"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."
For the record he did live to 88, which is a bit more than double my age (almost triple the original poster's age).
I don't think he believed he would live to 150, but saying that expressed his feeling of something that was beyond his reach but which animated every moment of his life and his art.
What I take from the quote is that existence shouldn't be a bell curve, with half or more of your life as an inevitable decline, but that your youth can be a foundation upon which to build knowledge and wisdom. You should end up smarter after many years, shouldn't you?
To be able to look back and smile at one's bravado, knowing that you can do so much more now, with less effort and rush, and that if you continue striving, you'll do even more in the future. To deeply and truly understand your craft.
That's what I'd want, a real life worth living, not to be the tech equivalent of a child star.
If you find that you are declining mentally after 30 or 40, you are either doing something wrong or are genetically extremely unlucky.
Exercise, a good diet, proper sleep, combined with plenty of intellectual and social interactions seem to be enough to keep you from measurably losing any mental faculties well into your 70s or 80s (and even 90+ if genetically lucky).
It actually is inevitable, as even you admit when we begin to reach our 70s/80s ;). If we don't die of something else, all of us will die of Alzheimer's. Simple fact of universal amyloid plaque buildup. http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...
Also technically incorrect on the mental decline as well - our brains do start to irrevocably decline at around age 30. Our myelin sheaths fully develop in the early 20s, and from there, we have a few golden years until it's all downhill :D http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090320092111.ht...
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 think the point is more like, "Don't worry so much, you're not the only fool on HN who hasn't yet mustered a billion-dollar exit".
In a community with a notable amount of awesome people, sometimes it starts to feel like everyone else is experiencing nothing but resounding success, which makes your modest successes feel like abject failures. This can be... demoralizing. Remembering the wild successes are the exception, not the rule, is an important piece of perspective.
> I feel I should have accomplished more by now, I could have.
Perhaps the I could have is the little lie we tell ourselves to soften the blow to our ego. Something to think about.
The problem with living inside your own head is that unlike everyone else, you judge yourself by what you think you could be rather than what you are. It's a sort of self deception at play.
> The problem with living inside your own head is that unlike everyone else, you judge yourself by what you think you could be rather than what you are. It's a sort of self deception at play.
I really like what you said here. When I think about my more "well-adjusted" friends, I see that they have a solid set of criteria to compare their achievements against: a decent job, an apartment, having friends. It amounts to a basic societal checklist that they can succeed against.
Living in your own head is like extending the goal every time you reach it. It's like having a carrot attached to a stick that moves with you.
I have this conversation with my wife occasionally.
Those moving goalposts are the difference between 'doing ok' and 'making progress'.
I had a solid job, benefits, place of my own to live, friends, and a spouse at 25. I went stir-crazy though - at that point, you've 'succeeded', what is left to do? What's next?
To muddy the metaphor a little - once you've mastered the 30yard field goal, why keep kicking it? Back up and try the 40, 50, etc. That said, I do think it's important to remember that you have mastered the 30, and that failure at the 80 isn't 'failure' in anybody but your own eyes.
The 'blow to our ego' here is the realization that maybe you're not as awesome as you think that you are, and all of the "I could haves" are really lies, because you couldn't have. At least that's my interpretation of that comment.
I don't know. The idea that you had the skill to do something amazing, but not the discipline to follow through seems to imply that you couldn't do it.
For example, say you see discipline and skill as the two ingredients need to do something amazing. It's easy to say "I had the skill, but not the discipline, I could have done it." But is that really any different than saying, "I had the discipline, but not the skill, I could have done it." Discipline is probably just as difficult as the raw development skills to master, yet it's really easy to convince ourselves that it's just a matter of 'doing it.'
Maybe it's more that I could have gained the skill if I'd worked harder. I fully realize that discipline is harder than raw development skills to learn, and that it's the critical ingredient in any major venture. I understand that, but when I have to really work to finish something I tend to fall down. Which is why it makes me feel horrible.
I'm not saying "relax, other people are lazy too". That's the other extreme.
Not all of us are Jeff Bezos or John Carmack. But we're not all Homer Simpsons either. There's a healthy, realistic middle ground in there somewhere.
If you feel you are a Bezos, then by all means go for it. I'm sure many on HN feel they are that and many are probably correct, too. But I'm also not sure it's healthy to cut ourselves down and hate on ourselves because we might not be living up to an unrealistic standard.
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.
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.
I think what's missing (for many of the people with trails of broken dreams, including me) is the ability to rally support for what you're doing. The best test of a good idea is whether others rally behind it. It's a crucial skill for makers.
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.
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
BracketPal is awesome! I'm so glad you made that! That's inspiring to see people scratch their own itch this way. There's a lot of itch scratching that's geared more towards businesses and other stuff that is definitely a niche but yours is in an area where I haven't seen anyone go. It's cool to know that your tiny little project which you may think is insignificant and probably won't get covered by TechCrunch or anyone is still useful enough to people that they'd pay. That gives me hope. Good for you, man.
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.
> I guess by definition this whole forum is 1st world problems
Maybe I am misreading this. But I am not sure why you think so. A lot of what goes by "hacking" is common to the first and third worlds. Often it is even more effective in a third world country where a little bit of appropriate technology can have a serious impact on the lives of a lot of people.
OP was whining that he was turning 30 and hadn't had his great artistic breakthrough yet. I was trying to make the comparison that that isn't really a problem compared to mass starvation, refugee camps, etc. In other words, he sees a problem when the solution is, find what you love to do, etc. He's got the tools to do it but just hasn't found a goal yet. Not that there aren't problems discussed here (ycombinator news) that have good tech solutions, like mosquito netting, solar power, water filtration, etc... My point is, his problem is very specifically a 1st world problem.
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.
I was a GTA, and I lived in one of the small compute labs at k-state. Sometimes in my car. Sometimes, I'd go out to fields (deer can be pricks btw) and just sleep under the stars. Or, I'd go up the roof (usually locked, but not always).
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 would interpret it as "don't put your life on hold". Life is all relative, so when you compare stuff, you compare it to what you know. Getting married and having my daughter (currently 1yr) has given me something amazing to compare everything else I do to.
So, I'm still just as hungry to create "the next big thing" but if it doesn't happen, fine, I already got the top prize.
I guess the irony is that my pursuit of "the next big thing" is so that one day I can spend more time with my wife and daughter, but actually it's currently having the exact opposite effect...
Because life is finite and relentless. Because it's better to take opportunity before it's gone forever. Because some things take two, and if you don't go all in in time the other will move on, n'er to return. Because better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Because procreation is awesome. Because not procreating, ever, is (for most) an emotional black hole. Because your business doesn't give a damn about you, but your spouse always will.
Because my daughter lying in front of me pestering me to play a game is the best thing ever, better than any technological or business success - and I'd best get to playing that game now.
And (game now over) because, when she's just 3 months old, having a doctor wonder why you're still alive and whether you will be a week hence, the indescribable melancholy will be about her and her mother, not about whether a project was finished.
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.
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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.
I dont know how much this applies to the author but I often feel like it hits home for me:
“Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.”
-Henry Wadsworth
By that, I dont mean that you should have no ambitions, just dont get troubled by it. What I mean is, dont postpone your today's work for what you may want to work on tomorrow. Finish the small things before dreaming of the next big thing. Small things like your current job, your social obligations, your relaxation time and the time to hone your skills.
Manage your time better, every minute you can spare, invest it in your future. You won't have to go looking for inspiration, mundane things can be a great catalyst for radical/new ideas. You'll have your moment, just gain enough discipline and build a secure nest egg; so when your moment comes, you'll be prepared to take the leap.
Van Gogh was 30 when he wrote that in a letter to Theo. That was two years before he painted his first major painting and several more before he did anything most of us would recognize as van Gogh.
I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm — but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.
Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, You can't do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, "defiles" — they say.
And some more:
What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.
And here is something that speaks to the struggle of the OP:
There is a great difference between one idler and another idler. There is someone who is an idler out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be a quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like you may take me for one of those.
Carl Friedrich Gauss and Richard Feynman both did great stuff until they were old. I knew from an early age that I would probably not even know what would be my career until I was at least 40, and learned the basics of art, math, computers, and music from about 10 to the present day, to be prepared (didn't know what for exactly). So now I'm 47 and making sax mouthpieces (I'm in the very center of my target market). I'm not sure what my point is with all this, but I guess what I'm saying is, just try a lot of stuff and eventually you will find that there is a demand for what you love to do. And make sure you maintain food and shelter.
For your next idea, follow the lean startup principle. It not only works in terms of results, but it works from a morale point of view. When you got people telling you they can't wait for the app to be released, it gives you motivation to push forward. It's an antidote against self doubt, and wondering whether you're just crazy. Start a mailing list, and immediately get email addresses of people who want to hear when the app will be released. Hire a designer, and have him/her design the homepage so you got something impressive to look at. Something you can point at and say.. "This is what my idea is gonna look like".
My Father didn't get his degree until he was thirty. That was over 20 years ago.
Today he gets an invitation to travel overseas every two weeks to help teachers teach English. He educates, runs a multi-million dollar business, has 3 successful children and 2 healthy grand children.
You have a lot more to look forward to. Enjoy the first day of the rest of your life.
I got married at 21, had my first child (of 4) at 21, and had the idea for Stormpulse at 23. I've now worked on it for 7 years and turned 30 last month. I feel like I've accomplished a lot in terms of having a very full home life and a very interesting project, but I still feel a lack in terms of having things "solved"--Stormpulse is just now finding its legs and I'm nowhere near being the father or husband I hope to become. I think I assumed I'd have these things more figured out by now, so I can relate. But I remain confident that each year holds better things than the last.
" I read stuff like “it’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing” from Steve Jobs, and it has the uncomfortable effect of simultaneously depressing me and jolting me with a sense of panic."
Most nobel prize winners, even in theoretical physics, do their nobel-winning work after 40[1] So don't worry about that.
Also: focus on doing what you love, not doing great things. Trying to do things just because everyone else thinks they're great just makes you a real-life karma whore.
You don't need to do something unbelievable to be great. Don't let yourself get into this mindset that you need to keep up with the Joneses. Do something that makes you happy, that is the real measure of success.
The reality is that no matter what you do, even if you do it great there will always be someone better. So you have to do something because you get enjoyment out of it not because your peers approve or because it might garner some praise for a few minutes.
You're young. Yes you are. 30 is a great place to be and for most people the real beginning of their careers.
If you have your heart set on building something cool/useful/etc then you just need to focus (don't beat yourself up), just focus. Look at the list of things you have and pick 1. Don't do any other projects (other than work of course) until you finish. You'll find that in a year from now you'll have plenty to be proud of and that's not bad for a 31 year old.
1. Instead of focusing on the idea, focus on the execution.
2. Pick a niche that has a relatively easy entry, and create something better and/or cheaper. Perfect your execution so that your product becomes the obvious choice in the market.
3. Get into an already proven market instead of trying to prove your idea and chase it.
4. Don't expect you'll be alone in any market, you always have competitors. Wherever there is money, there is a competitor.
5. Stay away from highly competitive markets.
6. Whatever you choose, make sure to answer these questions first: "Who's my audience?", and more importantly "How can I reach them". Because whatever you create, if it's hard to reach your audience then your audience won't know about you. Personally, I'd pick a market where I can reach its audience via online advertising, this way my success is not dependent on the media talking about my product and spreading the word.
7. Stay away from ideas/markets that requires virility. Those markets are very difficult to enter.
Maybe it's all true, but there are many ways to look at things in life, and I think the OA is just being too hard on himself.
Look around. Most people never create much of anything. It's easy to focus on "great art" that the Internet shoves in front of us and be demoralized. Our brains just aren't designed for the kind of sensory overload that we experience today, and even the greatest artist would feel belittled by the scope of what is at our fingertips today.
But if your goal is to create great art, then first you must dedicate yourself to just creating art. It doesn't matter if these attempts are abortive, so long as you keep doing it. Just keep honing your craft. This is the only hope of ever creating anything great. It's not a guarantee, but if you give it your all then you should be proud. Reflecting honestly on the past is useful for course correction, but beating yourself up never helps.
That's 99.99999% of the world too. It's okay. Create. Create. Create. Paint for the love of painting. An artist creates art for art's sake. Keep creating and FINISHING.
The second is nonsense as there is no set point where anyone should 'be' in life. Some contribute early, some late, some after they are dead!
The first is a real problem, one I've struggled with. The way I've attempted to overcome it is, when I got my next idea I wanted to try out I told myself the goal wasn't to be successful, rather it was to finish. I wanted to see something done and launched no matter how terrible I felt it was.
I found that overcoming the initial abandonment period required two things
1 a partner
2 skin in the game
With your next great idea, I'd advise you prioritize finishing it and invest in the above two points to get you there.
I used to have this affliction, but it's reasonably easy to overcome once you realize that you've got it. You just have to pick an idea and not shift attention to anything else until you've followed it through to some kind of conclusion.
Stop trying to force yourself to come up with ideas and just live your life. Nothing in life is so serious that you should be sweating yourself over it, save maybe an incurable disease (which you can't cure so again, don't sweat it).
The sad thing is, you tell someone "Someday you're going to suddenly wake up and realize that 10 years of your life has gone by and you've not done anything you wanted to do." And at the front side of those 10 years its really hard for them to hear, at the back side its catastrophically depressing for some.
It is the essence of the mantra "You are going to be dead a year from now, so put your affairs in order." kind of motivation that folks use to force them to finish things they start. Life is the journey, at some unpredictable time the journey stops.
at least for me, an idea dies quicker when i never tell anyone about it. if i show a working example to someone or even just talk about the idea, there's a sense of wanting to complete it just to show that person even if he or she never asks me about it again. if i keep ideas to myself and they stall out halfway through, i won't look like i never finished them because nobody knew i started. i realized this years ago and is unfortunately why i rarely tell people about my ideas now until i at least have something to show.
there are a lot of "show hn" posts on the /newest page that never even get an upvote and then roll off the page without any discussion. even if they make the front page, they stick around for a day and then we never hear about them again.
maybe if there were a dedicated place to post those early-stage ideas, whether they are just paragraphs explaining the ideas or links to fully-functioning websites, and they were visible for longer than a day, it would provide motivation for others to complete their projects. like forrst.com but less focused on design projects. perhaps this would be better suited as a forum, where one can maintain one long-running thread per idea and update it over time, allowing others to give feedback on it. i've seen this on car forums where someone will have a thread spanning over a year, updating it every week as they build a new car or something. the navigation would need some improvement over a standard forum, but it could work.
1. You finished this blog post, so you know how to finish things.
2. Turn off all mindless distractions for a month or more (fb, twitter, forums, even hn) so you can figure out something important that you can focus on. You've read enough and don't need to keep reading more motivational material.
3. Start a small project and finish it. This would help you to convince yourself that you can complete shit.
4. Use that feedback loop to continue building bigger projects.
5. Life IS really that short so learn to live in the moment (I've been there but am getting a bit better with this).
This reminds me of that article by Malcolm Gladwell about Cézanne and Picasso. Picasso is depicted as the visionary who revolutionizes artistic expression in his teens and Cézanne is a painter who struggles his entire life and doesn't achieve a breakthrough until he is much older. It might provide context to a discussion like this:
Yet, I wonder if achievement is evenly distributed across the range of all ages, and what is not evenly distributed are mentions of the achiever's age when mentioning her or his achievement. If artist A revolutionizes the art world at the age of 23 and artist B does so at the age of 60, would it not be more likely to see when the respective artists achievements are mentioned? i.e.:
Artist A revolutionized the art world and he did so at the age of 23
Artist B revolutionized the art world.
Anyway, the statement "I'm 30 and haven't done anything, so I won't" is based on a number normative assumptions. Not everyone is 30 finds herself in the same set of circumstances. Further, normativity is antithetical to creation, so a sentiment behind this post is contradictory.
Ultimately, the answer is to have ideas that are easy to follow through but are not obvious. That's how you look like a prodigy, i think.
Get real. I'm going to sound harsh, but if you're choosing to spend time angsting about this, you're probably better working for someone else than yourself. You aren't making good decisions on how to spend your time, which means you will be badly handicapped in any venture that you control.
If you want to prove me wrong, get hungry. Put all your money less enough to pay rent, expenses and ramen for six months into a long term savings account that you can't touch for a year. So in six months, you are going to be starving, out on the street, and your smartphone will be repossessed... unless you perform.
Whoa... OK, lets analyse all these amazing ideas. Ask female friends which ones have legs, work out which one is most likely to start earning you enough money to keep you off the street in six months. Forget trying to raise venture capital - if you can't show revenue they won't be interested, if you can show revenue you don't need them anyway.
Then get to it. By now you only have 5.5 months left to build this darn thing, 5.5 months before you starve. Design, code, network all hours of the day and night. Phone every new customer and ask them what they like and don't like about the product. Every thing you do, you ask "is this helping me build revenue?" before you spend a second doing it. Lying in bed before you go to sleep, you're figuring out how to do some A/B testing to improve signup rates, not worrying about whether you're too old to produce amazing art.
Then six months is up. You have enough revenue coming in to pay for the next month's rent, expenses and ramen - congratulations. Or you've learned that even with your best idea and effort, you couldn't make ends meet. You get regular job, and make a difference to the world that way.
Good luck to you, and if anything I've said helps at all, let me know how you go.
Realize that the amount of "art" you've created is altogether meaningless if you have a shallow experience of life. Let your self-esteem become unhinged from what you perceive as success, and just enjoy your time. If you have a single creative bone in your body you will create something amazing in due time. I recommend reading Siddhartha again and then getting back to work!
I find myself constantly writing down ideas in a notepad/phone/document.
Many of them are simple, one liners to remember the idea.
Others have expanded (even on my phone) into multi-page ideas, features, things to consider.
That helps me write down things to work on at a later date.
I let the idea bake for a moment and when I'm really passionate about it I will give it a go.
Each failure though helps me realise what to look out for next time.
For example, like you, I also run out of momentum.
You need to pick projects that are _achievable_ in a few months (especially when you're putting in after-hours work, and it isn't your day job) to avoid picking up a project too big for the amount of time you can afford.
I still write down those huge ideas, who knows if I will ever do them, but I don't pick them up (or totally forget them, either) because they are too much work to do right now.
Pick the projects that sound good (and cut feature's you don't really need for launch), do it incrementally, even with a friend if that helps you stay on track, and make sure it's something you can do in a reasonably short amount of time.
The probability of success (ie: creating a startup and selling it for 100 millions) is conditioned by two major factors: (a) a good idea (and the right implementation) and (b) the preparation of yourself.
So rather than trying to get the next big idea instead work on solving interesting problems and improve your skills and capacities. And take some risk!
I know the feeling. I'm 31 and beyond the middleground of fruitless endeavors to the point that so many things that I've felt should've been "what I put my life into" have turned out bad. And I'm not even a developer! (That was one of them, hello student loan.) But, you got to keep going. What else are you going to do, y'know?
I just turned 35, and have a very similar story. One thing I've found that helps is to start talking about your ideas with others. Not only does it give you insight into how others perceive your ideas and potentially help improve the concept, but it also gives you a certain amount peer motivation from friends and family to follow up on your progress. If they won't naturally do this, ask them to ... tell em it'll help you stay motivated, and ask whether you can follow up in a few weeks/months/whatever to show them what you've accomplished.
Ultimately, the message I needed to get into my own head was that nobody was going to build my idea for me ... so if I wanted to see it as something more than a Photoshop mockup, I just needed to break it into pieces, and start knocking them down.
I think being involved or attached in such an inspiring community is really important. True, too many people out there have never ever dreamed of creating anything. However, here, after reading so many articles about the passion to invent, I am too influenced to do something.
Ambition isn't everything to life. Being kind to others, surrounding yourself with friends and family, and seeking out new and fun experiences are all important and more permanent for your happiness.
However, if you have truly figured yourself out and creating something is vital to your happiness (which is probably true given you are on ycombinator), by golly, understand yourself and reengineer your environment so that you can realize your full potential.
Our society is kind of structured so you are thrown into a pipeline to water and tend to dreams that have already taken root; so if you want to realize your own dream, you need to really step outside the box and plant your own seeds.
People who say they've never seen anyone do y after x didn't look hard enough. You'll live longer if you stop stressing over arbitrary points on an imaginary curve and focus on the long journey ahead of you and all the potential it offers.
I find this thread fascinating. In over 20 years in the formal IT sector I've had one idea, and have stuck with that single idea for seven years.
It started with frustration at a piece of software I was using on my phone at the time (a Nokia 9210 Communicator), and has since been influenced by books I've read and other apps I've used. I quit my job at Microsoft in September last year to work on it full time.
Granted, over the years I've had a few more ideas - most of them spin-offs of the framework I created, but all have been put on hold until I can ship v.1 of the current idea.
I guess it's just another example my tendency to assume that eveyone else thinks like I do.
That sounds counter-productive. If you need good ideas, you better allow yourself to keep the ideas flowing (I suppose I believe there's something random about the quality of ideas, so to have a good one, you need to allow lots of 'em).
What might be interesting is to look into something called "mental contrasting": it says you shouldn't just revel in a new idea, because envisioning the outcome gives you a good part of the gratification of actually achieving it. Instead, you should still allow yourself the envisioning, but afterwards contrast that with how far you are now.
Web apps aren't art. Startups aren't art. Almost no one under 30 starts a successful business, and almost no one over 30 starts a successful business either, though the >30 group does have an advantage. So use it.
OP here. I want to express my gratitude for all of the great comments. There's a lot of wisdom and insight here, and it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who feels (or has felt) this way.
Rather than agreeing with everyone else in this thread (I do), let me ask a serious question. Does anyone think Adderall would help? Focus on one idea, that is. I find myself thinking it would.
One common problem developers have is that they try to do everything themselves and they have too many projects in their head, so just make an effort and forget about the other ones that won't happen anyways. Get one good project and divide it in really really easy tasks, and when you finish each part enjoy the success and move on slowly, it's better to move slow and fnish than moving fast and not go anywhere. My grandmother used to tell me
"Don't rush, I'm in a hurry", wise words.
The drive that compelled you to write this blog post is the same drive that will, when the time comes, kick you off your ass to actually get stuff done.
Maybe people don't produce art after 30 of 40, but there are hundreds of millionaires and billionaires who made their riches in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Frank Lloyd Wright was considered washed up and done in his 30s after a successful period. Most of his greatest works came late in his life. The Guggenheim museum, just as an example, was designed just before his death.
Ray Kroc was already in his 50s when he bought out McDonalds and turned it into the success we know of now.
The point of seizing the moment is to make the most of right now, not make you feel guilty about the past.
Or not. Never try to self-diagnose or self-medicate - seek professional help if you think this is the case.
I am the same way - I have many (failed) ideas, and an obsession with creating new ones, although fortunately I do not carry the aforementioned disorder :)
Also, the road to success is paved with failures. It is better to fail many times fast than continue working on an idea that is bound to be a failure. With every failure, you learn better how not to fail.
The cure I found for manic idea creation: work on something that you are really, really interested in. I have been working for the same idea for almost 8 years, on and off - the only problem is that I keep scrapping, rebuilding, and rethinking it :)
There is hope, I'm now 4 months into a startup which is my best commitment yet. The key difference for me: Involve other people. Firstly working in a team makes me more accountable. Second, having users sign up and use it really motivates me.
Not that its easy, its still hard at times. Which is fantastic because it means Im outside my comfort zone and getting some much needed personal growth.
If one day is all the difference in the world and the source of so much personal stress about what you've achieved, then ask yourself:
What did you do today?
If every day you do something, then one day you will find that you have achieved things that once seemed like a leap, but viewed from day by day were never more than the smallest increments over the day before.
This has turned to be one of the most interesting conversations on HN in the past month, at least for me. It made my day and I wanted to thank everyone for sharing their two cents. As someone approaching 30 in a couple of years this reflected some of my feelings about work and life. Gladly I walk out today having learned something about life.
i think that the personal value of art is making it and the importance it has to you. you can't hand down the judgment of how "good" your art is to somebody else, or in fact judge it at all. the only thing it will lead to is making yourself feel bad. the beauty is in making, not wanting.
art has nothing to do with money. The only thing you can do, is find what you love. Once you do that, you practice. You practice every day until your hands bleed, but you don't care, because you love it. Loving something is not instantaneous, it is a combination of chance itself, and a decision to make a commitment to being better at what you do than anyone else. Once you have enough practice, inspiration is inevitable. The problem is, if you are focused on money, you are likely to give up on practice for the sake of practice, and you will be too busy trying to make a buck that true inspiration will pass you by.
Inspiration is a subtle force, and retreats in the face of greed.
Developing a big web project can be a bit like running a marathon badly. You put on a giant chicken outfit. Run around trying to trip over celebrities for the cameras. And nearly die of a heart attack. Okay, maybe that's just me. No, seriously, let me start again. Developing a big... bit like... running a marathon. You are full of energy at the start and set off at a frantic pace. Before you know it, you have the concept design and prototype done. Then you begin to start on the database hierarchy, the sign up forms. This is tiring work and soon your pace begins to slow. But you are still excited by the project so you push on.
There comes a point however on most large projects - usually around two-thirds to completion - when your enthusiasm begins to wane. You look into the distance and cannot see the end in sight. There is so much work to do and this work is the boring detailed stuff rather than fun conceptual work. You begin to wonder if the project is any good. You begin to get distracted by Facebook, Hacker News, flash backs of the mangled dying Action Man you threw out of the window with only a paper bag as a parachute when you were a kid (Okay, that's just me again). In short, you are flagging and unless you pick yourself up soon you will be retiring from this race.
NEVER GIVE IN
This is usually when a good manager will step in and give his team of developers a good motivational talk (or a kick up the butt). But when you are working on your own projects as part of a startup, when you ARE your own manager, inviting yourself into your own office for a motivational talk does not usually do much good and could easily get you taken away by men in white coats (for me, writing this from Bradlington Mental Asylum, this is no longer a problem). It is easy to give up at this stage. So how do you motivate yourself in such a situation? How do you pick yourself up from the road, and crawl, if necessary, crawl, crawl, until bloodied and weeping, you inch over the finishing line on your stomach, a slimey trail of your inards in your wake (sorry, more flashbacks. My teddy this time. Tug of war with sis. Big Ted never was the same again). Yes, how do you do this...
Stop looking at me. Like, I have the slightest clue. What, you were expecting - because you had invested the time to read this far - that I magically would have the answer to one of the most intractable questions in software development - nay, in human psychology: how to motivate yourself and others. Or maybe, if you hadn't quite got the gist of this article, you were wondering how I could help you finish a marathon when, two thirds of the way through, your legs are buckling like a soldier who has taken one direct to the head. To the latter, I've heard that energy drinks are pretty good. Else, take a bus - nobody will probably notice and the money is only going to charity anyway. Later, you might want to invest in some smart drugs...
As for the former, get out of here - there's only one way you are going to finish your project, and that is by doing it. So stop reading frivilous articles like this, and get down to some serious coding.
this isn't a big deal. just study project management and get really good at it. you'll learn how to execute well on projects and find yourself getting things completed
As a recovering heroin addict (3 years sober) and a programmer I can say his metaphor is right on. I'm approaching 30 soon too and I get what he's saying. You buy some domain and a VPS for some awesome idea you're going to launch and then between your client work and running your own business all of the sudden everything falls apart.
I think the problem is working on too many projects at once. It can be close to impossible to keep track of your clients and 5 of your own projects all at once. I know that when I start a project I need to focus on it all the way or I lose steam. You get in the zone, you're familiar with all the inner workings and you're able to be productive. If you try to switch to a different project, especially if it's a half finished one, you have a hard time getting comfortable again. You end up having to relearn the code (in a way) and get into that different flow the other project had.
Also, every project has a personality. At least in my mind. It's hard to switch between projects with different "personalities" because there a lot of mental strain involved in making that transition to, say, a straight laced organization web app and a fun and exciting social network for just you and your friends.
Then there's always that temptation to learn some new technology, rent a dedicated server or get a VPS so you can be in total control and that's just sexy. I know I get a nerd boner whenever I get a new Linode and start setting it up exactly how I like it. The decisions that come with all of this setup and execution can lead to analysis paralysis.
I've had this same problem and I finally put a stop to it this year. I actually took one of my abandoned projects and used the code for a new venture.
I always had this problem when I worked a corporate job. Mostly because I wasn't hungry for success. I always had that steady paycheck coming in and I could abandon my new project when I ran into the slightest difficulty.
I quit last year with 2+ years salary and I've been working on the same two projects since.
Art is an extremely general and subjective term. I have seen code that is artful. I have seen paintings that are artful. No artist can lay claim to what is art in a field they may be unfamiliar with.
I've seen code that's poetic and artful. Computer science, like any science, has artistic elements to it, especially when economy of motion is utilized.
Money isn't art. To quote Robert Graves: "If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money."
I've never heard a businessman say "I'm disturbed that artists think they're engaged in a business."
There's nothing more noble about one profession or the other, every path has its place. It's not even worth getting into a discussion about "what is art" here (although I do believe that a creation that comes from your soul and expresses something about who you are and how you see the world to be art, no matter what your medium).
Even if your definition of art doesn't include what someone else calls their art, there is no reason at all to be bothered by that. They're not taking anything away from what you do, so focus on loving what you make and don't worry about how others refer to themselves.
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."