Everyone tells me the advantages of being young are energy and time. Paul Graham in his beautiful essay, How To Do Great Work, adds optimism and freedom to that list, which is closer to the truth but still not quite it I think. The real advantage of being young, the one that needs to be framed correctly because it sounds like an insult, is that you are profoundly, beautifully ignorant. You don’t know what’s supposed to be hard. You just don’t know that the thing you’re about to try has a 4% success rate, and because you don’t know that, you just try it, and sometimes it works. Simply because you don’t have enough information to be afraid.
I tried my hand at founding two startups while studying physics at Imperial. If someone had told me at the time that I was doing something unusual (many did to no avail), I would have believed them in theory but not in practice, because I was surrounded by other twenty-year-olds in that basement of Imperial Enterprise Lab doing similarly ridiculous things and none of us had the pattern recognition to understand how unlikely any of it was.
I think that’s the thing that gets lost when older people romanticise youth. They remember the energy, the late nights, the willingness to work weekends. But the real engine wasn’t any of that I’m sure. The real engine was that they genuinely did not understand the magnitude of what they were attempting, and so the magnitude didn’t slow them down. I just thought this is what you do when you find something interesting: you go and build it. I didn’t know that most people spend years thinking about building things and then decide the timing isn’t right. I hadn’t learned that yet. Thank The Lord.
Graham writes that lots of great things began with someone saying “how hard could it be?” and he’s right, but what he doesn’t say explicitly enough is that this question has an inherent shelf life. You can only ask it sincerely a certain number of times before experience fills in the answer, and once you know how hard something is, you can never unknow it. Every year you get smarter, more efficient, better at pattern matching, and in exchange you lose a little bit of the willingness to do something without fully understanding what you’re getting into.
By the time someone has the skills to execute perfectly, they often have too much information to start. I’ve watched this happen to people five years older than me who are more talented than I am in every measurable way and yet somehow do less, because they’ve learned enough to see all the ways things can go wrong and they can’t unsee them.
The thing I got right, and I want to be honest that I got it right mostly by accident, was that I have always treated my curiosity as a sufficient reason to act. Fuck the business plan or a market analysis or a five-year projection to justify spending my time on something. If it was interesting and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, that was enough. Graham calls curiosity the engine and the rudder of great work, and I think the rudder part is the more important one. Every time I followed where my curiosity led me rather than what seemed strategically smart, I ended up in a better place than when I tried to be clever about it. And every time I tried to be clever about it, I ended up doing something boring that I’d eventually quit anyway, which is a worse outcome than failing at something interesting because at least failure teaches you something while boredom just takes your time and gives you nothing back.
There’s a line in Graham’s essay about how the educational system is designed on the assumption that you’ll somehow magically guess your life’s work as a teenager, and that an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often look like a broken product of that system. I read that and laughed because it described my entire university experience. I was technically studying physics, and I say technically because for significant stretches I was spending more time on startup work than on problem sets, and the honest truth is that the startup work taught me more about how I think and what I care about than the degree did. I’m not saying the degree was useless, because it wasn’t, and the rigour of physics shaped how I approach problems in ways I’m still discovering. But the system wanted me to be a physics student, and I was using the physics degree as a structure to hang everything else I was interested in off of. The system read that as underperformance. I read it as figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, which is the thing the system claims to help with but has no mechanism for.
The advice I’d give to anyone in their early twenties, and I’m aware of the irony of a 22-year-old giving advice so take this with the appropriate amount of salt, is to do things before you’re ready. Not because being unprepared is inherently good, but because you will never have a lower cost of failure than you do right now. If I start a company at 22 and it collapses, I’ve lost some time and some pride and I’ve gained an education that would cost six figures at a business school. If I start a company at 35 with a mortgage and children, the calculus is entirely different. You’re almost certainly less capable than you will be in ten years. The reason to act now is that your ignorance is a temporary resource that is depleting every single day, and once it’s gone, you will have to replace it with courage, which is much harder to come by because courage means doing something despite knowing the risks, while ignorance means doing something because you haven’t met the risks yet. One of those requires willpower. The other one is free.
Graham says that being prolific is underrated, and I think that’s true, but I’d frame it slightly differently. Being willing to be bad at things is underrated. The reason young people can be prolific is that they haven’t yet developed the taste that makes them embarrassed by their early work. I look at things I wrote a year ago and wince, but the point is that I wrote them, and the writing I’m doing now is better because of all the bad writing that came before it. No one can skip the bad work to get to the good work. And the window in which one is willing to produce bad work without it destroying one’s self-image is narrower than you would think, because every year you develop more taste, more self-awareness, more of that internal editor that says “this isn’t good enough to publish” which is sometimes correct and sometimes the voice that kills prolificacy in its crib.
So if you’re young and you’re reading this, I suppose what I’m saying is: go do the stupid thing. I’m trying to take my own advice here, which is why I’m publishing a blog at 22 where I tell people what I think about things, which is either the beginning of something meaningful or the most public evidence of my own delusion, and I genuinely can’t tell which yet. But that’s sort of the whole point, isn’t it. If I could tell, I probably wouldn’t do it.
Aryan