![\"33-to-44.png\"](\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/33-to-44.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I operate with a long range planning horizon \u2013 I have lists of what I want to do in a day, a week, a month, a year, five years, and even my life. Not all my goals are fulfilled, of course, but I believe in the philosophy \u201cPeople overestimate what they can do in a year, but underestimate what they can do in a decade.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recently, I\u2019ve had that proven to me.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m an enormous packrat, and keep a huge variety of old papers and materials. Some people deal with clutter by adopting the philosophy \u201cif you haven\u2019t touched it in six months, throw it away.\u201d Clearly, these people don\u2019t write for a living.<\/p>\n
So, in an old notebook, uncovered on one of my periodic archaeological expeditions in my library, I found an essay \u2013 a diary entry, really \u2013 written just before my 33rd<\/sup> birthday, entitled \u201cApproaching 33\u201d \u2013 and I find its perspective fascinating, especially when you compare what I was worried about then with where I am now.<\/p>\n \u201cApproaching 33\u201d was written on the fifth of November, 2011. That\u2019s about five years after I split with my ex-fiancee, but a year before I met my future wife. It\u2019s about a year after I finished my nearly decade-long slog to get my PhD, but ten years before when I got a job that truly used my degree. It\u2019s about seven months after I reluctantly quit the dot-com I helped found to care for my dying father, but only about six months after my Dad actually died. And it\u2019s about 2 months after 9\/11, and about a month after disagreements over 9\/11 caused huge rifts among my friends.<\/p>\n In that context, this is what I wrote on the fifth of November, 2011:<\/p>\n Approaching 33, your life seems seriously off-track. Your chances of following up on the PhD program are minimal \u2013 you will not get a good faculty job. And you are starting too late to tackle software development; you are behind the curve. Nor are you on track for being a writer.<\/p>\n The PhD program was a complete mistake. You wasted ten years of your life on a PhD and on your ex-fiancee. What a loser.<\/p>\n Now you approach middle fucking age \u2013 38 \u2013 and are not on the career track, are not on the runway. You are stalled, lacking the crucial management, leadership and discipline skills you need to truly succeed.<\/p>\n Waste not time with useful affirmations \u2013 first understand the problem, set goals, fix things and move on. It is possible, only if you face clearly the challenges which are ahead of you.<\/p>\n You need to pick and embrace a career and a secondary vocation \u2013 your main path and your entertainment \u2013 in order to advance at either.<\/p>\n Without focus, you will not achieve. Or perhaps you are FULL OF SHIT.<\/p>\n Think Nixon. He had major successes before 33, but major defeats and did not run for office until your age. You can take the positive elements of his example \u2013 learn how to manage now, learn discipline now, learn leadership now, by whatever means are morally acceptable.<\/p>\n Then get a move on your career \u2013 it is possible. Do what you gotta do and move on with your life!<\/p>\n \n It appears I was bitter.<\/p>\n Apparently I couldn\u2019t emotionally imagine I could succeed, but recognized, intellectually, that if I focused on what was wrong, and worked at it, then maybe, just maybe, I could fix it. And in the eleven years that have past \u2026 I mostly have.<\/p>\n Eleven years ago, I was enormously bitter, and regretted getting my PhD. It took five years, but that PhD and my work at my search-engine dot-com helped land me a great job, and after five more years of work I ended up at a job within that job that used every facet of my degree, from artificial intelligence to information retrieval to robotics to even computer graphics. My career took a serious left turn, but I never gave up trying, and eventually, I succeeded as a direct result of trying.<\/p>\n Eleven years ago, I felt enormously alone, having wasted a lot of time on a one-sided relationship that should have ended naturally after its first year, and having wasted many years after that either alone or hanging on to other relationships that were doomed not to work. But I never stopped looking, and hoping, and it took another couple of years before I found my best friend, and later married her.<\/p>\n Eleven years ago, I felt enormously unsure of my abilities as a software developer. At the dot-com I willingly stepped back from a software lead role when I was asked to deliver on an impossible schedule, a decision that was proved right almost immediately, and later took a quarter\u2019s leave to finish my PhD, a decision that took ten years to prove itself. But even though both of those decisions were right, they started a downward spiral of self-confidence, as we sought out and brought in faster, more experienced developers to take over when I stepped back. While my predictions about the schedule were right, my colleagues nevertheless got more done, more quickly, ultimately culling out almost all of the code I wrote for the company. After a while, I felt I was contributing no more and, at the same time, needed to care for my dying father, so I left. But my father died shortly thereafter, six months before we expected. I found myself unable not to work, thinking it irresponsible even though I had savings, so I found a job at a software company whose technical lead was an old friend that who had been the fastest programmer I\u2019d ever worked with in college, and now who had a decade of experience programming in industry \u2013 which is far more rigorous than programming in academia. On top of that, I was still recuperating from an RSI scare I\u2019d had four years earlier, when I\u2019d barely been able to write for six months, much less type. So I wrote those bitter words above when I was quite uncertain about whether I\u2019d be able to cut it as a software developer.<\/p>\n Eleven years later \u2014 well, I still wish I could code faster. I\u2019m surrounded by both younger and older programmers who are faster and snappier than I am, and I frequently feel like the dumbest person in the room. But I\u2019ve worked hard to improve, and on top of that, slowly, I\u2019ve come to recognize that I have indeed learned a few things \u2013 usually, the hard way, when I let someone talk me out of what I\u2019m sure I know, and am later proved right \u2013 and have indeed picked up a few skills \u2013 synthetic and organizational skills, subtle and hard to measure, which aren\u2019t needed for a small chunk of code but which are vital as projects grow larger in size and design docs and GANTT charts are needed to keep everything on track. I\u2019d still love to code faster, to get up to speed faster, to be able to juggle more projects at once. But I\u2019m learning, and I\u2019ve launched things as a result of what I\u2019ve learned.<\/p>\n But the most important thing is that I\u2019ve been writing. A year after I wrote that note, I gave National Novel Writing Month a try for the first time. I spent years trying to perfect my craft after that, ultimately finding a writing group focused just on writing and not on critique. Five years later, I gave National Novel Writing Month another try, and wrote FROST MOON, which went on to both win some minor awards and to peak high on a few minor bestseller lists. Five years after that, I\u2019ve finished four novels, have starts to four more, and am still writing.<\/p>\n I have picked my vocation and avocation \u2013 I\u2019m a computer programmer, and a writer. I actually think of it as having two jobs, a day job and a night job. At one point I thought I was going to transition to writing full time, and I still plan to, but then my job at work became tremendously exciting. Ten years from now, I hope to be a full time writer (and I already have my next \u201csecond job\u201d picked out) but I\u2019m in no rush to leave my current position; I\u2019m going to see where it takes me. I learned that long ago when I had a chance to knuckle down and finish my PhD, or join an unrelated but exciting side project to build a robot pet. The choice to work on the emotion model for that pet indirectly landed me a job at two different search engines, even though it was the skills I learned in my PhD that I was ultimately hired for. The choice to keep working on that emotion model directly led to my current dream job, which is one of the few jobs in the world that required the combined skills of my PhD and side project. Now I\u2019m going to do the same thing: follow the excitement.<\/p>\n Who knows where it will lead? Maybe it will help me develop the leadership skills that I complained about in \u201cApproaching 33.\u201d Maybe it will help me re-awaken my research interests and lead to that faculty job I wanted in \u201cApproaching 33.\u201d Maybe it will just help me build a nest egg so when I finally switch to writing full time, I can pursue it with gusto. Or maybe, just maybe, it\u2019s helping me learn things I can\u2019t even yet imagine how I\u2019ll be using \u2026 when I turn 55.<\/p>\n After I sign off this blogpost, I\u2019m going to write \u201cPassing 44.\u201d Most of that\u2019s going to be private, but I can anticipate it. I\u2019ll complain about problems I want to fix with my writing \u2013 I want it to be more clear, more compelling, more accessible. I\u2019ll complain about problems I want to fix at work \u2013 I want to work faster, to ramp up more quickly, and to juggle more projects well while learning when to say no. And I\u2019ll complain about martial arts and athletics \u2013 I want to ramp up working out, to return to running, and to resume my quest for a black belt. And there are more things I want to achieve \u2013 wanting to be a better husband, friend, pet owner, person \u2013 a lot of which I\u2019m going to keep private until I write \u201cPassing 44, seen from 55.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m going to set bigger goals for the next ten years. Some of them might not come to pass, of course. I bet a year from now, I\u2019ll have only seen the barest movement along some of those axes. But ten years from now \u2026 the sky\u2019s the limit.<\/p>\n -the Centaur<\/p>\n Pictured: Me at 33 on the left, me at 44 on the right, over a backdrop shot at my home at 44, including a piece of art by my wife entitled “Petrified Coral”.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I operate with a long range planning horizon \u2013 I have lists of what I want to do in a day, a week, a month, a year, five years, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,1],"tags":[6,11,4,91,5],"class_list":["post-2294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-challenges","category-uncategorized","tag-dakota-frost","tag-development","tag-dragon-writers","tag-nanowrimo","tag-we-call-it-living","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2294"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3689,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2294\/revisions\/3689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}