I've spent the last few years building things that, realistically, I probably had no business being responsible for at my age.
Companies. Software. Teams. Projects that started as ideas and eventually became things other people depended on.
And somewhere along the way, I noticed something I hadn't really considered before: I was getting better at figuring out what I wanted to build without necessarily getting any closer to figuring out who I wanted to be.
There's a strange contradiction in that.
We're constantly told to start early. Build your portfolio. Get experience. Figure out your career before you've even finished high school. The earlier you start, the further ahead you'll be.
But nobody really talks about what happens when you actually do those things. When the projects become responsibilities, when people start depending on you, and when the future you've been working toward starts demanding more of you than the present can comfortably give.
I've been thinking about this for a while now. And what I've landed on is that there's a difference between getting ahead in life and growing up faster than you're supposed to.
I'm not entirely convinced we understand that difference.
The Responsibility Problem
There's something that happens when you start building things seriously. The work stops being exclusively yours.
What begins as a personal project eventually develops expectations. People join. Decisions start affecting more than just you. Something breaks, and suddenly you're the person everyone expects to fix it.
I've experienced this firsthand through software development and running projects in the gaming space. There are technical decisions to make, people to coordinate, problems to resolve, and an endless stream of things that could probably be done better.
None of that is particularly unusual for someone running a project. What's unusual is navigating those responsibilities while simultaneously dealing with everything that comes with being a teenager.
School doesn't stop because something needs your attention. Personal relationships don't become less complicated because you have work to finish. And the expectations people place on you don't always account for the fact that you're still figuring out things they might have had years to understand.
The difficult part isn't necessarily the workload. It's the assumption that because you've demonstrated the ability to take on responsibility, you must also possess the maturity to navigate everything that comes with it.
Those are two very different things.
I can make decisions about software architecture, coordinate development, and manage people working toward a shared objective. That doesn't mean I automatically know how to handle every disagreement, disappointment, or uncomfortable situation that comes my way.
And I don't think it should.
We've developed this strange tendency to measure maturity through responsibility. Someone starts a company at sixteen, and we describe them as mature for their age. Someone becomes financially independent early, and we assume they've figured something out that everyone else hasn't.
Maybe they have. But maybe they've just gotten particularly good at one part of life.
Being capable of managing something doesn't mean you've finished learning how to manage yourself.
When Ambition Becomes an Expectation
The thing about ambition is that it rarely stays where it started.
At first, it's exciting. You have an idea, you want to see whether it works, and you're willing to spend an unreasonable amount of time figuring it out.
There's no particular obligation attached to it. You're building something because you want to.
Then it starts working.
Not necessarily in the sense that you've become successful, but in the sense that the project becomes real. Other people get involved. You establish goals. You make commitments. You develop expectations about what comes next.
And gradually, the thing you originally pursued because it interested you becomes something you feel responsible for maintaining.
That's where ambition gets complicated.
I've noticed that the more you accomplish, the easier it becomes to treat accomplishment as the default expectation rather than something worth appreciating.
Finishing one project means thinking about the next. Reaching a milestone means establishing another. Solving a difficult problem usually reveals three more that need attention.
The work never really ends. It just changes shape.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Progress requires continuity, and meaningful projects rarely develop without sustained effort.
But there's a point where the motivation to accomplish something can become difficult to distinguish from the fear of not accomplishing enough.
And I think more people experience that than are willing to admit.
We've created an environment where being busy is almost synonymous with being important. Where productivity is treated as evidence of discipline, and rest is something you earn after you've done enough.
The problem is that enough becomes increasingly difficult to define.
There's always another opportunity. Another person accomplishing more. Another version of yourself that seems slightly more successful, more disciplined, or further ahead.
So you keep working.
Not necessarily because the work still excites you, but because slowing down starts to feel like falling behind.
Behind what, exactly?
That's the question I don't think we ask often enough.
The Identity We've Built Around Achievement
I've spent a considerable amount of time identifying myself through the things I do.
Developer. Entrepreneur. Writer. Someone who builds things.
Those descriptions are accurate, and I'm proud of the experiences behind them. But I've started questioning how much of my identity should actually depend on them.
Because there's a problem with defining yourself through achievement: eventually, something doesn't work.
A project fails. An idea doesn't attract the attention you expected. A decision turns out to be wrong. Something you invested months into produces very little in return.
That's a normal part of building anything. I've encountered it before, and I'll undoubtedly encounter it again.
But when your work becomes the primary way you understand yourself, those setbacks start feeling personal in ways they probably shouldn't.
You're no longer evaluating whether a project succeeded. You're evaluating whether you succeeded.
And those aren't the same question.
I've watched people become so invested in an idea that they lose the ability to evaluate it honestly. They defend decisions that no longer make sense. They continue working on things that aren't going anywhere because walking away would feel like admitting something about themselves.
I've caught myself doing versions of that, too.
There's a certain discomfort that comes from realizing something you believed in might not work. Especially when you've spent enough time talking about it, planning it, and imagining what it could become.
But persistence isn't always evidence of good judgment.
Sometimes it's just an unwillingness to reconsider an assumption you've become attached to.
The same applies to identity.
If you've spent years telling yourself that you're going to become a particular kind of person, changing direction can feel like betraying that commitment.
But the person who made that commitment might have been operating with a completely different understanding of the world.
And that's worth considering.
We're constantly encouraged to develop a sense of identity, but rarely encouraged to question whether the identity we've established still reflects who we actually are.
I think that's backwards.
An identity that can't accommodate growth isn't much of an identity. It's a set of expectations you're perpetually trying to satisfy.
You Can't Optimize Growing Up
Here's where I think the entire idea of getting ahead starts to fall apart.
We've become very good at accelerating certain kinds of development.
You can learn programming without attending a university. You can start a business without having a traditional career. You can access information, build products, and collaborate with people across the world before you're old enough to sign half the contracts involved.
The barriers to doing meaningful work have changed considerably.
But the barriers to understanding yourself haven't changed nearly as much.
You can accelerate technical experience. You can't necessarily accelerate emotional experience.
You can learn how to manage a project through documentation, experimentation, and practice. You can't learn everything about disappointment, trust, relationships, or judgment through the same process.
Some things require actually living through them.
And that's frustrating when you're accustomed to solving problems by doing more.
I've found that a lot of the skills I've developed through software engineering don't translate as cleanly into personal life as I'd sometimes like.
In engineering, there's usually some underlying reason a system behaves the way it does. You investigate, test assumptions, identify what went wrong, and make changes.
People are considerably less predictable.
You can communicate clearly and still be misunderstood. You can make a reasonable decision and still hurt someone. You can do everything you believe is right and discover afterward that your understanding of the situation was incomplete.
There's no documentation for that. No reliable test environment. No straightforward way to determine whether you've made the correct decision before experiencing its consequences.
You just have to navigate it.
And sometimes you get it wrong.
I don't think that's evidence that someone isn't mature enough. I think that's how maturity actually develops.
The problem is that we've started treating growing up as something that can be accelerated through achievement.
Get experience early. Establish your career early. Build financial independence early. Figure out what you want from life as quickly as possible.
But being ahead professionally doesn't necessarily mean you're ahead personally.
And I'm not sure personal development is something we should be racing through in the first place.
The Part We're Missing
There's another side to this that I think matters more than people realize.
When you're constantly focused on what comes next, the present starts becoming something you evaluate primarily through its usefulness to the future.
You stop asking whether you're enjoying something and start asking whether it's worth your time.
A hobby becomes an opportunity to develop a skill. An interest becomes a potential business. Free time becomes a resource that could probably be allocated more efficiently.
Eventually, even doing nothing starts feeling like a decision you need to justify.
I've noticed this in myself.
There are times when I have absolutely nothing urgent to do, and instead of appreciating that, my first instinct is to find something productive.
Another feature. Another improvement. Another idea worth exploring.
And while I genuinely enjoy much of that work, I don't think every available moment needs to become an opportunity to accomplish something.
That's an easy thing to say and a considerably harder thing to practice.
Especially when you've spent years developing habits around the assumption that doing more is generally better.
But there's a cost to treating everything as preparation for something else.
You start overlooking experiences that don't produce measurable outcomes.
Spending time with people you care about. Having conversations that go nowhere in particular. Enjoying something without wondering whether it could become useful later.
These things don't necessarily make you more successful.
They do make up a substantial part of being alive.
And I think there's something fundamentally wrong with an understanding of ambition that makes those experiences feel secondary.
I don't want to reach some arbitrary definition of success only to realize I spent most of my time preparing for a life I never really allowed myself to experience.
That doesn't mean abandoning ambition.
It means recognizing that ambition is supposed to contribute to your life, not replace it.
The Difference Between Becoming and Being
I still have a fairly clear idea of what I want to accomplish.
I want to keep building software. I want to develop meaningful projects, work with interesting people, and create things that have some actual value beyond the satisfaction of having built them.
I don't see that changing anytime soon.
But I'm also beginning to recognize how little certainty I actually have about the person I'll become along the way.
The version of myself that existed three years ago had different priorities. Different assumptions. A different understanding of what success looked like.
Some of those ideas have survived. Others haven't.
And I expect the same will be true three years from now.
There's a tendency to interpret that kind of change as inconsistency. As though having a direction means you're obligated to maintain it regardless of what you learn.
I don't think that's reasonable.
If experience teaches you something that fundamentally changes how you understand yourself, refusing to acknowledge it isn't commitment. It's stubbornness.
The entire point of gaining experience is that it gives you information you didn't previously have.
You're supposed to do something with that information.
That's true when building software, running a company, maintaining relationships, and figuring out what you want from life.
You make assumptions. You act on them. You encounter information that challenges those assumptions. And ideally, you're willing to reconsider what you believed.
Sometimes that means continuing down the same path.
Sometimes it means admitting that the path no longer makes sense.
Neither outcome inherently represents failure.
What matters is whether you're making those decisions because they reflect what you actually want, or because you've become attached to an earlier version of yourself that wanted something different.
What I'm Actually Trying to Figure Out
I don't think the answer is to stop being ambitious.
That would be an unnecessarily simple conclusion to a considerably more complicated problem.
Ambition has created opportunities for me that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. It's introduced me to people, experiences, and responsibilities that have genuinely changed how I understand the world.
I value that.
But I also think there's a difference between pursuing those opportunities and allowing them to determine your entire sense of self.
I can take my work seriously without believing every setback reflects something about my worth. I can accept responsibility without pretending I have all the experience necessary to navigate it perfectly. I can work toward a future I care about without treating everything happening right now as an obstacle to getting there.
And perhaps most importantly, I can acknowledge that I'm still figuring things out.
Not in the performative sense where uncertainty becomes another admirable quality to advertise. I mean genuinely accepting that there are things I don't understand yet, decisions I'll probably reconsider, and parts of myself that haven't fully developed.
That's not particularly comfortable.
But I think it's more useful than pretending otherwise.
There's a version of ambition that depends on having everything mapped out. A clear destination, a defined identity, and a sequence of accomplishments that supposedly lead toward becoming the person you're meant to be.
I've spent enough time building things to know how rarely plans survive contact with reality.
I don't see why growing up would be any different.
The person I'll become isn't someone I can fully design in advance. He's going to be shaped by experiences I haven't had, people I haven't met, mistakes I haven't made, and decisions I don't even know I'll need to consider.
I can influence that process. I can't completely control it.
And I think I'm becoming more comfortable with that distinction.
Because the more I think about it, the less convinced I am that the goal should be to become someone as quickly as possible.
We're so focused on getting ahead that we've started treating the process of growing up like an inconvenience. Something to accelerate, optimize, and move past so we can finally become the people we're supposed to be.
But there's no point at which you suddenly become a finished person.
There's just the person you are, the things you're learning, and the decisions you make with whatever understanding you have at the time.
I'm still going to build things. I'm still going to pursue opportunities that probably seem unreasonable for someone my age. And I'm still going to make decisions that turn out differently than I expected.
But I'm not interested in confusing any of that with having everything figured out.
I know what I want to build. I'm still figuring out who I want to be.
And I'm starting to think those two things don't need to happen at the same speed.