"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life.
I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention.
At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow.
If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.
At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.
May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."
I feel like the internet creates a distortion here. Sites like HN make us feel like everyone is out there creating like crazy and doing all this amazing stuff. The reality is a very small minority of people are doing this.
Most people don't create much of anything. At least, anything they could have a major break through on. Most people have day jobs and will always have day jobs. Most people come home from work and watch TV.
It takes serious discipline to take an idea through to success. If I had to guess, discipline is a very important trait for startup success. Maybe you'll never be that disciplined, or maybe it's something you can work on. I can say for sure I am much more disciplined now (at the ripe age of 34) than in my 20s. Yet I still question if I have what it takes to truly do a startup.
To the OP: I think you should just relax and enjoy yourself, let nature take over. Not every idea has to be worth a million dollars. My current project and the one just before it basically have no chance of ever making me any money. I did them because I enjoyed them. I think that is more important and more likely to lead you in a direction you want to go.
Arguments based on "most people" are not compelling to me. To me, the correct standard to measure my performance against is my potential. And I know I fall far short. I feel I should have accomplished more by now, I could have. I know others have.
I too feel the call of new ideas all the time, and have the same lack of discipline. I've brought precious few of my ideas to state that could possibly be called "done", and none to the glorious state I had imagined. I'm not even talking about making money, just making good stuff for people to enjoy. Perhaps the biggest difference between me and the author is that I'm still only 20 and still in school. To accomplish half the things I want to before I die, I'll have to grow a ton more self-discipline, and sometimes I wonder if I can do it.
To tell me and people like me "relax, other people are lazy too" is not that helpful. It's true, "most people" never fully realize their potential. They have all kinds of bad habits and issues. When have other people's mistakes been an excuse for mine?
I mean, I feel pretty good when I take the trash out on the right day and finish a book - he's setting a pretty high bar if he's assume everyone has to make a startup, let alone succeed at it.
I turn 30 in 5 months and can completely identify with how you've felt. I too have the dozens of domain names for long-abandoned web applications for some idea that I thought was a radical spike of insight at the time.
It's a vicious cycle. I get the idea. I register the domain name, already imagining a brilliant fully-featured yet astonishingly-easy-to-use product. I start cranking out code. But it takes some time. I realized some problems I thought were easy are harder. That takes more time. I realize a certain problem is exceptionally hard and will take me longer than I thought, so I hack together something that works for now. I realize yet another problem will take me longer than I thought, and a few weeks pass and I begin to feel my web application is just a series of hacks. If we're using the art analogy, rather than the beautiful and crisp design I envisioned, my canvas is filled with ugly smears and smudges that doesn't look anything like what's in my mind.
And it's always a lot easier to just throw out the canvas and start something new, than to tediously work out improving those smears and smudges.
So, perhaps one hopeful anecdote I can share: earlier this year I did start a project that I've finally been able to focus on. The only difference with this one vs. the others
is that I saw a tangible return relatively early on. Two months after I worked on it, I made $72. That's basically a laughable number, except it's the first tangible return on the dozens of web applications I've started and abandoned for the past 5 years. From then on, there's been a mostly-positive correlation between "hours put into project" and "dollars earned," which has completely shifted my mentality.
I've begun to take pride in those smears and smudges, knowing I'm already succeeding to some degree and it could be especially rewarding if I continue. I have no idea if this would work for you, or anyone else, but like others have said, this is a process. Everyone designs and creates at their own pace, and age seemed pretty meaningless to me. In fact it's now that I'm older, instead of 5 years ago, that I can begin to appreciate my limitations and have the patience to work with them, instead of ignoring the fact that they exist.
And above all, be proud that in a world where many are content to maintain and manage (literally and figuratively), you have the desire and the ability to create and produce. Best of luck.
Like you, and and I'm sure many of us, I also have plenty of projects I've conceived up, purchased domain names, and cranked out a bit of code for, only to let it languish in non-use never to be heard from again.
This is healthy, it helps to weed out the bad ideas, or at least the ideas that might be promising but for which you don't actually have the passion for bringing to fruition, let alone maintaining for years should it actually gain a little bit of traction.
The projects of mine that have stuck around despite my rather fickle nature are the ones that really hit close to home -- projects for which I clearly have a need and even more, a passion to keep alive. My current project, BracketPal[1], is such a project. I'm a pretty hardcore beach volleyball player, and after playing in many volleyball leagues, both bar/casual and competitive leagues, I've found the average quality of league websites to be offensively dismal. So it started as a nugget of "I need to make this, because I just can't handle getting my schedule emailed to me in a spreadsheet anymore", to my first paying customers' leagues starting up their indoor volleyball and kickball leagues this coming January.
Before that, in 2005 I was obsessed with running my World of Warcraft guild to an unhealthy degree, and so I started up and launched my guild hosting system in 2006 and it's still around.
In both cases, I would not have managed to create a quality product if I didn't have a passion, nay, obsession about these particular fields.
So I strongly believe that it's a good thing to cook up a bunch of half-baked ideas. If you lose interest in them before launching, great, you've found a project you shouldn't be doing anyway, it's time to move onto another project - one you might have a bit more serious passion for.
In your case, it's absolutely great getting that first payment, that first evidence that what you've created is being used and appreciated by people, even if it iss only $72. It all starts with those first few dollars. And once you've made something that you're receiving praise and money from your customers, it becomes a highly addictive drug, except that getting your "fix" requires you improving your software and keeping your customers happy.
[1] BracketPal is my sports league management system and I'm crazy excited about it! You can find it shamelessly linked right here: http://www.bracketpal.com
Keep doing things. Be lazy. Try to do less. Figure out how you can reduce and write less code. Ask yourself again and again "Do I REALLY need this part?"
Your process sounds a lot like mine, honestly. Keep going, it works.
It's worth remembering that web applications come a long way from conception to what the general public will see. Facebook is barely a hallmark of what Zuck was programming by himself.
If you have a great idea the early adopters will recognize that. The general public won't. However those early adopters might give you enough money to keep developing so that 5 years from now the general public might be paying too.
I've been there too and I like that you mention that you feel like you web app is just a series of hacks. I feel that way too and I'm sure others do as well so why do you think that is? In my case it's probably because we see so many other successful people launching and we start thinking of all the things that could go wrong and that just makes us want to start over.
I'll give you an example. I've had this VPS over at Webbynode for months now just sitting there. It was originally going to be one app but now I just set it up as another last night. (writeapp.me in case you're curious). So I set up my LAMP stack, uploaded whatever part of the app I had to far (which isn't much) and proceeded to install a mail server. Well it went well except I screwed something up and I can't access the web interface for it. That one little thing, not having my mail server work perfectly made me think about starting over with a fresh Ubuntu install. Crazy! I think your idea of what it will become when it's finished has a lot to do with this stuff.
I could have written this, except that I can already see 30 a ways back there in the rear view mirror.
I have just two things that I think are very important to say about this.
1) Don't worry about the fact that you're 30. That line about artists in their 30s or 40s is BS. There is no magical age at which you have to have produced your magnum opus. Never let the desire to "do something great" prevent you from doing the work. In fact, that's most likely what is keeping you FROM doing your great work. As someone who suffers from the same "idea addiction," I can say that one of the reasons people like us always chase new ideas is that we are trying to have our great moment, and are always afraid that if we buckle down and commit to one of our ideas, it might not be that Great Work, and we'll end up missing the next great idea when it comes along. So, we are always looking for the Best Possible Thing, and we don't get down to the work that really has to happen.
2) Even superstars have to do the dishes. We hear so much about the famous artists, businessmen, inventors, musicians, whatever, but all we hear about are their glories. It's boring to talk about all the days of the long grind, just plugging away to make the donuts. For every eureka moment, there are hundreds of hours of everyday work.
I'm 40 years old, and I've produced, in my estimation, one "amazing art." It's a magazine I started and ran for eight years. In retrospect, I feel like it was a non-stop party, but if I really think about it, the only reason it succeeded was that I had no choice but to slug it out and put in the 90-hour weeks of boring copy editing, ad sales, bookkeeping, etc. It's because at the time, it was the ONLY IDEA I HAD.
Now that I have dozens of ideas at any given time, ironically, I get none of them done.
Don't try to create a Great Work. Pick something you enjoy and have fun making, and just make the hell out of it. If you're lucky, it might even be "amazing art."
The "30 freakout" is one of the great undiscussed traumas in our society. I don't know if this is just an American thing, or a product of western culture, or if this is universal. It needs to be addressed, and I wished people started talking about this to kids in high school. I believe this is a more significant problem than the mid-life crisis.
For whatever reason (base 10 maybe?) we latch on to 30 as the time by which we should have some proof that we are on the right track. You can always beat yourself up at any age by comparing yourself to others. If you're in college, look at a Galois or a Joan of Arc and you're already a complete failure.
I think it makes sense. Early twenties is college, mid twenties is still considered "just out of college", so you are allowed to waste time and drink. Late twenties is getting older but still "hey, we're still in our twenties".
After that, thirties hits and you can't say that you're fresh out of college, or just graduated a few years ago. I think you start to look back and want some validation for the way your life is going.
I'm also over 30 and am still motivated to try and learn to do lots of new things well. I expect this to last my entire life, I'm just too curious to stop. Needing to reassure myself it's not "too late" is a sad consequence of the group-think you're describing.
Isn't it funny how practically all rich, developed, western countries have rising life expectancies but especially on the internet you get the feeling that by 30 they will just grab and bury you because your life is over...
Man, you totally said it. Someone with drive and who understands the "30 Freakout" should register the domain name and create a resource where people can learn about this extremely common condition.
Hah, I'm 19 and relate to this sentiment far too well, except just thinking back on the last 4-5 years.
I just spent the last 3 months away from the internet, and it was ridiculously mind-clearing. Burning Man turned into chasing a girl around the West Coast, turned into coming back to NYC and quitting my job so I can do more of what I want.
I still haven't really gotten back into Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook like I was before I left.
I'm not sure how I feel that mental clarity and this 'new idea ADD' are related. But I definitely feel more centered now. Reflection is key, and you're doing that. I think that's the first step toward doing what you want to do.
[edit] I think what I'm trying to say is, eliminate distractions, reflect, and follow your gut.
At 30 I was miserable because I hadn't done anything massive either. Then I sold a company for $12M when I was 34, started a company at 35 that is now (three years later) at a $1M monthly run rate and was an advisor to a billion-dollar public company.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. You never know what's coming up just over the next hill.
Just because Steve Jobs said it, it shouldn't scare you. Steve Jobs himself did his best work in his 40s and 50s. If it's true that it's rare that older people produce "less amazing stuff" (big if), then it's probably because they simply lose the desire to do it. Family, boredom or health issues get in the way.
Lots of opinions and advice here already. Some of it is good, but I felt strongly compelled to post a dissenting view based on my practical experience as both an "ideas guy" and as a successful founder of several companies.
It's true that ideas are worthless without execution, but I get bent out of shape every time someone spouts this mantra because it's only half of the story. A bad idea well executed is still a bad idea. You can waste a huge amount of time, money and energy throwing your passion into a bad idea.
Some of the most toxic advice is that you should just "pick one or two of your ideas and turn the volume up to 11 on them for a few years, no matter what!" aka "just start, you can always pivot". That's totally bullshit in the real world. Reputations get tarnished, and every opportunity you take costs all of the other opportunities you didn't take.
Now, that also doesn't mean that you should curl up in the fetal position and hope the world stops asking hard questions. It's possible that one of your ideas is the next Facebook, but the realistic truth is that statistically you will never dream up the next Facebook.
And that's okay. In fact, it's great. You can start forgiving yourself now.
My feeling is that it's perfectly fine to be addicted to having ideas and suppressing your excitement long enough to analyze the ideas for flaws. This isn't time wasted not executing, it's time invested in two valuable activities: practising the skill of spotting deadly flaws and rolling the dice on another idea. This is a much more pragmatic opportunity cost than believing that the world is counting on you to deliver the next major cultural wave, and soon.
Let's say that you realize none of your ideas (so far) are the next WWW or automobile. Nobody is going to be disappointed in you for teaming up with another person to build their idea. Insisting on building your own idea to feel validated is like refusing to adopt kids with a different skin color — it doesn't hold up to unbiased scrutiny. So my advice is that you should stop beating yourself up and be open to opportunities that originate amongst your self-selected, startup-inclined friends.
I turned 30 today, and I've find myself with a followed trail of crap. I spent 8 years while in high-school/college/grad school working on a game engine that I threw away. I spent a year working endlessly during graduate studies on a computer algebra system for college algebra students to provide step by step instructions. I spent a couple of years in a mathematics graduate program only to drop out and do a start-up. I was homeless for about a year while studying math (living in the CS department). When the start-up turned profitable, I got bored and left.
Now, I look back at all the crap I've made, and I look forward to the things I'm going to make. The things I make each year get better. They get faster, more scalable, better, more beautiful.
The key (I hope) is that no matter what, you don't give up on what you want to do. As I age, I'm getting more comfortable with that.
* 8 years experience designing and producing a game engine, accruing knowledge of dos/donts
> {homeless for a year...}
* Practical experience living/working with extreme resource constraints
> {Developed startup, quit}
* Have produced profitable ventures from nothing -> profit, and in the process realized what really motivates me.
Please don't sell yourself short (not just @mathgladiator, but anybody reading this). The expression "It's the journey, not the destination" can be applicable to both the past and the future.
May I suggest that you try approaching your ideas from a slightly different perspective: pick those that stem from a personal pain point, that way, you'll be personally vested.
Whilst it's exciting to come up with novel ideas, nothing's more spurring than fixing and making your own life better.
To illustrate, here are some projects that I've embarked on, which scratched a personal pain point and went on to be incidentally well liked by others enough to even pay for:
Customers were frequently asking how to do something and nothing beats sharing a webpage with step-by-step screenshots. Later I found Dropbox to be a great medium so I integrated with that.
Whilst reading long articles, I'd want to select some text, mark it out and jump back between them easily.
Whilst these are not runway successes with millions of dollars of profit, it certainly helps you build up the stamina to successfully ship and launch projects.
I believe that this sort of sentiment is a symptom of not having answered for yourself the question: "what makes a good life good". spking is likely operating on a temporary definition imparted by his upbringing that goes something like this:
"a good life is a life which, when seen from afar, appears to include a string
of successful and well-respected achievements, each one better than the last".
This perspective is, according to some of my friends from other continents, very "American".
An alternative definition that is more conducive to well-being and productivity is one in which your subjective experience of life is considered more important than your life as seen and judged from afar (i.e. by others). To build such a definition, you must first analyze and become aware of how most decisions that you make are made with respect to how they are perceived from afar. Once you see this, you must realize that you are simply mistaken in privileging this perspective. How other people (and systems) judge what you do should only be of consequence to you to the extent that it impacts your life concretely. These judgements have no intrinsic meaning. For instance, spking's post is lamenting a self-inflicted anxiety about how his life appears from an external perspective. He does not mention how his failure concretely impacts his life, only how it impacts his feelings (which are based on his unconsidered and ultimately mislead beliefs).
Following the recognition of this, you can then begin to make sense of the question: "what makes a good life good?" A good life is not a life that appears good, it is a life that, to you, feels good (i.e., you may remark "life is good"). So, to answer this question, you can begin by finding out what activities, situations and dispositions lead you to this sort of feeling (i.e. things you enjoy). You can then re-structure your life so as to maximize these things (rather than structuring it around only externally visible achievements).
(A quick hint: more than 50% of these things have to do with your past, your friends, your family, significant others, significant locations, food, music, art, etc. You have a career and you do projects in large part to support these things. Taking a vacation and doing psychedelic drugs are two great ways to remind yourself of this.)
That said, spking's projects are failing for a simple reason. What he truly desires is not for his projects to succeed, but to connect with people through his projects. The solution to this problem is to first focus on making a connection as soon as possible. A successful idea is one which takes a life of its own before you get bored of it. In the case of websites, people must begin using your project before you feel the desire to give up. Given this insight, it is best to start with a simple idea that can be deployed in a useful form quickly. Once a platform has been established – ideally with money coming in – more complex projects can be executed within that framework (if you're lucky, with the help of friends and investors)!
I'm happy that you said this so eloquently. Accomplishment and fulfillment are not the same. I had a little draft of a response (which I won't post, because you cover everything better) and it included Van Gogh's last words, "The sadness will last forever". Clearly this great artist was not fulfilled, sadly.
I also wanted to add that the impulse to create 'amazing art' perplexes me. The best anyone can do is to create art. 'Amazing' pertains to peoples' perception of the art. There is a short but very good part of Vonnegut's Timequake where he discusses this with his brother Bernard that may be relevant (http://books.google.com/books?id=cr93q_HVXb0C&pg=PA165#v... - chapter 43, though pg 166 is unfortunately not available. "I like what Mozart did, and I hate what the bucket did")
Marriage. Heh. It has the potential to seriously screw up your life, or be great. I can't advise entering into it on the basis of "I've put it off long enough."
I turn 29 in a few weeks. When I turned 27 I wrote a post similar to yours http://oonwoye.com/2010/01/12/a-birthday-rant-why-i-feel-too.... I planned to go full throttle with my startup that year. However, some circumstances made me leave the startup. I am just getting back on track.
Here is what has made me move so fast and stay focused in the past 2 months. I struck myself a deal. If I do not launch anything, I will not blog, Tweet or Facebook. Things I loved doing but gave me room for distraction. I suggest you do same.
Next year is my last year at doing something great "in my twenties" it is so symbolic for me. So I hope that my efforts will pay off this coming year.
I leave you with this quote.
"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is NOW"
Luckily, business isn't a field where only the young make an impact: Colonel Sanders started KFC at 65, Henry Ford started Ford Motor Company at 34...most entrepreneurs aren't 25.
Also, consider architecture: most architects don't hit their prime until 50. But yeah, life is short, so don't waste too much time.
I'm turning 32 in March and I gotta say it's been all uphill the last 2 years. Trust me it really means nothing, don't let a number scare you.
When I was in my late teens/20s I was way into the electronica act Underworld. I remember reading how their 20s/30s were spent doing a failed synth pop act (Fruer I think the name was). I son't think they wrote that classic Trainspoyting track "Born Slippy") until they were in their 40s. Maybe it sounds silly but that always stuck with me. I think the current tech startup scene puts an emphasis on youth that is turning into vanity a little. Don't let it get you down.. negative thoughts and fear are infinitely more crippling than any birthday. Keep it up and focus!
>>Today I need to get serious. No, drastic. Like a heroin addict going to rehab. This is my intervention. No more new ideas, no more domain names, no more client work, no more hypotheticals, no more I’ll do it tomorrow, no more wasted time. ”By the way, what have you ever done that’s so great?” I’ll have to get back to you.
<<
You can still have lots of new ideas but no matter how many ideas you have you should have one and only one project that you are committed to at a time and make sure you finish it no matter how long it takes.
One must realize that most ideas have a very similar chance of succeeding (slim to none) no matter how great they may seem at first and that one of the best ways to increase the chances for an idea to succeed is to commit to it.
Meanwhile, while you are working on your main idea you will probably realize that a lot of the pieces you are building (at least in software) you will be able to re-use for some of your other ideas.
Frank Herbert was born in 1920. It took him five years to research and write his second published novel; it was first published as a serial in 1963.
That book was called "Dune".
You do the math.
----
When I was 25 I moved out to California to attend animation school. When I was 30 I'd been a part of the first wave of dotcom boom funded Internet cartoons, watched some of my colleagues go in to TV work, and burnt out. When I was 36 I drew a Tarot deck[1]. The year I hit 40, it got published internationally. I think it's adequate. Some people react to it a lot more strongly than that.
Success at 25 is the exception, not the rule. Very few people are that driven. Many more labor under others for a time, slowly honing their craft until they make something amazing. Learning to identify the ideas worth focusing on for a whole year is an important, subtle skill.
[+] [-] huxley|14 years ago|reply
I find encouragement in the quote by the painter of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa", Katsushika Hokusai:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai
"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life.
I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention.
At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow.
If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.
At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.
May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."
[+] [-] nostromo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intenex|14 years ago|reply
Which is exactly the reason we're so rushed ;).
[+] [-] city41|14 years ago|reply
Most people don't create much of anything. At least, anything they could have a major break through on. Most people have day jobs and will always have day jobs. Most people come home from work and watch TV.
It takes serious discipline to take an idea through to success. If I had to guess, discipline is a very important trait for startup success. Maybe you'll never be that disciplined, or maybe it's something you can work on. I can say for sure I am much more disciplined now (at the ripe age of 34) than in my 20s. Yet I still question if I have what it takes to truly do a startup.
To the OP: I think you should just relax and enjoy yourself, let nature take over. Not every idea has to be worth a million dollars. My current project and the one just before it basically have no chance of ever making me any money. I did them because I enjoyed them. I think that is more important and more likely to lead you in a direction you want to go.
[+] [-] andrewflnr|14 years ago|reply
I too feel the call of new ideas all the time, and have the same lack of discipline. I've brought precious few of my ideas to state that could possibly be called "done", and none to the glorious state I had imagined. I'm not even talking about making money, just making good stuff for people to enjoy. Perhaps the biggest difference between me and the author is that I'm still only 20 and still in school. To accomplish half the things I want to before I die, I'll have to grow a ton more self-discipline, and sometimes I wonder if I can do it.
To tell me and people like me "relax, other people are lazy too" is not that helpful. It's true, "most people" never fully realize their potential. They have all kinds of bad habits and issues. When have other people's mistakes been an excuse for mine?
[+] [-] jaggederest|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhashem|14 years ago|reply
It's a vicious cycle. I get the idea. I register the domain name, already imagining a brilliant fully-featured yet astonishingly-easy-to-use product. I start cranking out code. But it takes some time. I realized some problems I thought were easy are harder. That takes more time. I realize a certain problem is exceptionally hard and will take me longer than I thought, so I hack together something that works for now. I realize yet another problem will take me longer than I thought, and a few weeks pass and I begin to feel my web application is just a series of hacks. If we're using the art analogy, rather than the beautiful and crisp design I envisioned, my canvas is filled with ugly smears and smudges that doesn't look anything like what's in my mind.
And it's always a lot easier to just throw out the canvas and start something new, than to tediously work out improving those smears and smudges.
So, perhaps one hopeful anecdote I can share: earlier this year I did start a project that I've finally been able to focus on. The only difference with this one vs. the others is that I saw a tangible return relatively early on. Two months after I worked on it, I made $72. That's basically a laughable number, except it's the first tangible return on the dozens of web applications I've started and abandoned for the past 5 years. From then on, there's been a mostly-positive correlation between "hours put into project" and "dollars earned," which has completely shifted my mentality.
I've begun to take pride in those smears and smudges, knowing I'm already succeeding to some degree and it could be especially rewarding if I continue. I have no idea if this would work for you, or anyone else, but like others have said, this is a process. Everyone designs and creates at their own pace, and age seemed pretty meaningless to me. In fact it's now that I'm older, instead of 5 years ago, that I can begin to appreciate my limitations and have the patience to work with them, instead of ignoring the fact that they exist.
And above all, be proud that in a world where many are content to maintain and manage (literally and figuratively), you have the desire and the ability to create and produce. Best of luck.
[+] [-] chops|14 years ago|reply
This is healthy, it helps to weed out the bad ideas, or at least the ideas that might be promising but for which you don't actually have the passion for bringing to fruition, let alone maintaining for years should it actually gain a little bit of traction.
The projects of mine that have stuck around despite my rather fickle nature are the ones that really hit close to home -- projects for which I clearly have a need and even more, a passion to keep alive. My current project, BracketPal[1], is such a project. I'm a pretty hardcore beach volleyball player, and after playing in many volleyball leagues, both bar/casual and competitive leagues, I've found the average quality of league websites to be offensively dismal. So it started as a nugget of "I need to make this, because I just can't handle getting my schedule emailed to me in a spreadsheet anymore", to my first paying customers' leagues starting up their indoor volleyball and kickball leagues this coming January.
Before that, in 2005 I was obsessed with running my World of Warcraft guild to an unhealthy degree, and so I started up and launched my guild hosting system in 2006 and it's still around.
In both cases, I would not have managed to create a quality product if I didn't have a passion, nay, obsession about these particular fields.
So I strongly believe that it's a good thing to cook up a bunch of half-baked ideas. If you lose interest in them before launching, great, you've found a project you shouldn't be doing anyway, it's time to move onto another project - one you might have a bit more serious passion for.
In your case, it's absolutely great getting that first payment, that first evidence that what you've created is being used and appreciated by people, even if it iss only $72. It all starts with those first few dollars. And once you've made something that you're receiving praise and money from your customers, it becomes a highly addictive drug, except that getting your "fix" requires you improving your software and keeping your customers happy.
[1] BracketPal is my sports league management system and I'm crazy excited about it! You can find it shamelessly linked right here: http://www.bracketpal.com
[+] [-] joshu|14 years ago|reply
Keep doing things. Be lazy. Try to do less. Figure out how you can reduce and write less code. Ask yourself again and again "Do I REALLY need this part?"
Your process sounds a lot like mine, honestly. Keep going, it works.
[+] [-] electromagnetic|14 years ago|reply
If you have a great idea the early adopters will recognize that. The general public won't. However those early adopters might give you enough money to keep developing so that 5 years from now the general public might be paying too.
[+] [-] billpatrianakos|14 years ago|reply
I'll give you an example. I've had this VPS over at Webbynode for months now just sitting there. It was originally going to be one app but now I just set it up as another last night. (writeapp.me in case you're curious). So I set up my LAMP stack, uploaded whatever part of the app I had to far (which isn't much) and proceeded to install a mail server. Well it went well except I screwed something up and I can't access the web interface for it. That one little thing, not having my mail server work perfectly made me think about starting over with a fresh Ubuntu install. Crazy! I think your idea of what it will become when it's finished has a lot to do with this stuff.
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|14 years ago|reply
I could have written this, except that I can already see 30 a ways back there in the rear view mirror.
I have just two things that I think are very important to say about this.
1) Don't worry about the fact that you're 30. That line about artists in their 30s or 40s is BS. There is no magical age at which you have to have produced your magnum opus. Never let the desire to "do something great" prevent you from doing the work. In fact, that's most likely what is keeping you FROM doing your great work. As someone who suffers from the same "idea addiction," I can say that one of the reasons people like us always chase new ideas is that we are trying to have our great moment, and are always afraid that if we buckle down and commit to one of our ideas, it might not be that Great Work, and we'll end up missing the next great idea when it comes along. So, we are always looking for the Best Possible Thing, and we don't get down to the work that really has to happen.
2) Even superstars have to do the dishes. We hear so much about the famous artists, businessmen, inventors, musicians, whatever, but all we hear about are their glories. It's boring to talk about all the days of the long grind, just plugging away to make the donuts. For every eureka moment, there are hundreds of hours of everyday work. I'm 40 years old, and I've produced, in my estimation, one "amazing art." It's a magazine I started and ran for eight years. In retrospect, I feel like it was a non-stop party, but if I really think about it, the only reason it succeeded was that I had no choice but to slug it out and put in the 90-hour weeks of boring copy editing, ad sales, bookkeeping, etc. It's because at the time, it was the ONLY IDEA I HAD. Now that I have dozens of ideas at any given time, ironically, I get none of them done. Don't try to create a Great Work. Pick something you enjoy and have fun making, and just make the hell out of it. If you're lucky, it might even be "amazing art."
[+] [-] softbuilder|14 years ago|reply
For whatever reason (base 10 maybe?) we latch on to 30 as the time by which we should have some proof that we are on the right track. You can always beat yourself up at any age by comparing yourself to others. If you're in college, look at a Galois or a Joan of Arc and you're already a complete failure.
[+] [-] polyfractal|14 years ago|reply
After that, thirties hits and you can't say that you're fresh out of college, or just graduated a few years ago. I think you start to look back and want some validation for the way your life is going.
[+] [-] richardkmichael|14 years ago|reply
I'm also over 30 and am still motivated to try and learn to do lots of new things well. I expect this to last my entire life, I'm just too curious to stop. Needing to reassure myself it's not "too late" is a sad consequence of the group-think you're describing.
[+] [-] gnaritas|14 years ago|reply
Must be, because I've never heard of it, nor did I experience it; I don't expect 40 will be any different.
[+] [-] kahawe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] presidentx|14 years ago|reply
Again, excellent point.
[+] [-] sporkologist|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Breefield|14 years ago|reply
I just spent the last 3 months away from the internet, and it was ridiculously mind-clearing. Burning Man turned into chasing a girl around the West Coast, turned into coming back to NYC and quitting my job so I can do more of what I want.
I still haven't really gotten back into Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook like I was before I left.
I'm not sure how I feel that mental clarity and this 'new idea ADD' are related. But I definitely feel more centered now. Reflection is key, and you're doing that. I think that's the first step toward doing what you want to do.
[edit] I think what I'm trying to say is, eliminate distractions, reflect, and follow your gut.
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|14 years ago|reply
The cool thing about being 19 is you could fuck up totally for, like, five years and still be young enough to start completely over.
Bravo on learning to focus, bravo on chasing a girl around the West Coast, and bravo on following your gut.
Keep it up, the 40-year-old you will thank 19-year-old you for it one day.
[+] [-] zobzu|14 years ago|reply
Self reflection, criticism, and being able to detach yourself from things that control our though and behavior.
[+] [-] bpm140|14 years ago|reply
It's a marathon, not a sprint. You never know what's coming up just over the next hill.
[+] [-] poundy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diego|14 years ago|reply
I'm 42 and I'm as productive as I've ever been.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ibisum|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] peteforde|14 years ago|reply
It's true that ideas are worthless without execution, but I get bent out of shape every time someone spouts this mantra because it's only half of the story. A bad idea well executed is still a bad idea. You can waste a huge amount of time, money and energy throwing your passion into a bad idea.
Some of the most toxic advice is that you should just "pick one or two of your ideas and turn the volume up to 11 on them for a few years, no matter what!" aka "just start, you can always pivot". That's totally bullshit in the real world. Reputations get tarnished, and every opportunity you take costs all of the other opportunities you didn't take.
Now, that also doesn't mean that you should curl up in the fetal position and hope the world stops asking hard questions. It's possible that one of your ideas is the next Facebook, but the realistic truth is that statistically you will never dream up the next Facebook.
And that's okay. In fact, it's great. You can start forgiving yourself now.
My feeling is that it's perfectly fine to be addicted to having ideas and suppressing your excitement long enough to analyze the ideas for flaws. This isn't time wasted not executing, it's time invested in two valuable activities: practising the skill of spotting deadly flaws and rolling the dice on another idea. This is a much more pragmatic opportunity cost than believing that the world is counting on you to deliver the next major cultural wave, and soon.
Let's say that you realize none of your ideas (so far) are the next WWW or automobile. Nobody is going to be disappointed in you for teaming up with another person to build their idea. Insisting on building your own idea to feel validated is like refusing to adopt kids with a different skin color — it doesn't hold up to unbiased scrutiny. So my advice is that you should stop beating yourself up and be open to opportunities that originate amongst your self-selected, startup-inclined friends.
[+] [-] mathgladiator|14 years ago|reply
Now, I look back at all the crap I've made, and I look forward to the things I'm going to make. The things I make each year get better. They get faster, more scalable, better, more beautiful.
The key (I hope) is that no matter what, you don't give up on what you want to do. As I age, I'm getting more comfortable with that.
[+] [-] bch|14 years ago|reply
* 8 years experience designing and producing a game engine, accruing knowledge of dos/donts
> {homeless for a year...}
* Practical experience living/working with extreme resource constraints
> {Developed startup, quit}
* Have produced profitable ventures from nothing -> profit, and in the process realized what really motivates me.
Please don't sell yourself short (not just @mathgladiator, but anybody reading this). The expression "It's the journey, not the destination" can be applicable to both the past and the future.
Keep on keepin' on.
[+] [-] reledi|14 years ago|reply
How'd you manage to do that?
[+] [-] freshlog|14 years ago|reply
Whilst it's exciting to come up with novel ideas, nothing's more spurring than fixing and making your own life better.
To illustrate, here are some projects that I've embarked on, which scratched a personal pain point and went on to be incidentally well liked by others enough to even pay for:
http://freshlog.com
I had to submit bug reports with attached screenshots in Basecamp (later Pivotal Tracker and Fogbugz), which involves many steps, so I made this.
http://screendocs.com
Customers were frequently asking how to do something and nothing beats sharing a webpage with step-by-step screenshots. Later I found Dropbox to be a great medium so I integrated with that.
http://handpick.me
I felt that Facebook was a little too noisy and public to share personal links with my family and friends, so I made this.
http://letsrecap.com
Whilst reading long articles, I'd want to select some text, mark it out and jump back between them easily.
Whilst these are not runway successes with millions of dollars of profit, it certainly helps you build up the stamina to successfully ship and launch projects.
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|14 years ago|reply
You made my fiancee squeal with joy.
[+] [-] msutherl|14 years ago|reply
An alternative definition that is more conducive to well-being and productivity is one in which your subjective experience of life is considered more important than your life as seen and judged from afar (i.e. by others). To build such a definition, you must first analyze and become aware of how most decisions that you make are made with respect to how they are perceived from afar. Once you see this, you must realize that you are simply mistaken in privileging this perspective. How other people (and systems) judge what you do should only be of consequence to you to the extent that it impacts your life concretely. These judgements have no intrinsic meaning. For instance, spking's post is lamenting a self-inflicted anxiety about how his life appears from an external perspective. He does not mention how his failure concretely impacts his life, only how it impacts his feelings (which are based on his unconsidered and ultimately mislead beliefs).
Following the recognition of this, you can then begin to make sense of the question: "what makes a good life good?" A good life is not a life that appears good, it is a life that, to you, feels good (i.e., you may remark "life is good"). So, to answer this question, you can begin by finding out what activities, situations and dispositions lead you to this sort of feeling (i.e. things you enjoy). You can then re-structure your life so as to maximize these things (rather than structuring it around only externally visible achievements).
(A quick hint: more than 50% of these things have to do with your past, your friends, your family, significant others, significant locations, food, music, art, etc. You have a career and you do projects in large part to support these things. Taking a vacation and doing psychedelic drugs are two great ways to remind yourself of this.)
That said, spking's projects are failing for a simple reason. What he truly desires is not for his projects to succeed, but to connect with people through his projects. The solution to this problem is to first focus on making a connection as soon as possible. A successful idea is one which takes a life of its own before you get bored of it. In the case of websites, people must begin using your project before you feel the desire to give up. Given this insight, it is best to start with a simple idea that can be deployed in a useful form quickly. Once a platform has been established – ideally with money coming in – more complex projects can be executed within that framework (if you're lucky, with the help of friends and investors)!
[+] [-] 3am|14 years ago|reply
I also wanted to add that the impulse to create 'amazing art' perplexes me. The best anyone can do is to create art. 'Amazing' pertains to peoples' perception of the art. There is a short but very good part of Vonnegut's Timequake where he discusses this with his brother Bernard that may be relevant (http://books.google.com/books?id=cr93q_HVXb0C&pg=PA165#v... - chapter 43, though pg 166 is unfortunately not available. "I like what Mozart did, and I hate what the bucket did")
[+] [-] cousin_it|14 years ago|reply
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...
It's probably not a very good idea to always put experienced happiness above remembered happiness, though.
[+] [-] spenen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctdonath|14 years ago|reply
Comes down to one thing: PICK SOMETHING AND DO IT.
And don't put off marriage.
[+] [-] ams6110|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidhansen|14 years ago|reply
Why not? Elucidation on this point would be appreciated.
[+] [-] philjackson|14 years ago|reply
edit: I'm being voted down? I was dead serious, a co-founder could help keep him on track, as could he them.
[+] [-] mechanical_fish|14 years ago|reply
But that judgement is unfair, because one of the characteristics of a truism is that it's often true.
[+] [-] blhack|14 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4
You haven't been failing, you've been dancing. This is the point. Enjoy it and stop waiting for the payoff.
[+] [-] OoTheNigerian|14 years ago|reply
Here is what has made me move so fast and stay focused in the past 2 months. I struck myself a deal. If I do not launch anything, I will not blog, Tweet or Facebook. Things I loved doing but gave me room for distraction. I suggest you do same.
Next year is my last year at doing something great "in my twenties" it is so symbolic for me. So I hope that my efforts will pay off this coming year.
I leave you with this quote.
"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is NOW"
[+] [-] keiferski|14 years ago|reply
Also, consider architecture: most architects don't hit their prime until 50. But yeah, life is short, so don't waste too much time.
[+] [-] ams6110|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbattaglia|14 years ago|reply
When I was in my late teens/20s I was way into the electronica act Underworld. I remember reading how their 20s/30s were spent doing a failed synth pop act (Fruer I think the name was). I son't think they wrote that classic Trainspoyting track "Born Slippy") until they were in their 40s. Maybe it sounds silly but that always stuck with me. I think the current tech startup scene puts an emphasis on youth that is turning into vanity a little. Don't let it get you down.. negative thoughts and fear are infinitely more crippling than any birthday. Keep it up and focus!
[+] [-] felipemnoa|14 years ago|reply
You can still have lots of new ideas but no matter how many ideas you have you should have one and only one project that you are committed to at a time and make sure you finish it no matter how long it takes.
One must realize that most ideas have a very similar chance of succeeding (slim to none) no matter how great they may seem at first and that one of the best ways to increase the chances for an idea to succeed is to commit to it.
Meanwhile, while you are working on your main idea you will probably realize that a lot of the pieces you are building (at least in software) you will be able to re-use for some of your other ideas.
[+] [-] egypturnash|14 years ago|reply
That book was called "Dune".
You do the math.
----
When I was 25 I moved out to California to attend animation school. When I was 30 I'd been a part of the first wave of dotcom boom funded Internet cartoons, watched some of my colleagues go in to TV work, and burnt out. When I was 36 I drew a Tarot deck[1]. The year I hit 40, it got published internationally. I think it's adequate. Some people react to it a lot more strongly than that.
Success at 25 is the exception, not the rule. Very few people are that driven. Many more labor under others for a time, slowly honing their craft until they make something amazing. Learning to identify the ideas worth focusing on for a whole year is an important, subtle skill.
[1] http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/