There's a somewhat famous quote from photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson — 'Your first 10000 photographs are your worst.' In that vein, everything you do can get

There's a somewhat famous quote from photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson — 'Your first 10000 photographs are your worst.' In that vein, everything you do can get better. 25 is not old. The industry is somewhat young-people-worshipping now, but that's because computation has gotten incredibly popular now, and that is the age of a lot of people - most of the people I've worked with are older than that, and that's fine. Experience is great. There will be a ton of older folks making awesome things long into the distant future. I find the idea (it seems a little bay-area centric) that 25 is old to be, well, insane, but perhaps that's just what people of every generation do. I started my first startup at 33 or so, really, there's nothing magically about this (many parts of it totally suck!), and it's just as good to work for a large company. Because someone started something at an earlier age is really meaningless. Heck, just thinking about a great idea for 5 years and then finally making it into a thing is valuable, so your time isn't wasted. We are basically a culmination of all of our experiences, and how we use that information. More experience is better. The best thing you can do is build cool things that you enjoy, but there's also no point in trying to "win" the game or be better than anyone else. I think the general ideas about attachment or desire for greater things breeding suffering are more or less correct. Build things that you enjoy, and enjoy them for you. It's similar to "more money, more problems". Fame from past projects or accomplishments will fade too, technology gets replaced daily. You can be happy with today, but if you are always focusing on tomorrow, you really can't be. Also, if you don't enjoy building things, do something you do enjoy as well. Helping people matters. Everything else? Building a really shiny ecommerce webpage? Not so much. I guess what I'm saying is, those things don't matter. There's no benchmark. There's only whether you are happy, and you can actually change what makes you happy. And it's also ok if you don't know what that is yet. But yeah, if you want to do good stuff, keep doing more stuff. Better just happens. (And to bring it back to the quote -- everybody takes bad photos, the trick is to just not upload the bad ones. Everybody writes bad code too!). Ultimately I think HN focuses on people who get lucky and make the big bugs on startup exits or big CEO salaries WAAAY too much. It messes up people's value systems. Money is not all that matters - not by a longshot. It's also true you can do really well without being one of those extremely lucky people.