For many years I was often the youngest person in the room. I started my first company at 19 and had already had several bizarre “too young” experiences by the time I was 21. I vividly remember almost losing our largest client at the time because they had taken my partner Dave out for drinks (he is three years older than me) and they somehow pried out of him that I was only 21. That generated a lot of anxiety for a week or so. ...
I changed my sleep pattern in October. Three months later, I feel like a completely different person. A much better one. Since I was in my early 20’s, I’ve been getting up at 5am from Monday to Friday. I generally would go to sleep between 10 and 11. An alarm clock would wake me up. By Thursday or Friday I would often snooze or even reset it for 6am or 7am. But most of the time I pried myself out of bed at 5am. ...
At dinner last week, my long time friend Dave Jilk (we just celebrated our 30th friendship anniversary) tossed a hypothesis at me that as people age, they resist adopting new technologies. This was intended as a personal observation, not an ageist statement, and we devolved into a conversation about brain plasticity. Eventually we popped back up the stack to dealing with changing tech and at some point I challenged Dave to write an essay on this. ...
I’m turning 45 next week and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. For some reason this seems like a more significant birthday to me than 30 or 40 was. I know some of my thoughts are a result of a few colleagues dying recently (in their 50’s and 60’s ), me completely wearing myself out this fall , and spending about half the year struggling with a back injury , but I think something deeper is going on. ...