It is difficult to take someone seriously when they introduce themselves by saying something like that. Experiencing life is not a competition, nor is it a valid bragging point. I guess it is good to know that there are some painfully obvious lessons that are not learned by building a company.
Indeed, whenever I hear something along those lines, its obvious that I talk to young immature person, who experienced quite a bit in a very narrow part of life, and not much more. Arrogance never helped anybody, did it.
Truly experienced people who properly seen-it-all get a proper dose of humility about themselves, the world and the others. You can really feel it from them. Unlike this kiddo.
I can relate to him. I used to think that adulthood was a permanent state, that I would feel the same age at 30 as I did at 20. That is not the case, I feel exactly the age that I am and I learned just as much in my last ten years as I did in the ten years prior.
People with the mindset of "I'm in my 20s, I know all about the struggles of life" are usually primed for a big kick in the pants by life. I'm saying this as someone in their mid-20s. When I was 22, I used to think I knew what adulthood was like after having to work a 9-5 job and pay rent and buy groceries. Hah, was I wrong. There's such a level of naivete based on using a 2-3 year sample size of living independently to project what the next 40+ years (who actually knows how long) of life will be like. Life always finds a way to throw something new at you, and as people age the accumulation of life experience also expands. There really is no replacement for experience, and it's impossible to say "I know what everything will be like ahead of me" without actually having lived it.
In fairness, I feel like I had more formative experiences between 16-20 than I have since (35). Young adulthood tends to be eventful and formative in a way people's 30s usually aren't. Throw in entrepreneurship... It's not that far fetched.
I can't make assumptions as to whether you or the gp have kids, but I didn't have my first until 37 and the second last year at 41. For me personally, having kids was the single most trans formative experience of my life with regards to how I have to examine my life and the world around me. Nothing before that came anywhere close, perhaps if I had lost a parent/sibling when I was younger or had enlisted after 9/11 I could say something else was in the same league, but as it stands, kids in my late 30s is it for me :)
I'm not sure what you mean by 'comfortable'.
But let's assume you mean 'figured out life'. I used to think that people knew what they were doing as they were getting older.
I'm still 'young', my wife and I are late 20s, early 30s. And I have given up the idea on 'figuring it out'.
What does it even mean, to have experienced “more” than anyone else? How do you compare raising a child to starting a company to performing as a top level athlete to losing a parent to ...
Mathematically minded nerds tend to forget that not everything in life can be turned into set theory :)
As a mathematically minded something, I agree with your first sentence, mostly disagree with your last one. There are a lot of nerds who think they are good at math when they are not.
There's a lot of potential life experience out there, not all of it good. And a lot of people go through extraordinary hardships that they didn't choose. A great example of someone who's experienced both the difficulties of running a business and the difficulties of running for your life is Intel chairman Andy Grove:
" He was born András Gróf into a not religious Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, which was ruled by a military dictator whose government persecuted Jews. That Gróf was not a Jewish surname may have helped his family avoid some of the worst of the persecution. As a small child, Grove had scarlet fever, which not only nearly killed him but also rendered him partly deaf. With the advent of World War II and Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Hungary abandoned its official neutrality and joined the Germans. In 1944, when the war went badly for Germany, the Nazis overthrew the Hungarian government, fearing that the Hungarians were about to make peace with the Soviets. The rounding up of Jews for death camps and slave labor soon began. Grove's father was forced to serve in the German army at the Eastern Front, where he endured appalling tortures for the amusement of German soldiers. Grove and his mother hid under false names with a Christian family; almost every day was a close call, as soldiers snatched Jews off the streets and out of their homes. Then the Soviets fought their way into Budapest, bringing with them more persecution (and the rape of Grove's mother).
Grove wanted to be a journalist, but he discovered that journalistic success depended on the whims of political correctness, and he decided to enter a field where subjectivity would not affect judgments about his work; he chose to study chemistry. In 1956 Hungarians tried to replace their Communist government with a democracy, and the Soviet Union in vaded their nation. There was fighting in Budapest's streets as young people tried to repel soldiers and tanks with small weapons and bottles filled with gasoline. Soviet troops began snatching young men and imprisoning, torturing, or killing them. Grove and his best friend, Janos Lanyi, fled to Austria, dodging Soviet troops, crawling in mud, afraid all the way. He had lived 20 years under murderous oppression, surviving by always remaining alert to the possibility that even a simple attempt to purchase a loaf of bread could cause him to disappear along with many other young Hungarians."
I've never heard this story, thank you for sharing. As hard as I (and many others in the West may try), I wonder if it's possible to bring as much determination to my field as someone from such harsh circumstance can. What an interesting person.