4 ms·

The Most Important Assets you Lose when you're over 30

11 points by transburgh 19y ago

abstractbill 19y ago
"What I'm going to lose is the benefit of learning. My experience is going to let me avoid mistakes but at the same time avoid learning from those mistakes." This is one of the few points anyone's made in the whole age debate that I agree with.
- create_account 19y ago
  Huh? That makes little sense. If you're experienced enough to avoid a mistake, you have learned that lesson, and that's why you don't repeat it.
  - abstractbill 19y ago
    The point I took away from the article is this: There are things I have enough experience of that I will never do them (installing Vista was the example from the article). But there may be things that I would learn along the way if I did install Vista that would be useful to me in some random venture.
    - gyro_robo 19y ago
      Of course you could do something else more productive with that same amount of time, which would be even more useful.
- erdos2 19y ago
  I agree that he will lose those things.
- gyro_robo 19y ago
  Something I've noticed is you get better at learning as you age. That is, learning is itself a skill, and you get more efficient with it. There is always an opportunity cost to everything you do, so you can never get all the benefits while avoiding all of the drawbacks; but having been around a while, you get a sense of what's really good and what's not. So you don't need to mess around with every new "technology" and learn from those mistakes, when you can be selective, mess around with better ones, and learn even more valuable lessons. One of the biggest barriers to learning is psychological resistance. Learning to overcome that is a skill that improves with practice as well. So even assuming our brains aren't as spongy anymore, we learn how to direct them better and can still get as good or better results than when we were less selective and soaked up information indiscriminately.
wschroter 19y ago
In all fairness I should have titled the article more toward what I'M losing over 30!
lkozma 19y ago
Sorry, but I don't see the connection between not being on Facebook and "not getting it" as the author implies.
- migpwr 19y ago
  Which is exactly why he wrote this article...
wschroter 19y ago
Facebook isn't the all-telling oracle. It's the fact that my ENTIRE CLASS is not on it from 1992 and the entire class is on it in 2007 that demonstrates the significant generational gap.
Tichy 19y ago
So basically what he says is that over 30 you lose the ability to be excited about Windows Vista? Fine, I can live with that. The reason I don't have a facebook account is that I used to have an Orkut account and eventually got bored with the whole thing. Perhaps the class of 2007 was too young when Orkut came out, so they try Facebook instead - eventually they might get bored, too, only time will tell. Maybe Facebook is so much better than Orkut, but in the meantime there are so many other things to do. Btw., I am over 30 and I am still reading articles like that, which basically refutes the article's thesis.
- nostrademons 19y ago
  The class of 2007 absolutely will get bored with Facebook - I know many members of it that got bored with MySpace before it, and LiveJournal before that, and Xanga before that. But in the process, they will have explored every feature of it, added dozens of third-party apps, started using it in ways the developers never intended, and possibly created a few competitors. The point of the article, as I understood it, was to not let "But it'll be obsolete in five years!" be a reason to keep you from learning something new. Of course it'll be obsolete in five years. Chances are, your job will be too, and we'll all be using some website or technology or whatever that hasn't been invented yet. FWIW, I have a FaceBook account, a MySpace, 2 Livejournals, 3 PlanWorlds (that's an Amherst-only social network), 2 Bloggers, a DeadJournal, a GreatestJournal, a uJournal, and a Plog. I don't use all of them regularly, but I do keep up with a good half-dozen or so of them.
  - Tichy 19y ago
    I had a blog before the name was invented (diary on diaryland). Right now I am doing some Scripting for Second Life. I really don't feel as if I have lost the taste for learning new things.
- mynameishere 19y ago
  _eventually got bored with the whole thing_ You know, I practically missed the whole internet for a similar reason. When I was a kid, I screwed around with 1200 baud modems (ATX? ATH? I forget) until I managed to LOG ON to local BBSes. Oh, yeah! You could set that sucker to xModem down a game and have the world's 573rd best tetris clone in just 17 hours (unless your mom picked up the phone--eventually I trained her to ask first.) Well, it got pretty damn boring. Eventually, I gave up, and when people started talking about AOL, email, etc, I was like "whatever, dude." I didn't actually have an ISP account until...2001 maybe?
migpwr 19y ago
You all are focusing on "Facebook" and missing the point.
tx 19y ago
Well... there were lots of things we all used to do when me and my friends were in high school. Most of those things were... well... absurdly dumb just like most things you do when you're in high school. Nobody used to write articles "ahh! I don't get it, I'm old!" about it back then.
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
donna 19y ago
Again with the age stories... living life fully in exploring what one loves and finds interesting, and exciting. For me personally; MySpace/Facebook do not offer anything of interest. LinkedIn offers more of what i'm interested in spending my time on.
wschroter 19y ago
It's funny how often these articles go scanned versus read. A few points of clarification 1. Thanks to migpwr for pointing out that facebook was just an example of the generational gap, not the point of why facebook is good or bad. 2. The generational age issue has never been more salient than it is now since the periods between meaningful technological changes are shortening significantly. 3. I'm over 30 and writing/building companies based on these technologies but I'm doing so as more of an outsider than an insider like before.
- youngnh 19y ago
  Additionally, the generational gap might simply mean that 30 year olds won't write the next 100%-high-school-adoption-rate app in the same way a 22 year-old probably won't write the next parenting/401k management/funeral home-related application. If you turn 30 don't give up on writing good software. What might be a more important metric is the willingness of a certain demographic to adopt a well-written piece of software in large numbers. Will these high-schoolers grow up and be 30 year-olds flocking to new applications in droves or is there something about being young that makes you do exactly what your friends are doing?
  - wschroter 19y ago
    I think as a gen-x'er we grew up in a time period (the dot com era) where much of our careers was defined by a major generational/technological change that provided us a great deal of opportunity. For that, we are aware of how these shifts can create great opportunities, but now we're becoming aware of where they can be liabilities as well. (now that we're the old guys)
geebee 19y ago
They guy has a point here. I think facebook wasn't the greatest example, but in general, people are in danger of ossifying as they age. I'm in my mid-30s now, and I know some people who are, or at least were, really good programmers. But I was amazed recently when they didn't really know what Ruby on Rails was, or django, or AJAX. I'm not trying to play buzzword bingo here, and I certainly don't think people need to know these things in detail, or agree that they're good tools. But it is very alarming that they draw a blank. These aren't obscure technologies - if you haven't even heard of them, you clearly aren't paying attention. I suppose the 30+ set could get insular enough that nobody brings these things up.. whereas it's nearly impossible not to learn about them if you hang with a younger crowd. That said, I had a professor in college who was over 70. He could write programs on the whiteboard that would compile without a single syntax error - it was bizarre. He was unbelievably up-to-date. And it wasn't out of some kind of old man and the sea stubbornness, it was just deep in his personality to keep reading, hacking, knowing what's up. You can't tell who has a drinking problem in college, because everyone drinks too much - you have to wait and see who's still overdoing it 10 years later. By the same token, maybe you can't tell who the true hackers are until they've considered and rejected the opportunity to fade away...
- wschroter 19y ago
  You're totally on point with what I'm saying. It's about the fact that when you get older the crowd you run in is worrying about mortgage payments, spouses and kids. You don't have the time or curiosity to engage new stuff and share it with your friends like you used to. And yes, there is probably SOME GUY out there that does. It's a trend, not an absolute rule.
  - Tichy 19y ago
    Friends of my age are all having children right now. That way I learned about the existence of pages like http://lilypie.com/ http://lilypie.com/ which seems to cater for parents. What if something like that is the next killer-app? Older people would be more likely to create an application like that, I would think. Why should the "teen apps" be the only ones that are interesting?
davidw 19y ago
Ok, all these age articles have convinced me. I'm going to be 25 instead of 31, as that may well be the ideal age to start a startup.
menloparkbum 19y ago
According to Comscore, 40% of MySpace users are over 35 and 33% of Facebook users are over 35. The numbers for people aged 18-24 on facebook is only 1% higher than the 35+ demographic. A large number of 18-24 year olds makes sense because Facebook started out as a way for students to network, and the site's features remain optimized for people still in school. Regarding curiosity and learning by trial and error - most people are not naturally curious. In 1994, many 42 year old people didn't understand why you would need a web page. However, neither did most 22 year olds.
- steve 19y ago
  This is absolutely not how myspace started.
catfish 19y ago
What a bunch of horsepoop. Being nearly 50, having ridden the first communication wave called BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS, the second wave called HTTP (the internet existed long before the graphic web), and the third wave called CELL PHONES, I learned that "INHERENTLY GETTING IT" doesn't matter for squat. The only true form of "GETTING IT" that matters can be summed up in three words and it applies across all generations, fads, and follies. Follow the money. That's it. Thats all there is too it. Give me a bleeding edge wave of any sort, comprised of a significant member class, young or old, and the only metric that matters is who makes the money. The rest of this crap about how some group "GETS IT" inherently, is mental masturbation. The only person who truly "GETS IT" is the old fart VC who cashes the biggest checks while getting the young and the dumb to paint the fence. Praise be unto him, Samuel Clemens was right. As I grew older, and discarded the arrogance of youth, I changed my focus. The metric that matters most in terms of inherently "GETTING IT", is determined strictly by your position in the cash flow. I don't need a myspace reddit delicious facebook account to get that! I need a dumb kid willing to take up front money for an idea so that they can feverishly burn through a few years of their life, and in the end get their well deserved and fully diluted 2% return. Give me that please, with sugar on top. The youthful are there to be exploited. Period. They beg for it with their arrogance. I for one am more than happy to oblige them. Why would I care about what they inherently GET? I don't. In fact I hope that every one of them I meet has this particular chip on their shoulder because it makes it all the more easy to steal the fruit of their labor, which is what I "INHERENTLY GET".
- wschroter 19y ago
  That was the most obnoxious view of our youth I've read in a long time. Well done.

11 points by transburgh 19y ago

"What I'm going to lose is the benefit of learning. My experience is going to let me avoid mistakes but at the same time avoid learning from those mistakes." This is one of the few points anyone's made in the whole age debate that I agree with.

create_account 19y ago
Huh? That makes little sense. If you're experienced enough to avoid a mistake, you have learned that lesson, and that's why you don't repeat it.
- abstractbill 19y ago
  The point I took away from the article is this: There are things I have enough experience of that I will never do them (installing Vista was the example from the article). But there may be things that I would learn along the way if I did install Vista that would be useful to me in some random venture.
  - gyro_robo 19y ago
    Of course you could do something else more productive with that same amount of time, which would be even more useful.
erdos2 19y ago
I agree that he will lose those things.
gyro_robo 19y ago
Something I've noticed is you get better at learning as you age. That is, learning is itself a skill, and you get more efficient with it. There is always an opportunity cost to everything you do, so you can never get all the benefits while avoiding all of the drawbacks; but having been around a while, you get a sense of what's really good and what's not. So you don't need to mess around with every new "technology" and learn from those mistakes, when you can be selective, mess around with better ones, and learn even more valuable lessons. One of the biggest barriers to learning is psychological resistance. Learning to overcome that is a skill that improves with practice as well. So even assuming our brains aren't as spongy anymore, we learn how to direct them better and can still get as good or better results than when we were less selective and soaked up information indiscriminately.

wschroter 19y ago

In all fairness I should have titled the article more toward what I'M losing over 30!

lkozma 19y ago

Sorry, but I don't see the connection between not being on Facebook and "not getting it" as the author implies.

migpwr 19y ago
Which is exactly why he wrote this article...

wschroter 19y ago

Facebook isn't the all-telling oracle. It's the fact that my ENTIRE CLASS is not on it from 1992 and the entire class is on it in 2007 that demonstrates the significant generational gap.

Tichy 19y ago

So basically what he says is that over 30 you lose the ability to be excited about Windows Vista? Fine, I can live with that. The reason I don't have a facebook account is that I used to have an Orkut account and eventually got bored with the whole thing. Perhaps the class of 2007 was too young when Orkut came out, so they try Facebook instead - eventually they might get bored, too, only time will tell. Maybe Facebook is so much better than Orkut, but in the meantime there are so many other things to do. Btw., I am over 30 and I am still reading articles like that, which basically refutes the article's thesis.

nostrademons 19y ago
The class of 2007 absolutely will get bored with Facebook - I know many members of it that got bored with MySpace before it, and LiveJournal before that, and Xanga before that. But in the process, they will have explored every feature of it, added dozens of third-party apps, started using it in ways the developers never intended, and possibly created a few competitors. The point of the article, as I understood it, was to not let "But it'll be obsolete in five years!" be a reason to keep you from learning something new. Of course it'll be obsolete in five years. Chances are, your job will be too, and we'll all be using some website or technology or whatever that hasn't been invented yet. FWIW, I have a FaceBook account, a MySpace, 2 Livejournals, 3 PlanWorlds (that's an Amherst-only social network), 2 Bloggers, a DeadJournal, a GreatestJournal, a uJournal, and a Plog. I don't use all of them regularly, but I do keep up with a good half-dozen or so of them.
- Tichy 19y ago
  I had a blog before the name was invented (diary on diaryland). Right now I am doing some Scripting for Second Life. I really don't feel as if I have lost the taste for learning new things.
mynameishere 19y ago
_eventually got bored with the whole thing_ You know, I practically missed the whole internet for a similar reason. When I was a kid, I screwed around with 1200 baud modems (ATX? ATH? I forget) until I managed to LOG ON to local BBSes. Oh, yeah! You could set that sucker to xModem down a game and have the world's 573rd best tetris clone in just 17 hours (unless your mom picked up the phone--eventually I trained her to ask first.) Well, it got pretty damn boring. Eventually, I gave up, and when people started talking about AOL, email, etc, I was like "whatever, dude." I didn't actually have an ISP account until...2001 maybe?

migpwr 19y ago

You all are focusing on "Facebook" and missing the point.

tx 19y ago

Well... there were lots of things we all used to do when me and my friends were in high school. Most of those things were... well... absurdly dumb just like most things you do when you're in high school. Nobody used to write articles "ahh! I don't get it, I'm old!" about it back then.

deleted 19y ago
[deleted]

donna 19y ago

Again with the age stories... living life fully in exploring what one loves and finds interesting, and exciting. For me personally; MySpace/Facebook do not offer anything of interest. LinkedIn offers more of what i'm interested in spending my time on.

wschroter 19y ago

It's funny how often these articles go scanned versus read. A few points of clarification 1. Thanks to migpwr for pointing out that facebook was just an example of the generational gap, not the point of why facebook is good or bad. 2. The generational age issue has never been more salient than it is now since the periods between meaningful technological changes are shortening significantly. 3. I'm over 30 and writing/building companies based on these technologies but I'm doing so as more of an outsider than an insider like before.

youngnh 19y ago
Additionally, the generational gap might simply mean that 30 year olds won't write the next 100%-high-school-adoption-rate app in the same way a 22 year-old probably won't write the next parenting/401k management/funeral home-related application. If you turn 30 don't give up on writing good software. What might be a more important metric is the willingness of a certain demographic to adopt a well-written piece of software in large numbers. Will these high-schoolers grow up and be 30 year-olds flocking to new applications in droves or is there something about being young that makes you do exactly what your friends are doing?
- wschroter 19y ago
  I think as a gen-x'er we grew up in a time period (the dot com era) where much of our careers was defined by a major generational/technological change that provided us a great deal of opportunity. For that, we are aware of how these shifts can create great opportunities, but now we're becoming aware of where they can be liabilities as well. (now that we're the old guys)

geebee 19y ago

They guy has a point here. I think facebook wasn't the greatest example, but in general, people are in danger of ossifying as they age. I'm in my mid-30s now, and I know some people who are, or at least were, really good programmers. But I was amazed recently when they didn't really know what Ruby on Rails was, or django, or AJAX. I'm not trying to play buzzword bingo here, and I certainly don't think people need to know these things in detail, or agree that they're good tools. But it is very alarming that they draw a blank. These aren't obscure technologies - if you haven't even heard of them, you clearly aren't paying attention. I suppose the 30+ set could get insular enough that nobody brings these things up.. whereas it's nearly impossible not to learn about them if you hang with a younger crowd. That said, I had a professor in college who was over 70. He could write programs on the whiteboard that would compile without a single syntax error - it was bizarre. He was unbelievably up-to-date. And it wasn't out of some kind of old man and the sea stubbornness, it was just deep in his personality to keep reading, hacking, knowing what's up. You can't tell who has a drinking problem in college, because everyone drinks too much - you have to wait and see who's still overdoing it 10 years later. By the same token, maybe you can't tell who the true hackers are until they've considered and rejected the opportunity to fade away...

wschroter 19y ago
You're totally on point with what I'm saying. It's about the fact that when you get older the crowd you run in is worrying about mortgage payments, spouses and kids. You don't have the time or curiosity to engage new stuff and share it with your friends like you used to. And yes, there is probably SOME GUY out there that does. It's a trend, not an absolute rule.
- Tichy 19y ago
  Friends of my age are all having children right now. That way I learned about the existence of pages like http://lilypie.com/ http://lilypie.com/ which seems to cater for parents. What if something like that is the next killer-app? Older people would be more likely to create an application like that, I would think. Why should the "teen apps" be the only ones that are interesting?

davidw 19y ago

Ok, all these age articles have convinced me. I'm going to be 25 instead of 31, as that may well be the ideal age to start a startup.

menloparkbum 19y ago

According to Comscore, 40% of MySpace users are over 35 and 33% of Facebook users are over 35. The numbers for people aged 18-24 on facebook is only 1% higher than the 35+ demographic. A large number of 18-24 year olds makes sense because Facebook started out as a way for students to network, and the site's features remain optimized for people still in school. Regarding curiosity and learning by trial and error - most people are not naturally curious. In 1994, many 42 year old people didn't understand why you would need a web page. However, neither did most 22 year olds.

steve 19y ago
This is absolutely not how myspace started.

catfish 19y ago

What a bunch of horsepoop. Being nearly 50, having ridden the first communication wave called BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS, the second wave called HTTP (the internet existed long before the graphic web), and the third wave called CELL PHONES, I learned that "INHERENTLY GETTING IT" doesn't matter for squat. The only true form of "GETTING IT" that matters can be summed up in three words and it applies across all generations, fads, and follies. Follow the money. That's it. Thats all there is too it. Give me a bleeding edge wave of any sort, comprised of a significant member class, young or old, and the only metric that matters is who makes the money. The rest of this crap about how some group "GETS IT" inherently, is mental masturbation. The only person who truly "GETS IT" is the old fart VC who cashes the biggest checks while getting the young and the dumb to paint the fence. Praise be unto him, Samuel Clemens was right. As I grew older, and discarded the arrogance of youth, I changed my focus. The metric that matters most in terms of inherently "GETTING IT", is determined strictly by your position in the cash flow. I don't need a myspace reddit delicious facebook account to get that! I need a dumb kid willing to take up front money for an idea so that they can feverishly burn through a few years of their life, and in the end get their well deserved and fully diluted 2% return. Give me that please, with sugar on top. The youthful are there to be exploited. Period. They beg for it with their arrogance. I for one am more than happy to oblige them. Why would I care about what they inherently GET? I don't. In fact I hope that every one of them I meet has this particular chip on their shoulder because it makes it all the more easy to steal the fruit of their labor, which is what I "INHERENTLY GET".

wschroter 19y ago
That was the most obnoxious view of our youth I've read in a long time. Well done.