This piece seriously misrepresents Vonnegut's career just to make a dubious point.
Sure, Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's big financial breakthrough, but by that time he was a very well-known writer with several classics, including Player Piano and Harrison Bergeron, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and made a decent living from writing full time. Not glamorous for sure, but in line with most very good writerd.
Far from demonstrating the author's thesis that "failure can ripen into art", his story is the story of a man that had no notable failures in writingy, who consistently produced great work, and continued to do so until he made it big.
I don't see how what you're saying is at odds with the author. At no point did they say Vonnegut was a failure before Slaughthouse Five. Only that he, like many others, didn't produce their opus until later in life. This isn't just limited to writing. There are examples in all fields if you look, both creative and commercial. This idea is definitely at odds with a lot of current SV rhetoric.
Your point, that many people don't produce their magnun opus until later in life, is definitely at odds with a lot of current SV rhetoric. And it's a good point.
If the article had tried to make your point, it would have been a much better article.
Instead, it made a different, much less true point, and had to contort Vonnegut's biography to make it.
"His career looked like a sequence of failures until it suddenly wasn't" is just not true of Vonnegut, not true of Galilei, not true of any of the other "examples in all fields" cites in the article. All of them are people who consistently produced great work from early on, well before their 40s, and then produced a magnum opus that really stood the test of time.
Also Kurt himself wrote he had always been trying to write about Dresden but failed to do, obviously until said novel. So this article is very spot on on that matter as well — maturity can achieve something that precociousness can’t. So your accusation is kinda missing the point.
As they say, youth is wasted on the young. Reaching my 40s, I feel I am, almost, at the end of the tutorial of life. Sure, if you dedicate yourself to something as soon as your brain is reaching maturity in early adulthood, you might be a master by the time you reach middle age.
But the common trajectory is that youth is not usually spent advancing the arts and sciences, but to learn the circus of society, its rules, its demands, to the point that we have the very real concept of midlife crisis when these individuals, after learning what the hell society wants from them, ask, “is that all? I got my degree, my job, my career, now what?”
Only after answering this question, in your late 30s or 40s, the road to self-realisation opens. I think rather the fact that we don’t see many Vonneguts is that the vast majority of people never make this step, and just continue to dance the monotonous rhythm of work and family, learned in their 20s, to their grave, without ever developing their full potential.
A lot of Carl Jung’s career as a therapist was dedicated to the topic of self-actualisation for middle-aged adults.
He wrote his science fiction novel "Cat's Cradle" before Slaughterhouse-Five, and I consider this novel to be his best. It is essentially an intelligent parody of the madness of scientists who are eager to make a breakthrough discovery but also completely blind to ethics, and who can even endanger the whole planet. This is a very relevant issue to this day.
Maybe I'm too early to speak on this, since I haven't reached 47 yet ;) but so far, from having been around for a while and having seen people struggle through life, I'd say: All traumas resist immediate rendering.
Trauma overwhelms you and causes behaviors that are hard to break until you understand them. And getting to that understanding is difficult, because the behavior is mostly there to obscure that which is overwhelming, because, well, if it wasn't then the trauma would overwhelm you.
How many people I've seen who get stuck in cycles that never seem to break. But then again, most of these lives are far from over, so it's premature to add "most never will".
I think the people who need to hear this message are not in their late 40s, but are in their 20s thinking that they have to do it now or they never will. I see a lot of ageism on X from people who are clearly young and inexperienced, but when you actually get into the real world and how things are done you see the vast majority of real success happens later in life once you've been around a couple times.
Experience, on the whole, really does get you further than cleverness, but good luck telling that to the inexperienced.
Something we definitely lose when we age is lack of judgement, and with it the ability to play and experiment. I miss that naïveté and over confidence from my twenties knowing I was allowed to screw up.
Is it really those things, or is it that as we get older we have something to lose? I could go live like I'm 20 again...reduce my spending to nothing, work all day on whatever I believe in...but that would cost me my family's comfort, and I rather like them.
I love seeing a Vonnegut writeup on HN. He’s my favorite author and his work had a major influence on me in my 20s. I guess we’ll see what I do when I’m old, whenever that is.
Frank Herbert and Dune is another; he also apparently spent 6 years laying the ground work for it. Both he and Richard Adams had trouble even getting their books published, sci-fi and fantasy as genres not taken seriously at all back then.
Unfortunately, this doesn't fully transfer over for math. The Fields Medal has an age limit on it for example, based on an ancient premise that old mathematicians can't make new incredible discoveries.
It's ridiculous though, I've seen some older mathematicians do some incredible work by themselves. Rare in my experience, but it happens.
> The Fields Medal has an age limit on it for example, based on an ancient premise that old mathematicians can't make new incredible discoveries.
No, it's like that because it was established to encourage young promising researchers. It should not have become the "supreme award" of mathematics. Fortunately, now we also have the Abel Prize.
The Fields Medal isn't the only achievement in math.
> based on an ancient premise that old mathematicians can't make new incredible discoveries.
Not true. The Fields Medal is an encouragement to do more work, not a reward for completion.
https://www.ams.org/notices/201501/rnoti-p15.pdf
In fact, the strict age limit of forty was only
codified at the 1966 Congress, although an informal
criterion of youth preceded it. Fields’s remark that
is often interpreted as favoring young medalists,
that the prize should be “in recognition of work
already done” but was “at the same time intended
to be an encouragement for further achievement,”
is associated with no claim about the age or career
status of the recipient. Rather, the stipulation that
the award should be given “not alone because of the
outstanding character of the achievement but also
with a view to encouraging further development
along these lines,” was Fields’s suggestion for how
“to avoid invidious comparisons” from partisans
dissecting candidates’ existing work [18, pp. 173–
174]. What started with a worry about rivalrous
national factions became an excuse to narrow the
pool of candidates and eventually turned into a
restrictive cutoff. It is yet another myth that Fields
intended the medal only for the young.
John B. Goodenough filed his breakthrough lithium-ion battery patent at 58. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry at 97, the oldest Nobel laureate in history.
The lessons here are two-sided: First of all, don't write off experienced tech workers just because they don't have the spark of youth. Second of all, don't write yourself off just because you haven't had your breakthrough yet.
There is an untold plethora of fabulous artists and creators whom go forth in obscurity because fame is akin to winning the lottery and only a sliver of a hair of an ant's elbow ever finds success. The stories we hear are typical of the famous (biased) survivors, but never those stuck hacking away through the brambles of anonymity.
I know there is ageism in tech and that people think they need to do x(thing) by y(age) but as a 51 year old: let your values drive you and don’t spend all your money. My 40s on have been the best in terms of freedom, learning and execution. Yes, I felt all the same pressures in my 20s and 30s so my words mean little, but I am far happier and more fulfilled the last 11 years of my values and the things that bring me joy driving me. And I’ve never been more productive- frankly, at 30, full of piss and vinegar, I didn’t know shit. And I had already started and exited an ISP and a software consultancy.
In general, young naive entrepreneurs are easier to exploit due to desperation in a sucker VC deal, and tax or school credits often subsidize youth labor costs in many places.
No tech bro or VC wants experienced people around telling younger versions of themselves what to avoid. =3
I feel like there is powerful social conditioning in our society which prevents people who didn't succeed early from succeeding later. It's not about their work. At the end of the day, nobody can succeed in society without the stamp of approval from a bunch of elites. Like a big publisher, or a big social media influencer or a big media platform editor. Nowadays, it seems more than ever, that the elites all have to agree.
It creates situations where some young person may not be "allowed to succeed" due to their unconventional approach and this continues until they turn a certain age by which point those in power think "This person cannot be good because they're 45 and I never heard of them." The suppression becomes self-fulfilling because they were unconventional even though their approach later proved optimal and everyone may be doing it now. Not everyone on the frontline gets recognition.
Also, because a lot of successful people achieved success by a certain age, they tend to look for and help people who are like them. Someone who is 45 and not successful has a very different worldview than someone who became successful in their first venture at 18 years old.
It may be true that youth confers certain physical and mental benefits, but I feel it's generally under-appreciated what a massive amount of value older people can still easily bring to society around them.
I grew up as a young 20-ish programmer in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar, and you can be productive and matter and contribute to greater things for far longer than most people seem to assume.
The bottom line is perhaps more that "finding ways to apply yourself" and doing the right things is challenging at any age.
Agreed. The child prodigy is overvalued in popular perception. It is a subject of fascination precisely because it is uncommon. Most really great work is done by people with plenty of experience; it's just not that interesting when an experienced person does good work.
I don't think child prodigies as commonly known exist in computer programming. A child can learn concertos or even write concertos, but not the comparable version of a concerto in code.
I have two existence proofs in mind that this isn't true.
One of them runs a very large venture backed company and is active right here on this site, the other you've likely never heard of, is super modest and absolutely blew me away with their ability while still in high school, by which time they'd been programming for more than a decade. Some kids really are amazingly capable.
I wasn’t a child prodigy but I wrote a word processor (on a Wang PCS II) that was used for years later by (high) school administration when I was in the tenth grade. By the 11th grade my first after school job was writing commercial software.
I remember an article on Slashdot (IIRC, can't find it now) that examined big discoveries in science and they found there are either child prodigies or old masters that make them. Prodigies make a big splash by their early twenties, and then you get people who don't make big contributions until after middle age.
Some solutions require an entirely new perspective while others require a lifetime's worth of information and experience to be properly collated I guess.
40 is the new 30s and life really starts after 50. Until then you’re spinning your wheels trying to pay back loans, raise kids, work, save, and not fall victim to vices.
Colonel Sanders started KFC in his 40s and didn’t come up with the signature recipe until he was 50. KFC as we know it didn’t exist until he was 65.
Truth is, most successful business owners start in their mid 40s or around 40.
I’ve seen this (“most successful businesses start in their 40s”) a couple times, but I always wonder if the people who start a successful business succeed in their 40s _because_ they’ve been trying since their 20s, and learned a bunch on the way. And if the secret isn’t some combination of business experience/connections/etc, then what is it about being 40+ that would make one intrinsically better at starting a business?
What's the difference? The message is "keep trying and don't give up just because you're 40". It's fairly dubious to say "You can feel free to start a new hobby/business at 40 and expect to succeed quickly", but it's in line with this thread to say "If you haven't felt the success you want by 40, it's ok, greatness comes as often as not after".
Ya, i think “keep trying” is absolutely the right message! But some people will read the statistic and say “i shouldn’t start yet!” — just trying to argue against that.
I'm not so crazy about "keep trying". I tried at my business for long after it was obvious to everyone that I should have quit. I wasted well over a decade of my life, and I learned no lessons other than "don't". But they won't be writing articles about me.
As the poster says, "Winners never quit and quitters never win. But those who don't win and don't quit are idiots." This idiot affirms that advice.
What's the secret that you know which makes poor people have a better life after 50? I'd love to hear it and quit working so damn hard. Hell these days the middle class is getting their ass kicked at the grocery store. I can't even imagine how hard it would be if you cut my income by what it would take to get me to the poverty line. That amount won't even cover my rent.
Even the rich, get richer… this comment definitely misses the point.
The point isn’t about money, it’s about spending time doing the things you enjoy doing. Without commitment to doing so because it’s your job. Some people find their ikigai early. Some decide to work to provide for others and put their own ambitions aside. Selflessly. So sure, the kid genius who struck it rich at 22 that now lives in a mansion is “living his best life”. By what standards? We have different measuring sticks.
i was asking myself what is the point of succeeding if its so late in life. then i wondered what is the point of succeeding young? having a ten year period of not working when you otherwise would be? but business owners and other rich people work harder than most… so the only way to succeed is to not only succeed but make enough to stop working? i just dont understand what im chasing anymore. the only two clear objectives that i can identify are to avoid discomfort unless its deliberate discomfort and to become rich just to prove to myself that i can
> the only two clear objectives that i can identify are to avoid discomfort unless its deliberate discomfort and to become rich just to prove to myself that i can
IMO any fulfilling goal needs to be about more than just yourself. Not just avoiding discomfort for yourself, but also providing stability for a family (note: not saying this needs to be a "traditional" family). And in business the goal should be to contribute positively to your community, which can include seemingly mundane things like producing things of value, establishing trust-based relationships, mentoring others, providing employment opportunities, etc.
I also don't think the goal of early retirement should just be to quit and do nothing - I think that's actually quite unhealthy. But rather to free up time to focus on the things that are most important to you. Self improvement, health, family, charitable causes and other causes that are important to you, and of course some leisure time as well.
I think by those measures, Kurt Vonnegut was a very successful person. I don't know that always translated into happiness, though. Although I think he was about as happy as he could be - which is the most we can ask for.
Ask yourself what would you do with the time given? Would you be a better version of yourself? Because that’s what happens. Money amplifies you. If you’re an asshole, money is going to make you even more so. If you’re a provider, money will make you able to provide more.
Ask yourself some serious questions in the mirror. Why would you pursue early retirement and money? To get rich? For what purpose? You lack the vision right now to even see it through. Take a step back, focus on your immediate needs, stop chasing other peoples dreams and start dreaming of your own future - who would you be?
All the more impressive that he turned out the way he did.
"Vonnegut definitely had survived a lot. His once wealthy family was impoverished by the Great Depression, causing grim strains in his parents' marriage. His mother committed suicide. His beloved sister died of breast cancer, a day after her husband was killed in a train accident. But the defining horror of Vonnegut's life was his wartime experience and surviving the Dresden bombing, only to be sent into the ruins as prison labour in order to collect and burn the corpses."
Not exactly a life made in a bed of roses, to put it mildly. I realize he's not perfect, but then again, neither am I and probably neither are you, shooting your arrows from behind comfy anonymity.
I enjoyed reading the Brothers Vonnegut about Kurt and his brother and the time they both spent working for GE in 40s. His brother worked on cloud seeding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Vonnegut
Irrelevant even if true, which it isn’t, so you’re both mean-spirited and wrong. Does this kind of comment soothe some wound?
Your characterization doesn’t make any sense anyway. A nepo baby how? He wasn’t in the construction business, working a cushy job in dad’s company. He sold cars and did PR work while trying to write. His family’s past seems to have conferred him no advantage whatsoever.
"Comes from money" (often, but not always, coupled with family having an "in" with people in whatever artistic business their kid goes on to succeed in) is the secret to the success of an enormous proportion of artists in general.
Taylor Swift works hard and has talent and all, but also her parents could afford both the money and time required to get her to music and acting lessons in NYC, get her to auditions in Nashville to try to get a foot in the door, et c. They were a rich enough family that they "summered" in an expensive shoreline New Jersey zip code and her dad had a Christmas tree farm as a hobby. One wonders how many might-have-beens as good as her, or better, are instead waiting tables at Waffle House because they grew up in a mobile home and their parents couldn't even afford once-a-week piano lessons from the old lady who plays for services at the local Methodist church. I don't mean to knock her—it's not like it's her fault she had advantages. Parents with money are a key ingredient in tons of stories like hers, is all, and she's a good example of that in action.
Tons of successful actors are children of parents who were in the business. Actors themselves, directors, producers. Money, connections, and maybe existing name recognition go a long way. You can see the extreme (and extremely forced) version of this pretty often, with famous and/or rich parents playing key, credited roles in financing and putting together lead role debut vehicles for their actor kids.
I'm all for casually pointing out/questioning potentials -isms when they appear more probable than not or perhaps imbued without consideration, but it seems more about the context of a snapshot in the arc of a public figure's life than anything else.
This piece seriously misrepresents Vonnegut's career just to make a dubious point.
Sure, Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's big financial breakthrough, but by that time he was a very well-known writer with several classics, including Player Piano and Harrison Bergeron, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and made a decent living from writing full time. Not glamorous for sure, but in line with most very good writerd.
Far from demonstrating the author's thesis that "failure can ripen into art", his story is the story of a man that had no notable failures in writingy, who consistently produced great work, and continued to do so until he made it big.
He got the guggenheim fellowship in 1967 when he was 45, only a couple years after he had considered giving up.
I don't see how what you're saying is at odds with the author. At no point did they say Vonnegut was a failure before Slaughthouse Five. Only that he, like many others, didn't produce their opus until later in life. This isn't just limited to writing. There are examples in all fields if you look, both creative and commercial. This idea is definitely at odds with a lot of current SV rhetoric.
Your point, that many people don't produce their magnun opus until later in life, is definitely at odds with a lot of current SV rhetoric. And it's a good point.
If the article had tried to make your point, it would have been a much better article.
Instead, it made a different, much less true point, and had to contort Vonnegut's biography to make it.
"His career looked like a sequence of failures until it suddenly wasn't" is just not true of Vonnegut, not true of Galilei, not true of any of the other "examples in all fields" cites in the article. All of them are people who consistently produced great work from early on, well before their 40s, and then produced a magnum opus that really stood the test of time.
Well just a few years before the breakthrough, he was broke and considering giving up so not entirely misleading IMO.
I think you need some luck to have picked something early in life to be passionate about that will allow you too be great at something later on.
If you were unfortunate enough to be passionate about something physical like a sport or game, not much to look forward to
> If you were unfortunate enough to be passionate about something physical like a sport or game, not much to look forward to
Coach Little League. Physical passions can be a lot more fullfiling than otherwise
You still need to be good enough to be someone people want to be coached by. In the niches I'm familiar that's hard.
Passion can be its own reward. People run into their 90s, it is obviously rewarding even if not “great.”
Also Kurt himself wrote he had always been trying to write about Dresden but failed to do, obviously until said novel. So this article is very spot on on that matter as well — maturity can achieve something that precociousness can’t. So your accusation is kinda missing the point.
As they say, youth is wasted on the young. Reaching my 40s, I feel I am, almost, at the end of the tutorial of life. Sure, if you dedicate yourself to something as soon as your brain is reaching maturity in early adulthood, you might be a master by the time you reach middle age.
But the common trajectory is that youth is not usually spent advancing the arts and sciences, but to learn the circus of society, its rules, its demands, to the point that we have the very real concept of midlife crisis when these individuals, after learning what the hell society wants from them, ask, “is that all? I got my degree, my job, my career, now what?”
Only after answering this question, in your late 30s or 40s, the road to self-realisation opens. I think rather the fact that we don’t see many Vonneguts is that the vast majority of people never make this step, and just continue to dance the monotonous rhythm of work and family, learned in their 20s, to their grave, without ever developing their full potential.
A lot of Carl Jung’s career as a therapist was dedicated to the topic of self-actualisation for middle-aged adults.
He wrote his science fiction novel "Cat's Cradle" before Slaughterhouse-Five, and I consider this novel to be his best. It is essentially an intelligent parody of the madness of scientists who are eager to make a breakthrough discovery but also completely blind to ethics, and who can even endanger the whole planet. This is a very relevant issue to this day.
I'll mention the recent Second Act as an excellent survey of the phenomenon of the late bloomer: https://www.henry-oliver.co.uk/home.
A book surveying late bloomers does sound interesting.
However, this is packaged as a self help book, which probably sells more but doesn't interest me at all.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201064797-second-act
> Some traumas resist immediate rendering.
Maybe I'm too early to speak on this, since I haven't reached 47 yet ;) but so far, from having been around for a while and having seen people struggle through life, I'd say: All traumas resist immediate rendering.
Trauma overwhelms you and causes behaviors that are hard to break until you understand them. And getting to that understanding is difficult, because the behavior is mostly there to obscure that which is overwhelming, because, well, if it wasn't then the trauma would overwhelm you.
How many people I've seen who get stuck in cycles that never seem to break. But then again, most of these lives are far from over, so it's premature to add "most never will".
Good piece. There's still time.
I think the people who need to hear this message are not in their late 40s, but are in their 20s thinking that they have to do it now or they never will. I see a lot of ageism on X from people who are clearly young and inexperienced, but when you actually get into the real world and how things are done you see the vast majority of real success happens later in life once you've been around a couple times.
Experience, on the whole, really does get you further than cleverness, but good luck telling that to the inexperienced.
Something we definitely lose when we age is lack of judgement, and with it the ability to play and experiment. I miss that naïveté and over confidence from my twenties knowing I was allowed to screw up.
Is it really those things, or is it that as we get older we have something to lose? I could go live like I'm 20 again...reduce my spending to nothing, work all day on whatever I believe in...but that would cost me my family's comfort, and I rather like them.
Teresa of Avila was 62 when she wrote the Interior Castle. Easily one of the most impactful books on my own life.
So it goes.
Craig Newmark was...checking Wikipedia...42, 45 at incorporation of craigslist.
I love seeing a Vonnegut writeup on HN. He’s my favorite author and his work had a major influence on me in my 20s. I guess we’ll see what I do when I’m old, whenever that is.
Richard Adams was 52 when he wrote Watership Down and surely there's more examples
JRR Tolkien was 38 when he started writing The Hobbit, which wouldn't get finished and published until he was in his mid 40s.
Frank Herbert and Dune is another; he also apparently spent 6 years laying the ground work for it. Both he and Richard Adams had trouble even getting their books published, sci-fi and fantasy as genres not taken seriously at all back then.
Unfortunately, this doesn't fully transfer over for math. The Fields Medal has an age limit on it for example, based on an ancient premise that old mathematicians can't make new incredible discoveries.
It's ridiculous though, I've seen some older mathematicians do some incredible work by themselves. Rare in my experience, but it happens.
> The Fields Medal has an age limit on it for example, based on an ancient premise that old mathematicians can't make new incredible discoveries.
No, it's like that because it was established to encourage young promising researchers. It should not have become the "supreme award" of mathematics. Fortunately, now we also have the Abel Prize.
The Fields Medal isn't the only achievement in math.
> based on an ancient premise that old mathematicians can't make new incredible discoveries.
Not true. The Fields Medal is an encouragement to do more work, not a reward for completion.
https://www.ams.org/notices/201501/rnoti-p15.pdf In fact, the strict age limit of forty was only codified at the 1966 Congress, although an informal criterion of youth preceded it. Fields’s remark that is often interpreted as favoring young medalists, that the prize should be “in recognition of work already done” but was “at the same time intended to be an encouragement for further achievement,” is associated with no claim about the age or career status of the recipient. Rather, the stipulation that the award should be given “not alone because of the outstanding character of the achievement but also with a view to encouraging further development along these lines,” was Fields’s suggestion for how “to avoid invidious comparisons” from partisans dissecting candidates’ existing work [18, pp. 173– 174]. What started with a worry about rivalrous national factions became an excuse to narrow the pool of candidates and eventually turned into a restrictive cutoff. It is yet another myth that Fields intended the medal only for the young.
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201504/rnoti-p327.pdf
Except to be a president , for that your prime is 90 - 92
John B. Goodenough filed his breakthrough lithium-ion battery patent at 58. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry at 97, the oldest Nobel laureate in history.
The lessons here are two-sided: First of all, don't write off experienced tech workers just because they don't have the spark of youth. Second of all, don't write yourself off just because you haven't had your breakthrough yet.
I think Cormac McCarthy also wrote very late in life.
He started writing young, but he was nearly 60 when he hit his first big breakthrough.
There is an untold plethora of fabulous artists and creators whom go forth in obscurity because fame is akin to winning the lottery and only a sliver of a hair of an ant's elbow ever finds success. The stories we hear are typical of the famous (biased) survivors, but never those stuck hacking away through the brambles of anonymity.
I know there is ageism in tech and that people think they need to do x(thing) by y(age) but as a 51 year old: let your values drive you and don’t spend all your money. My 40s on have been the best in terms of freedom, learning and execution. Yes, I felt all the same pressures in my 20s and 30s so my words mean little, but I am far happier and more fulfilled the last 11 years of my values and the things that bring me joy driving me. And I’ve never been more productive- frankly, at 30, full of piss and vinegar, I didn’t know shit. And I had already started and exited an ISP and a software consultancy.
In general, young naive entrepreneurs are easier to exploit due to desperation in a sucker VC deal, and tax or school credits often subsidize youth labor costs in many places.
No tech bro or VC wants experienced people around telling younger versions of themselves what to avoid. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE
Not just "young naive entrepreneurs" but also "young naive workers".
In my 20's I worked a ton of 60 hours weeks that also included mandatory travel on Sundays without any comp time.
Never. Again.
I feel like there is powerful social conditioning in our society which prevents people who didn't succeed early from succeeding later. It's not about their work. At the end of the day, nobody can succeed in society without the stamp of approval from a bunch of elites. Like a big publisher, or a big social media influencer or a big media platform editor. Nowadays, it seems more than ever, that the elites all have to agree.
It creates situations where some young person may not be "allowed to succeed" due to their unconventional approach and this continues until they turn a certain age by which point those in power think "This person cannot be good because they're 45 and I never heard of them." The suppression becomes self-fulfilling because they were unconventional even though their approach later proved optimal and everyone may be doing it now. Not everyone on the frontline gets recognition.
Also, because a lot of successful people achieved success by a certain age, they tend to look for and help people who are like them. Someone who is 45 and not successful has a very different worldview than someone who became successful in their first venture at 18 years old.
Charlie Sheen was successful at age 20 in Platoon and has been a drug addict since.
It may be true that youth confers certain physical and mental benefits, but I feel it's generally under-appreciated what a massive amount of value older people can still easily bring to society around them.
I grew up as a young 20-ish programmer in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar, and you can be productive and matter and contribute to greater things for far longer than most people seem to assume.
The bottom line is perhaps more that "finding ways to apply yourself" and doing the right things is challenging at any age.
Agreed. The child prodigy is overvalued in popular perception. It is a subject of fascination precisely because it is uncommon. Most really great work is done by people with plenty of experience; it's just not that interesting when an experienced person does good work.
I don't think child prodigies as commonly known exist in computer programming. A child can learn concertos or even write concertos, but not the comparable version of a concerto in code.
I have two existence proofs in mind that this isn't true.
One of them runs a very large venture backed company and is active right here on this site, the other you've likely never heard of, is super modest and absolutely blew me away with their ability while still in high school, by which time they'd been programming for more than a decade. Some kids really are amazingly capable.
I wasn’t a child prodigy but I wrote a word processor (on a Wang PCS II) that was used for years later by (high) school administration when I was in the tenth grade. By the 11th grade my first after school job was writing commercial software.
Geohot sim unlocked the iPhone at 17.
Pff, I unlock my iPhone all the time
I remember an article on Slashdot (IIRC, can't find it now) that examined big discoveries in science and they found there are either child prodigies or old masters that make them. Prodigies make a big splash by their early twenties, and then you get people who don't make big contributions until after middle age.
Some solutions require an entirely new perspective while others require a lifetime's worth of information and experience to be properly collated I guess.
The ham radio community is basically kept alive by senior citizens and the 42 of us under 50.
> It may be true that youth confers certain [...] mental benefits
I think it would be better if HN didn't tell impressionable 20yo techbros things like this.
> massive amount of value older people can still easily bring to society around them.
This is generally recognized in many places, outside of techbro echo chambers.
> in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar,
To your 20yo techbro, this sounds like damning with faint praise.
40 is the new 30s and life really starts after 50. Until then you’re spinning your wheels trying to pay back loans, raise kids, work, save, and not fall victim to vices.
Colonel Sanders started KFC in his 40s and didn’t come up with the signature recipe until he was 50. KFC as we know it didn’t exist until he was 65.
Truth is, most successful business owners start in their mid 40s or around 40.
I’ve seen this (“most successful businesses start in their 40s”) a couple times, but I always wonder if the people who start a successful business succeed in their 40s _because_ they’ve been trying since their 20s, and learned a bunch on the way. And if the secret isn’t some combination of business experience/connections/etc, then what is it about being 40+ that would make one intrinsically better at starting a business?
What's the difference? The message is "keep trying and don't give up just because you're 40". It's fairly dubious to say "You can feel free to start a new hobby/business at 40 and expect to succeed quickly", but it's in line with this thread to say "If you haven't felt the success you want by 40, it's ok, greatness comes as often as not after".
Ya, i think “keep trying” is absolutely the right message! But some people will read the statistic and say “i shouldn’t start yet!” — just trying to argue against that.
I'm not so crazy about "keep trying". I tried at my business for long after it was obvious to everyone that I should have quit. I wasted well over a decade of my life, and I learned no lessons other than "don't". But they won't be writing articles about me.
As the poster says, "Winners never quit and quitters never win. But those who don't win and don't quit are idiots." This idiot affirms that advice.
Yeah that's the thing. Nobody writes articles about someone who stops, whether they stop at the right time or not.
What would your advice be?
The secret sauce (even yc will confirm) is relationships. It’s not necessarily what you know, but who you know.
Sometimes they are offered in your 20s. Sometimes they are built over time for 20 years.
>40 is the new 30s and life really starts after 50.
If you're poor, yes. I don't mean this in a derogaroty way.
What?
What's the secret that you know which makes poor people have a better life after 50? I'd love to hear it and quit working so damn hard. Hell these days the middle class is getting their ass kicked at the grocery store. I can't even imagine how hard it would be if you cut my income by what it would take to get me to the poverty line. That amount won't even cover my rent.
You go it backwards.
Not-so-poor people enjoy their life since their 20s, because they're not worrying about all the other things that you wrote in your comment ...
Even the rich, get richer… this comment definitely misses the point.
The point isn’t about money, it’s about spending time doing the things you enjoy doing. Without commitment to doing so because it’s your job. Some people find their ikigai early. Some decide to work to provide for others and put their own ambitions aside. Selflessly. So sure, the kid genius who struck it rich at 22 that now lives in a mansion is “living his best life”. By what standards? We have different measuring sticks.
i was asking myself what is the point of succeeding if its so late in life. then i wondered what is the point of succeeding young? having a ten year period of not working when you otherwise would be? but business owners and other rich people work harder than most… so the only way to succeed is to not only succeed but make enough to stop working? i just dont understand what im chasing anymore. the only two clear objectives that i can identify are to avoid discomfort unless its deliberate discomfort and to become rich just to prove to myself that i can
> the only two clear objectives that i can identify are to avoid discomfort unless its deliberate discomfort and to become rich just to prove to myself that i can
IMO any fulfilling goal needs to be about more than just yourself. Not just avoiding discomfort for yourself, but also providing stability for a family (note: not saying this needs to be a "traditional" family). And in business the goal should be to contribute positively to your community, which can include seemingly mundane things like producing things of value, establishing trust-based relationships, mentoring others, providing employment opportunities, etc.
I also don't think the goal of early retirement should just be to quit and do nothing - I think that's actually quite unhealthy. But rather to free up time to focus on the things that are most important to you. Self improvement, health, family, charitable causes and other causes that are important to you, and of course some leisure time as well.
I think by those measures, Kurt Vonnegut was a very successful person. I don't know that always translated into happiness, though. Although I think he was about as happy as he could be - which is the most we can ask for.
Ask yourself what would you do with the time given? Would you be a better version of yourself? Because that’s what happens. Money amplifies you. If you’re an asshole, money is going to make you even more so. If you’re a provider, money will make you able to provide more.
Ask yourself some serious questions in the mirror. Why would you pursue early retirement and money? To get rich? For what purpose? You lack the vision right now to even see it through. Take a step back, focus on your immediate needs, stop chasing other peoples dreams and start dreaming of your own future - who would you be?
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All the more impressive that he turned out the way he did.
"Vonnegut definitely had survived a lot. His once wealthy family was impoverished by the Great Depression, causing grim strains in his parents' marriage. His mother committed suicide. His beloved sister died of breast cancer, a day after her husband was killed in a train accident. But the defining horror of Vonnegut's life was his wartime experience and surviving the Dresden bombing, only to be sent into the ruins as prison labour in order to collect and burn the corpses."
From: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/03/kurt-vonnegut-...
Not exactly a life made in a bed of roses, to put it mildly. I realize he's not perfect, but then again, neither am I and probably neither are you, shooting your arrows from behind comfy anonymity.
I enjoyed reading the Brothers Vonnegut about Kurt and his brother and the time they both spent working for GE in 40s. His brother worked on cloud seeding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Vonnegut
Irrelevant even if true, which it isn’t, so you’re both mean-spirited and wrong. Does this kind of comment soothe some wound?
Your characterization doesn’t make any sense anyway. A nepo baby how? He wasn’t in the construction business, working a cushy job in dad’s company. He sold cars and did PR work while trying to write. His family’s past seems to have conferred him no advantage whatsoever.
"Comes from money" (often, but not always, coupled with family having an "in" with people in whatever artistic business their kid goes on to succeed in) is the secret to the success of an enormous proportion of artists in general.
Taylor Swift works hard and has talent and all, but also her parents could afford both the money and time required to get her to music and acting lessons in NYC, get her to auditions in Nashville to try to get a foot in the door, et c. They were a rich enough family that they "summered" in an expensive shoreline New Jersey zip code and her dad had a Christmas tree farm as a hobby. One wonders how many might-have-beens as good as her, or better, are instead waiting tables at Waffle House because they grew up in a mobile home and their parents couldn't even afford once-a-week piano lessons from the old lady who plays for services at the local Methodist church. I don't mean to knock her—it's not like it's her fault she had advantages. Parents with money are a key ingredient in tons of stories like hers, is all, and she's a good example of that in action.
Tons of successful actors are children of parents who were in the business. Actors themselves, directors, producers. Money, connections, and maybe existing name recognition go a long way. You can see the extreme (and extremely forced) version of this pretty often, with famous and/or rich parents playing key, credited roles in financing and putting together lead role debut vehicles for their actor kids.
Identity theft!!
The agism on this site is astounding and completely tolerated by the mods whereas stating negative facts about race or sex is disallowed.
Significant double standard.
As probably one of the older members here: bullshit.
What ageism?
I'm all for casually pointing out/questioning potentials -isms when they appear more probable than not or perhaps imbued without consideration, but it seems more about the context of a snapshot in the arc of a public figure's life than anything else.