you measure yourself by your level of achievement (or even just your level of fulfillment and enjoyment) in your chosen field, take comfort in a quick Google search, which will reveal many examples of people who have been successful quite late in life (many at double your age, and a few even triple). And some of the world’s most successful people have built their reputations despite not attending any college whatsoever. Quite a few “Harvard men” actually go on to work for the people who had the confidence to skip college and go build cool things because they had a growth mindset and knew they could “learn by doing”. Also, being admitted to an elite school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I myself am actually an alumni of one of the “elite” schools more prominently featured in the middle of this admissions scandal. I took my $200,000 education and had two completely different but equally miserable careers (one as a travel agent and another as an overseas ESL teacher) before attending a coding bootcamp and landing in a field I love. I had no idea what I wanted my career or my life in general to look like when I was a high school senior, ended up using very little of what I learned in college, and could have saved my parents a lot of money and financial worry by attending a JC instead. That’s not to say my classmates didn’t achieve a lot- of course they did. But that’s more a function of who they were when they entered college than who college made them into. A lucky few people are precocious enough at that age to already know where they’re headed in life. Most people aren’t. That’s no one’s fault, least of all theirs.

saagarjha 8y ago

> I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless). For each of those people there are a hundred that haven't done anything like that. "Ability" is a continuum: there are levels between "not doing anything" and "at the top of everything". Join your local research lab, try some competitive programming, do some open source work–just try your best and see what you can do! Not everyone can be the very best (though, it's entirely possible that you can, if you work hard and get lucky, so I don't want to close that off to you), but that doesn't make you unable to do cool things. (FWIW, I'm in a middling undergraduate program, have no patents or papers in my name, and while I've competed in olympiads I have probably not done so at the level you're thinking of; I still feel that I've done cool things. YMMV, but if you want to chat personally feel free to shoot me an email.)

com2kid 8y ago

I helped design/write an embedded runtime when I was ~29. Got a lot of patents out of it. If I'd done it at 22, it'd have been a crappy OS. Getting software patents is easy. I used to take time to file one whenever I had a 6 hour or more flight. Boredom and all that. Also my employer's patent bonus paid for my airfare. You have decades of life left. One of my mentors had the time of his life programming in his 50s, putting his mark as a leader on multiple amazing products that sold in numbers ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions upon millions. Up until then? Rather uneventful. If I remember, lots of years working on test equipment.

pauljurczak 8y ago
Thank you for clogging the patent pipeline for the rest of us! ;-)
- com2kid 8y ago
  No problem! If you are willing, for only a few thousand I'm willing to sit down and write a 1 page draft on a variety of topics! Semi-seriously, my team did solve a lot of very hard problems in a very resource constrained environment, and we didn't competitors sueing us to oblivion, so... patent everything! :/

tntn 8y ago

Are you dying soon? If not, there's no deadline. If the people you know did a cool thing at 20 or 21, and you do a cool thing at 24 or 25 (or 45 or 55 or 65 or ...), it is still cool, is it not? It seems clear that you aren't actually interested primarily in sound the cool things, but doing more cool things earlier than peers.

akhilcacharya 8y ago
Not as far as I know, but there’s only 1 real chance to be a “Harvard man” or an “MIT man”.
- toomanyrichies 8y ago
  If having the “Harvard man” label is your one metric of success vs. failure, and if that isn’t likely to change, then so be it. But if you measure yourself by your level of achievement (or even just your level of fulfillment and enjoyment) in your chosen field, take comfort in a quick Google search, which will reveal many examples of people who have been successful quite late in life (many at double your age, and a few even triple). And some of the world’s most successful people have built their reputations despite not attending any college whatsoever. Quite a few “Harvard men” actually go on to work for the people who had the confidence to skip college and go build cool things because they had a growth mindset and knew they could “learn by doing”. Also, being admitted to an elite school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I myself am actually an alumni of one of the “elite” schools more prominently featured in the middle of this admissions scandal. I took my $200,000 education and had two completely different but equally miserable careers (one as a travel agent and another as an overseas ESL teacher) before attending a coding bootcamp and landing in a field I love. I had no idea what I wanted my career or my life in general to look like when I was a high school senior, ended up using very little of what I learned in college, and could have saved my parents a lot of money and financial worry by attending a JC instead. That’s not to say my classmates didn’t achieve a lot- of course they did. But that’s more a function of who they were when they entered college than who college made them into. A lucky few people are precocious enough at that age to already know where they’re headed in life. Most people aren’t. That’s no one’s fault, least of all theirs.