Everyone is different, every decade in a person's life is different. In my personal case, my work between 30 and 40 was far better than what I did between 20 and 30. I feel pretty inspired right now.
This type of post is the stuff that you want to say to yourself at every point in your life (you can only make the best of the present, after all). It doesn't really work as advice to others.
OT(as far as the OP is concerned) questions from someone who is considering taking up climbing.
1. Isn't what you are doing in the video called bouldering?
2. Do you usually climb in your jeans? I am wondering does it allow you required flexibility?
3. Do you work on your core for climbing or climbing works your core?
4. What would you say about artificial walls and bouldering arenas for a beginner?
1. Yes that is bouldering, but bouldering is a subset of rock climbing, as is sport climbing.
2. Bouldering is frequently about balance and power, for some problems flexibility isn't as crucial. I climb in jeans outdoors, sometimes it's the best option as rock can quickly cut through lighter materials. My jeans are skinny and stretchy.
3. Climbing works your core, simply by climbing more and more.
4. Don't play the grades game, don't buy a hangboard. Go into a gym and have fun on the boulder. Don't try too hard and hurt your tendons, they take years to grow accustom to the stress induced by hard bouldering.
1. Yes. Bouldering is one type of rock climbing.
2. Very occasionally. It does limit flexibility somewhat, but I wouldn't skip climbing because I forgot my shorts.
3. Both.
4. They're great. Just make sure to get outside eventually!
(edit: formatting)
Basically, bodybuilding is concerned with aesthetics, while the strength sports are concerned with performance. When I train, my motivation comes from the challenge. Can I deadlift 405 for 5 reps? Can I hit a new personal record of 435? It's a question of raw capability: what are the limits of what I can do? When you get into high rep rangs with compound movements, it becomes an issue of anaerobic endurance: can I squat 235 for 20 reps, or will the pain and exhaustion be too much?
This came up a few weeks ago when I was discussing a ray tracer with a classmate in the locker room and everybody else in the room had something to chip in. I wouldn't even expect that programmer-density on campus, never mind a gym 30 minutes away.
I've always heard the problem solving aspect put forth as to why it's so popular with these types.
Sounds like a great place for networking.
And hey, if you do ever make it out to Font itself, look me up. It's paradise for the 7a (V6) boulderer, and we've got a house here. It'd be cool to meet a fellow HN'r on the rocks.
Happy Birthday!
I agree. I think one of the reasons why people in 30s seem to be more "close-minded" to new ideas is because they already have a decade of experience of the (then) fresh new stuff. This is especially true for the IT world.
Let's face it, we are reinventing the wheel in every 5 years. Just look at how frameworks and programming languages go in and out of fashion. You may say "oh man, not again!" when an enthusiastic young programmer tells you how great node.js is - which may be true, but in your open-minded 20s you already learnt Erlang, Twisted, EventMachine and Java NIO for the very same thing.
I'm not yet 30, but I already feel that I am becoming more conservative. I have seen a lot of "hot stuff" come and go, so I try to learn from technologies that seem to persist. Look at C, this old monster: it survived its creator, and for a reason. Now look at YUI or ExtJS: they were so "hot" around 2007, and I haven't even heard them mentioning for a long time. When somebody says that framework/language X is so great and "hot", I am a bit more careful now that 5 years ago: will it be around in 2 years? If not, does it worth even bothering?
Is this closed-mindness or wisdom? Very hard to tell. I am trying to be open-minded in a sense that I try to look and evaluate everything new, but I'm sure that I say "no" to much more things than 5 years before. I wonder how I would see myself in the eye of my 5 year-old younger me.
I feel social pressure plays a big part. Even the so-called open-minded 20 year olds will make fun of people in their 30s and 40s who still try to live an "unsettled" lifestyle. To accept wild and crazy ideas in your 20s just means you still have some growing up to do. To do the same later in life shows an abandonment of your responsibilities, which is frowned upon by society – in North America, at least.
Obviously these stats don't mean that old people are stupid and close-minded. Knowledge accumulates and helps offset many of the deficiencies. Still, this evidence does suggest that young people might want to change their behavior to benefit their future selves. This doesn't just mean making the most of the time you have. Exercise, continuous learning, and a few drugs can help to slow the decline. As an analogy, think of athletes. A 50 year-old is never going to win the Boston marathon. But with proper training, nutrition, and maybe a few performance-enhancing drugs, they can beat 95% of 25 year-olds.
I have felt that palpably running my own company for the last 5 years. In the first few years, it was just my wife and I doing everything, writing the code and running the business. As we started to make enough money that we could hire people, I started to notice how set in our ways we became.
Since we had started writing iPhone apps near the beginning of the mobile revolution, our code was written to suit older devices. In places, we did things for performance reasons so our apps would work well on old phones. Also, we never adopted ARC, because that's just not how we did it. But as we started to hire people, our engineers pushed us to change our old ways, and as a result, our code became much better.
So, I say - don't fear the reaper. Just find some young friends (or employees). I turned 30 this year, so I have a few gray hairs, but working with people in their 20s really has changed my ideas on the right way to do things, and given me perspective on my own life.
Interesting links.
Perhaps I have some sort of Benjamin Button thing going on. I spent most of my "youth" being quite reserved. Up until my mid-20s I was primarily concerned with not screwing up what I believed to be precious, fragile success.
I've increasingly opened up as I've gotten older and at 33 feel decades "younger" than I did heading into my 20s for whatever that's worth.
I wonder what my chart would look like? Would I actually find myself rising in these regards relative to the average, only myself or not at all?
>Exercise, continuous learning, and a few drugs can help to slow the decline.
I could not agree more.
I credit frequent, intense exercise with at least a much benefit to my mind as my body and find boredom hard to fathom.
I'd put surrounding yourself and interacting with the right and likely ever-evolving set of people up there too. Complacency and conformity lead to mental atrophy.
As a mid-30s guy at Google for 2 years, I'm never sure whether fresh grads getting their first job at Google will ever know (or need to know) how lucky they are.
While it's true that those in their 30s or older can be closed to new idea, that's not because they're "old", it's because they're people and some people are closed-minded.
I find a lot of these complaints are more about the cultural and lifestyle gap between those in their 20s and those who are older.
I remember the 80s. I'm not particularly interested in going bar-hopping. I find most social media to be an annoying drivel from people who vary between exhibitionists to just liking the sound of their own voices (everybody is talking, nobody is listening). I don't have that same sense of enthusiasm because for me everything isn't new. Most things really are derivative. To paraphrase something Don Draper said, I've reached a point on my life where I think I've basically met every kind of person there is. That's not to say that people can't surprise you. They can. It's just that you realize they're not as different as they once seemed.
This is exacerbated in the startup world since so many are cut from the same cloth: valedictorians in high school, magna cum laude, graduates of Stanford/MIT/CMU/Columbia, interned at Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft/Google, now working for one of those or some hot startup. It's a whittled down group of the technocratic elite who often-times don't really know how privileged and lucky they are.
At Google there tends to be two kinds of people: those who have worked in the outside world, particularly in Corporate America, and know how lucky they are and how different this is. And those that haven't and think this is just how the world is.
I don't begrudge them their successes and accomplishments but it is a form of cultural isolation--even inbreeding.
All of this means there tends to be a smaller set of common social norms with the "20s set".
At the same time, I pick up new technologies, languages and frameworks as much as I ever did. Possibly more so. Just now I've been doing a lot of AngularJS. That certainly didn't exist in my 20s. While I may not have the same youthful exuberance, I have experience and can draw lessons and parallels from programming in every stage of the Web's development (from CGI scripts on).
I will say this to those planning to have children: do it while you're young and it has nothing do with fertility. Children simply take an enormous amount of energy and commitment and this is far easier to bounce back from the younger you are.
As for the rest of it? Take another comment on this thread:
> Once somebody is fully set in their ways it's almost impossible to change their mind without divine intervention
That's fairly blatant ageism but, more than that, it's from someone who only knows people like him- or herself that wants to surround themselves with the same. Like I said: commonality and shared social norms are really what's in play there.