What success at seventeen cost me
The part that doesn't make it onto LinkedIn: the insomnia, the isolation, and the bill nobody hands you upfront.
From the outside the story reads well. Teenager starts company, teaches on a master’s programme, manages clients. It makes a good line in a bio.
From the inside, for quite a while, I was sleeping four hours and waking up thinking about a server.
I’m writing this because when someone young tells me they want to start something, they almost always ask what you get. They almost never ask what you pay. And you pay.
That much focus cuts both ways
When something genuinely interests me I can hold a level of concentration most people find excessive. It’s my biggest professional advantage. It’s literally the reason I could do things at fifteen that are supposed to arrive at thirty.
But that concentration doesn’t distinguish between what’s good for you and what isn’t.
The same capacity that let me solve an entire architecture over a weekend let me ignore that I hadn’t spoken to anyone in three days. It isn’t discipline. It’s a magnifying glass that stays wherever you point it, and if you point it at work for months, the rest of your life quietly drops out of frame.
Nobody warns you about the bill
What nobody tells you about climbing fast is that the bill doesn’t arrive on the day you overdo it. It arrives months later, all at once, when you can no longer write it off as a bad week.
In my case it arrived as chronic insomnia and a very specific feeling of being alone in a room full of achievements.
The worst part is that for a long time I wore it as a medal. There’s an entire culture that applauds you for it, that confuses wrecking yourself with being committed. If you barely sleep, you must be going hard. If you have no life, you must be focused.
It’s a lie, and it’s an expensive one.
What I’d change
I wouldn’t change starting early. I’d do that again.
I’d change believing the cost was temporary. I thought it was a sprint, that you take one rough year and then it sorts itself out. It doesn’t sort itself out. What you stop looking after doesn’t wait for you.
I’d change not asking for help sooner, because it took me far too long to understand that asking didn’t contradict anything I was building.
And I’d change how I measured. For years I judged a day by the hours I’d endured. Now I judge it by what I resolved and by how I arrive at the evening. Those are two very different ways to live, and only one of them holds.
If you’re in that phase right now
The project doing well doesn’t mean you’re doing well. They’re two separate things and they’re worth checking separately.
An empty race car doesn’t win any race that matters. It took me a while to understand that, and it’s basically what the book I’m writing is about.
If this sounds familiar, don’t wait for the bill to arrive before you look at it.