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I was incredibly driven about 7 years ago... I was a founder of a startup and had really lofty aspirations. I told my wife that it was very possible that we wo

I was incredibly driven about 7 years ago... I was a founder of a startup and had really lofty aspirations. I told my wife that it was very possible that we would be millionaires by the time we hit 40. Fast forward to today and that did not happen. The startup is no more, but mainly due to burnout. We made money and did well, but not well enough. I never made my millions, but did have a substantial aqui-hire opportunity that I turned down that would have almost gotten me there. Once that part of my life played out, I decided to make a 180 turn... I'm not working to exhaustion anymore and take a tortoise approach to my career. I've found that as long as I'm consistent and have my eye on my goals, it doesn't matter how hard I work outside of my day job. I just need to be consistent and take advantage of bursts of motivation. I've accomplished a surprising amount with this approach. I'm not stressed, I have the best quality of life that I've ever had and work is generally fun. This is what my goal should have been from the beginning.

xxxtentachyon 6y ago
As someone who has generally tried to take your current approach and has generally been rewarded for it, yours is a refreshing perspective. There's a persistent voice in the back of my head that questions whether I'm acting out of fear, rationality, or just following a happy stasis. It's always reassuring to see the other side of this.
- dfxm12 6y ago
  I follow this approach, too, and I consider myself successful, but I also have no voice questioning me. Consider for yourself if you'll regret what you're doing (or not doing) today ten years from now...
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Noone posts about how their startup exploded and took 5 years of savings in their prime money earning years.
  - goatherders 6y ago
    Mine wasn't a startup per se, but my first business exploded, cost me my marriage, six figures of debt and a 70,000 IRS tax bill.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - dkersten 6y ago
    Myself and former cofounder did a blog post like that once (no longer online), but yeah, I agree, there are plenty of negatives of the startup life that isn't talked about so much, especially the toll it can take on your health (both mental and physical), nevermind your bank account, which in our industry isn't thaaat hard to recover.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Are you suggesting that your twenties are prime money earning years? I know that for me my earnings have only gone up over time.
    - mkl 6y ago
      Earnings go up, but so do expenses and responsibilities for most people. And would your earnings be where they are now if you had a big gap in your twenties where you did a failed startup? (Depends on the experience it gave you, I guess.)
      - vidarh 6y ago
        My career is almost entirely startups. ~25 years of it. Several failed. Several paid out inconsequential amounts. It's never been anything but a positive in interviews, as long as you can talk to lessons learned and as long as it doesn't seem like you were the primary reason it failed. Despite a family, I have more disposable income net of tax now than my gross salary for most of my 20's.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
lol636363 6y ago
For last few years, I have been telling myself to take it slow and do what you are doing now. I got a easy but a boring job. I figured this way I will save all my mental energy for my projects after work. But this is slowly burning me out. The boredom of not doing any real work for 8 hours is soul killing. I do a lot of busy red tape work but it is not intelluctly stimulating. So now I will do 180 and quit my job in a few months and go indie solo founder route.
- stanislavb 6y ago
  Good luck. It will be more difficult than expected, just be ready for that. But it will be worth it.
  - lol636363 6y ago
    Thanks!
- oblio 6y ago
  Plan B would be to get a more challenging job for much better pay :-)
  - why_only_15 6y ago
    Where do such jobs exist?
    - liujy 6y ago
      I’d assume the parent comment is alluding to FAANG or some of the hotter software startups.
      - klipt 6y ago
        I'd be very surprised if most FAANG engineers aren't millionaires after 5-10 years. The caveat being that houses in the Bay Area cost a lot more than a million...
sirspacey 6y ago
I’ve found the same. Thanks for sharing!
sizzle 6y ago
Did you have kids? I feel like that is a hard stop and pushes you beyond burn out with sleep deprivation and all your undivided attention, free time and career notwithstanding.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  I guess you have babies? It gets easier!
  - yabai_yatsu 6y ago
    It doesn't get easier, it just gets a different kind of difficult.
    - duderific 6y ago
      I generally agree with you (I have a six and a two year old), but the sleep deprivation when the kids are babies is extremely debilitating. At least that part definitely gets better.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Exactly that. I have a 1.5 year old. We've been pretty much zombies for the first half a year, until she started sleeping through (most of) the night.
        bcrosby95 6y ago
        Sleep regressions are a thing. Our twins had a big one around 1.5 years old. I averaged 3 hours of sleep for about 2 weeks.
      - yabai_yatsu 6y ago
        Good point. That initial period is hellish (and amazing) and it does taper off somewhat but settles on a new baseline of permanently elevated difficulty.
praveen9920 6y ago
> take advantage of bursts of motivation I understand this but most of the time I am excited about that new awesome idea that popped into my head. How do you focus on one thing without getting deviated?
- grasshopperpurp 6y ago
  For myself, I have two main creative outlets that take up most of my personal free time, and I alternate between the two depending on how I feel. I find them both rewarding and never regret the time spent on either - even when I don't produce anything of any value. I understand going in that there will be fruitless sessions (in terms of quantifiable output), so I count them as a price to get to the stuff of value, which is subjective anyway.
- smichel17 6y ago
  I see parallels everywhere else, and that pulls me back. Fundamentally, Snowdrift.coop (start at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop https://wiki.snowdrift.coop) is about public goods and collective action / coordination problems. When you think enough about the alignment of individual and group incentives, you start seeing how so many societal issues (moloch!) fall into this category. And yes, I'd like to fix all of those, and I get excited about projects that try to do so. But at the end of the day, given my skills, interests, connections, etc, nothing else I could do has the tiniest fraction of the potential to make a difference in the world that Snowdrift.coop does.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  I have a place to note them down. With time it gets filled, refined and culled. If they’re really great I’ll do it at some point. No need to rush to the fresh idea now.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I kind of work on 6 different things from time to time. For some reason awesome new ideas have been coming more slowly lately.
- bumby 6y ago
  Discipline > Motivation Motivation invariably wanes
ttul 6y ago
You are describing my life lol.
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
What were you going to do with a million dollars?
- nemo44x 6y ago
  It’s quite nice. You can live wherever you want, make your home just how you want it, have a variety of investments, and have your other half not have to work and raise the children and take care of a garden, etc. You can leave work as well to be even closer to the ones you love. It takes a lot of stress out of day to day living and you can really plan a future. All while being able to continue work you enjoy or switch careers into something maybe isn’t as profitable but brings different enjoyment.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    Okay. So where are you gonna live? Do you have the blueprints for you new house? What are you investing in? You didn't answer the question.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      You don't have to already have blueprints for the house in order to want the million dollars. Once you get the million, then you have time to look at blueprints.
      - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
        The dream is so far out of reach, it doesn't even exist. Yet we chase the money anyways. Thank you for explaining.
        nemo44x 6y ago
        I guess I’m living proof that you’re wrong. There’s likely quite a few people on this site that have managed to achieve a million+ net worth by 40 without coming from a high net worth family.
war1025 6y ago
My personal mantra at work is: One useful thing per day. If I manage to do one useful thing every day, it adds up to a lot of useful things over time. And that has proven to be enough. There's a sort of mediocre Johnny Cash song with the chorus "Even I might get to Heaven at a half a mile a day" That's basically how I try to live my life.
- nine_k 6y ago
  The speed still matters somehow. Well, take Johnny Cash. Half a mile a day * 30k days gives 15k miles; maybe it's enough to reach heaven, but not enough to e.g. reach the Moon. So, when choosing to move steadily albeit slowly, you have to manage your expectations, and get used to get by with little. Investing your time is not unlike investing your money: least risky strategies bring most stable but least spectacular results, while big bets bring both big gains and big losses.
  - chii 6y ago
    > while big bets bring both big gains and big losses. it's actually an asymmetric. The losses a capped - you cannot lose more than you own, and you cannot lose more than the time you put in (which is, of course, something you're going to lose by living any way). Technically, you also lose the "risk free reward" in opportunity cost - e.g., a minimum wage job. The gains, however, are unlimited. For both yourself, and for society. So i think it's in the interest of society to make many of these "big bets".
    - sushshshsh 6y ago
      You can in fact lose more than you own, in some cases, if a judge deems you liable for damages that you have caused (in their opinion).
      - chii 6y ago
        > you liable for damages that you have caused only if you did something illegal. You cannot be sued for more than you own in a civil suit.
bg24 6y ago
Mind sharing some more on this? "I'm not working to exhaustion anymore and take a tortoise approach to my career. I've found that as long as I'm consistent and have my eye on my goals, it doesn't matter how hard I work outside of my day job. I just need to be consistent and take advantage of bursts of motivation." Or, is there any article/post you may have written already?
cactus2093 6y ago
I can definitely relate to this. My own journey is, in addition to a couple of stints as a founder that didn't work out, I've worked primarily for other startups as opposed to large companies. After 10 years what I have to show for it is about $35,000 from one moderate sized acquisition of a startup you've definitely heard of but was not especially lucrative for anyone except the founders, some options that I never exercised and are worth 0 today since the company shut down, some other options that I never exercised and lost 3 months after leaving the company that may or may not be worth something eventually but I couldn't afford to exercise/didn't feel strongly enough to make a big bet on, and now finally some options where I have 8 years left on a 10 year exercise window which may actually go somewhere (but could also end up at $0 or something minimal). I had other peers in my graduating class in college that went to work at places like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon while I went to do a startup with a few friends, then ended up mostly working as an employee for these other startups. I find it interesting to idly muse about what would have happened to someone who'd joined one of those companies in an entry level engineering role in 2010 and stayed there while having a fairly average career trajectory, say getting to a senior engineer level 5 years in and then plateauing, going from a stock grant size of maybe $50k a year when joining to $150k a year at senior level. Doing some rough estimates based on stock prices over the years, if you'd been in that position at any of these companies and never sold any stock you'd have something like $2.5 million (Google), $4 million (Microsoft) or $6 million (Amazon) in stock today. And of course your base salary and cash bonuses over that time would have been higher than your base salary working for startups. I don't say this to complain, I'm still doing fine overall and there are a lot of people in the world who work very hard for a lot less. But I also don't feel like I've really accomplished much of any significance. It's pretty mind-blowing to realize that the less risky, more tortoise-like approach to a career would have been so vastly more profitable than what I've experienced at what I would say have been a pretty average selection of startups. And it's not like the startups have been so much more fulfilling, you're still pretty much a cog in the machine as an engineer even at a 30 person company. In conclusion - working at a startup smaller than, say, series D is a fool's game and a very likely path to one day looking back and feeling like you haven't accomplished anything. Either become a founder to try to build something meaningful from nothing, or just work at a FAANG company as a 9-5 and get your fulfillment elsewhere and/or retire young.
BjoernKW 6y ago
Compounding outcomes. Someone who consistently gets just a little better every day is more likely to succeed than someone who works insanely hard for just a limited period of time. The years don't come without the days.
- chii 6y ago
  > just a little better every day is more likely to succeed than someone who works insanely hard for just a limited period of time but someone who works insanely hard for a long time is going to beat the person who gets just a little bit better each day. The point is, someone who works insanely hard gets to a certain required level quicker than someone who improves a tiny bit every day for a long time. Think cramming for an exam etc.
  - Axsuul 6y ago
    but someone who works insanely hard for a long time is always walking that fine line of burnout.
  - jasonblais 6y ago
    Agree and disagree. Agree that someone who "works insanely hard" will advance quicker. However, I disagree that's necessarily the best approach long-term. When in university, I did something for each of my courses every day. Studied something new, reviewed past materials, solved an assignment. I did it every day. Continuous improvement. I never had an all-nighter or really crammed for an exam. Yet I got the best marks. It's not because I was an Einstein - it's because I improved on each of the previous 90 days that got me to the required level faster than working insanely hard over a few days. Continuously improve - do one thing every day. Two if you can. In 90 days, you'll be 90 ways closer to your goal than you were before.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I like that. Thanks for sharing it. I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it. Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately, and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in tech. It was a real shock, as I had always been treated with a fair degree of respect. That is no longer the case. Respect seems to be a virtue that no one practices, anymore (I'm not talking about "worship." I'm talking about simple, basic, courtesy and respect; like I give to others). I had saved up a fairly substantial war chest, so I just decided to give up on looking for work, and have been spending my time since then, writing a lot of open-source code[0], and learning the latest stuff in the way I want. Best decision I ever made. Too bad. I'm pretty good at what I do, I would have worked for a lot less than most (see "war chest," above), and would have been happy to take on riskier work with startups and whatnot. [0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (and almost every green square will take you to an open-source repo, where I am the sole author, and you can view the checkins)
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I won't say ageism the main reason I moved from programming to tech writing, but it's certainly been something on my mind. I look younger than my 53 years, but I'm pretty clearly not in my early 30s anymore. But, I haven't experienced any real ageism in this field, at least yet.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Thanks for your Service. We desperately need a lot of skilled tech writers. The state of documentation, these days, fills me with despair.
    - arvinsim 6y ago
      Is there a free resource on how write great documentation?
1DRACOSEA8 6y ago
Did you ask for help? Maybe the business was not scalable.
alwahi 6y ago
this, so much this
sukilot 6y ago
> I told my wife that it was very possible that we would be millionaires by the time we hit 40. Are you being colloquial? Being a millionaire by 40 (in 7 years or less) is quite likely for anyone with the talent to launch a startup, by working at a regular big conpany. Launching a startup lowers those odds by quite a bit (but increases the small chance of being a manymillionaire).

xxxtentachyon 6y ago

As someone who has generally tried to take your current approach and has generally been rewarded for it, yours is a refreshing perspective. There's a persistent voice in the back of my head that questions whether I'm acting out of fear, rationality, or just following a happy stasis. It's always reassuring to see the other side of this.

dfxm12 6y ago
I follow this approach, too, and I consider myself successful, but I also have no voice questioning me. Consider for yourself if you'll regret what you're doing (or not doing) today ten years from now...
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Noone posts about how their startup exploded and took 5 years of savings in their prime money earning years.
- goatherders 6y ago
  Mine wasn't a startup per se, but my first business exploded, cost me my marriage, six figures of debt and a 70,000 IRS tax bill.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dkersten 6y ago
  Myself and former cofounder did a blog post like that once (no longer online), but yeah, I agree, there are plenty of negatives of the startup life that isn't talked about so much, especially the toll it can take on your health (both mental and physical), nevermind your bank account, which in our industry isn't thaaat hard to recover.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Are you suggesting that your twenties are prime money earning years? I know that for me my earnings have only gone up over time.
  - mkl 6y ago
    Earnings go up, but so do expenses and responsibilities for most people. And would your earnings be where they are now if you had a big gap in your twenties where you did a failed startup? (Depends on the experience it gave you, I guess.)
    - vidarh 6y ago
      My career is almost entirely startups. ~25 years of it. Several failed. Several paid out inconsequential amounts. It's never been anything but a positive in interviews, as long as you can talk to lessons learned and as long as it doesn't seem like you were the primary reason it failed. Despite a family, I have more disposable income net of tax now than my gross salary for most of my 20's.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

lol636363 6y ago

For last few years, I have been telling myself to take it slow and do what you are doing now. I got a easy but a boring job. I figured this way I will save all my mental energy for my projects after work. But this is slowly burning me out. The boredom of not doing any real work for 8 hours is soul killing. I do a lot of busy red tape work but it is not intelluctly stimulating. So now I will do 180 and quit my job in a few months and go indie solo founder route.

stanislavb 6y ago
Good luck. It will be more difficult than expected, just be ready for that. But it will be worth it.
- lol636363 6y ago
  Thanks!
oblio 6y ago
Plan B would be to get a more challenging job for much better pay :-)
- why_only_15 6y ago
  Where do such jobs exist?
  - liujy 6y ago
    I’d assume the parent comment is alluding to FAANG or some of the hotter software startups.
    - klipt 6y ago
      I'd be very surprised if most FAANG engineers aren't millionaires after 5-10 years. The caveat being that houses in the Bay Area cost a lot more than a million...

sirspacey 6y ago

I’ve found the same. Thanks for sharing!

sizzle 6y ago

Did you have kids? I feel like that is a hard stop and pushes you beyond burn out with sleep deprivation and all your undivided attention, free time and career notwithstanding.

quickthrower2 6y ago
I guess you have babies? It gets easier!
- yabai_yatsu 6y ago
  It doesn't get easier, it just gets a different kind of difficult.
  - duderific 6y ago
    I generally agree with you (I have a six and a two year old), but the sleep deprivation when the kids are babies is extremely debilitating. At least that part definitely gets better.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Exactly that. I have a 1.5 year old. We've been pretty much zombies for the first half a year, until she started sleeping through (most of) the night.
      - bcrosby95 6y ago
        Sleep regressions are a thing. Our twins had a big one around 1.5 years old. I averaged 3 hours of sleep for about 2 weeks.
    - yabai_yatsu 6y ago
      Good point. That initial period is hellish (and amazing) and it does taper off somewhat but settles on a new baseline of permanently elevated difficulty.

praveen9920 6y ago

> take advantage of bursts of motivation I understand this but most of the time I am excited about that new awesome idea that popped into my head. How do you focus on one thing without getting deviated?

grasshopperpurp 6y ago
For myself, I have two main creative outlets that take up most of my personal free time, and I alternate between the two depending on how I feel. I find them both rewarding and never regret the time spent on either - even when I don't produce anything of any value. I understand going in that there will be fruitless sessions (in terms of quantifiable output), so I count them as a price to get to the stuff of value, which is subjective anyway.
smichel17 6y ago
I see parallels everywhere else, and that pulls me back. Fundamentally, Snowdrift.coop (start at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop https://wiki.snowdrift.coop) is about public goods and collective action / coordination problems. When you think enough about the alignment of individual and group incentives, you start seeing how so many societal issues (moloch!) fall into this category. And yes, I'd like to fix all of those, and I get excited about projects that try to do so. But at the end of the day, given my skills, interests, connections, etc, nothing else I could do has the tiniest fraction of the potential to make a difference in the world that Snowdrift.coop does.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
I have a place to note them down. With time it gets filled, refined and culled. If they’re really great I’ll do it at some point. No need to rush to the fresh idea now.
Aeolun 6y ago
I kind of work on 6 different things from time to time. For some reason awesome new ideas have been coming more slowly lately.
bumby 6y ago
Discipline > Motivation Motivation invariably wanes

ttul 6y ago

You are describing my life lol.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

What were you going to do with a million dollars?

nemo44x 6y ago
It’s quite nice. You can live wherever you want, make your home just how you want it, have a variety of investments, and have your other half not have to work and raise the children and take care of a garden, etc. You can leave work as well to be even closer to the ones you love. It takes a lot of stress out of day to day living and you can really plan a future. All while being able to continue work you enjoy or switch careers into something maybe isn’t as profitable but brings different enjoyment.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  Okay. So where are you gonna live? Do you have the blueprints for you new house? What are you investing in? You didn't answer the question.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    You don't have to already have blueprints for the house in order to want the million dollars. Once you get the million, then you have time to look at blueprints.
    - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
      The dream is so far out of reach, it doesn't even exist. Yet we chase the money anyways. Thank you for explaining.
      - nemo44x 6y ago
        I guess I’m living proof that you’re wrong. There’s likely quite a few people on this site that have managed to achieve a million+ net worth by 40 without coming from a high net worth family.

war1025 6y ago

My personal mantra at work is: One useful thing per day. If I manage to do one useful thing every day, it adds up to a lot of useful things over time. And that has proven to be enough. There's a sort of mediocre Johnny Cash song with the chorus "Even I might get to Heaven at a half a mile a day" That's basically how I try to live my life.

nine_k 6y ago
The speed still matters somehow. Well, take Johnny Cash. Half a mile a day * 30k days gives 15k miles; maybe it's enough to reach heaven, but not enough to e.g. reach the Moon. So, when choosing to move steadily albeit slowly, you have to manage your expectations, and get used to get by with little. Investing your time is not unlike investing your money: least risky strategies bring most stable but least spectacular results, while big bets bring both big gains and big losses.
- chii 6y ago
  > while big bets bring both big gains and big losses. it's actually an asymmetric. The losses a capped - you cannot lose more than you own, and you cannot lose more than the time you put in (which is, of course, something you're going to lose by living any way). Technically, you also lose the "risk free reward" in opportunity cost - e.g., a minimum wage job. The gains, however, are unlimited. For both yourself, and for society. So i think it's in the interest of society to make many of these "big bets".
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    You can in fact lose more than you own, in some cases, if a judge deems you liable for damages that you have caused (in their opinion).
    - chii 6y ago
      > you liable for damages that you have caused only if you did something illegal. You cannot be sued for more than you own in a civil suit.

bg24 6y ago

Mind sharing some more on this? "I'm not working to exhaustion anymore and take a tortoise approach to my career. I've found that as long as I'm consistent and have my eye on my goals, it doesn't matter how hard I work outside of my day job. I just need to be consistent and take advantage of bursts of motivation." Or, is there any article/post you may have written already?

cactus2093 6y ago

I can definitely relate to this. My own journey is, in addition to a couple of stints as a founder that didn't work out, I've worked primarily for other startups as opposed to large companies. After 10 years what I have to show for it is about $35,000 from one moderate sized acquisition of a startup you've definitely heard of but was not especially lucrative for anyone except the founders, some options that I never exercised and are worth 0 today since the company shut down, some other options that I never exercised and lost 3 months after leaving the company that may or may not be worth something eventually but I couldn't afford to exercise/didn't feel strongly enough to make a big bet on, and now finally some options where I have 8 years left on a 10 year exercise window which may actually go somewhere (but could also end up at $0 or something minimal). I had other peers in my graduating class in college that went to work at places like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon while I went to do a startup with a few friends, then ended up mostly working as an employee for these other startups. I find it interesting to idly muse about what would have happened to someone who'd joined one of those companies in an entry level engineering role in 2010 and stayed there while having a fairly average career trajectory, say getting to a senior engineer level 5 years in and then plateauing, going from a stock grant size of maybe $50k a year when joining to $150k a year at senior level. Doing some rough estimates based on stock prices over the years, if you'd been in that position at any of these companies and never sold any stock you'd have something like $2.5 million (Google), $4 million (Microsoft) or $6 million (Amazon) in stock today. And of course your base salary and cash bonuses over that time would have been higher than your base salary working for startups. I don't say this to complain, I'm still doing fine overall and there are a lot of people in the world who work very hard for a lot less. But I also don't feel like I've really accomplished much of any significance. It's pretty mind-blowing to realize that the less risky, more tortoise-like approach to a career would have been so vastly more profitable than what I've experienced at what I would say have been a pretty average selection of startups. And it's not like the startups have been so much more fulfilling, you're still pretty much a cog in the machine as an engineer even at a 30 person company. In conclusion - working at a startup smaller than, say, series D is a fool's game and a very likely path to one day looking back and feeling like you haven't accomplished anything. Either become a founder to try to build something meaningful from nothing, or just work at a FAANG company as a 9-5 and get your fulfillment elsewhere and/or retire young.

BjoernKW 6y ago

Compounding outcomes. Someone who consistently gets just a little better every day is more likely to succeed than someone who works insanely hard for just a limited period of time. The years don't come without the days.

chii 6y ago
> just a little better every day is more likely to succeed than someone who works insanely hard for just a limited period of time but someone who works insanely hard for a long time is going to beat the person who gets just a little bit better each day. The point is, someone who works insanely hard gets to a certain required level quicker than someone who improves a tiny bit every day for a long time. Think cramming for an exam etc.
- Axsuul 6y ago
  but someone who works insanely hard for a long time is always walking that fine line of burnout.
- jasonblais 6y ago
  Agree and disagree. Agree that someone who "works insanely hard" will advance quicker. However, I disagree that's necessarily the best approach long-term. When in university, I did something for each of my courses every day. Studied something new, reviewed past materials, solved an assignment. I did it every day. Continuous improvement. I never had an all-nighter or really crammed for an exam. Yet I got the best marks. It's not because I was an Einstein - it's because I improved on each of the previous 90 days that got me to the required level faster than working insanely hard over a few days. Continuously improve - do one thing every day. Two if you can. In 90 days, you'll be 90 ways closer to your goal than you were before.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I like that. Thanks for sharing it. I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it. Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately, and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in tech. It was a real shock, as I had always been treated with a fair degree of respect. That is no longer the case. Respect seems to be a virtue that no one practices, anymore (I'm not talking about "worship." I'm talking about simple, basic, courtesy and respect; like I give to others). I had saved up a fairly substantial war chest, so I just decided to give up on looking for work, and have been spending my time since then, writing a lot of open-source code[0], and learning the latest stuff in the way I want. Best decision I ever made. Too bad. I'm pretty good at what I do, I would have worked for a lot less than most (see "war chest," above), and would have been happy to take on riskier work with startups and whatnot. [0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (and almost every green square will take you to an open-source repo, where I am the sole author, and you can view the checkins)

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I won't say ageism the main reason I moved from programming to tech writing, but it's certainly been something on my mind. I look younger than my 53 years, but I'm pretty clearly not in my early 30s anymore. But, I haven't experienced any real ageism in this field, at least yet.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Thanks for your Service. We desperately need a lot of skilled tech writers. The state of documentation, these days, fills me with despair.
  - arvinsim 6y ago
    Is there a free resource on how write great documentation?

1DRACOSEA8 6y ago

Did you ask for help? Maybe the business was not scalable.

alwahi 6y ago

this, so much this

sukilot 6y ago

> I told my wife that it was very possible that we would be millionaires by the time we hit 40. Are you being colloquial? Being a millionaire by 40 (in 7 years or less) is quite likely for anyone with the talent to launch a startup, by working at a regular big conpany. Launching a startup lowers those odds by quite a bit (but increases the small chance of being a manymillionaire).