I can relate to this perspective. My parents encouraged me to try a number of things when I was young. They encouraged me to read a lot, to get outside, to ch

I can relate to this perspective. My parents encouraged me to try a number of things when I was young. They encouraged me to read a lot, to get outside, to challenge myself. But every time I started to get really good at something, they encouraged me to back off, often in very subtle ways. I think they were afraid of real success, or afraid of a big failure on my part. It took a long time to recognize this, and a long time to fully break away from this. My father was a software engineer from the 70's-90's, and he passed away last year. It was really sad to go through his computer, and see the project which he'd been working on in his retirement, knowing it would never see the light of day. He never learned the "release early, release often" concept. The positive side of this is the new motivation I have to make sure I finish projects. I do not want to watch my technical skills go to waste. This is especially important to me, because my day job is teaching, not programming. So all of my programming consists of side projects, the easiest things to leave unfinished. It also inspires me to not fear my son's failures, in fact I want to teach him that you have to fail in order to succeed significantly. Some of my heroes in life are the programmers who have remained relevant throughout their entire lives. It's interesting growing older. I am just as impressed by technology as I was when I was a kid, but I am much more focused on what we do with that technology.