[vessenes]

I did read that before I asked, I promise :)

I was curious more about how you think about your own time at this phase in your career -- are you mostly 'playing'? Is this "serious play"? Is it motivated by anything beyond personal interest?

I ask because I'm monitoring my own projects and time commitments more seriously as I hit my mid 40s and trying to make sense of how and when I've had the best impact, globally, personally, to my own happiness, etc.

One of the keys for me seems to have been to pay attention to what interests/intrigues me, and I'm curious what your experience is on that front as well -- you have a pretty unique amount of experience assessing and watching companies that have in some cases made a major amount of change in the world.

Anyway, I guess I'm just asking for a sort of 'mid career thoughts' essay from you, or at least wondering if you're thinking much about it.

[pg]

This was something I'd meant to do for a long time, and wanting to work on it was one of the reasons I retired from YC. Being overtly ambitious would have provoked haters, but few will see this thread now, so I'll tell you: the goal was to discover the Platonic form of Lisp, which is something I could always sense lurking beneath the surface of the many dialects I've used, but hidden by mistaken design choices. (T was probably the best in this respect.)

I don't know how much my experience translates to other people, because my "career" has been unusually random, but when I retired from YC what I was thinking was that at 49, if there was something I'd been meaning to do, I'd better do it.