A couple weeks ago, our 51-year-old founder was talking about the 30 under 30s list, looked at me, and said "you should be on that list one day". I know he meant it as a compliment, an I-think-you're-great-and-you-should-go-for-it little comment but since then, I've felt this additional bit of pressure to do something, anything, now.
Apparently, there are statistics to show that the most successful founders are about 38 when they found their company, which doesn't really jive with the whole 30 under 30 thing.
But being a founder, to me at least, seems like the absolute hardest thing in the world. Arguably, you're trying to do something innovative and hence, new. Let's say you get there. Let's say, you've thought of something and miraculously, none of the other 7 billion people in the world has tried doing it. This means you're trying to convince everyone (your potential users, your investors, your employees) that this thing you've conceived in your head is something that is viable, valuable, and needed in the world. And then, you have to make money from it.
I feel like I'm on this constant rat race of learning enough to eventually be a founder, contemplating if that's even what I want to do and discovering a problem I'm passionate about then discovering a solution someone else has already created for it that was coincidentally exactly how I had thought about it and it's exhausting.
Honestly, I am tired and life is IMO, not that hard. A friend brought up the Comfort Crisis: a book about how humans have created a world where no one really has to go outside of their comfort zone, or really, even their homes. You can order in, stream a movie, work from home, do anything you want and call it treating yourself.
All of this, I think, ties in with the idea that by the time you're 30, you have to have your shit together. You have to know the job you're doing for the rest of your life, the person you're going to be with, ideally have plans for children if you don't already have them or know that you don't want to have them. You have to have found yourself and I have major angst about not being able to do that. I'm 23 and already feel like I'm too old for so many things. Is that not absolutely preposterous?
I think we often try to be too many things at once. Regarding the 30 under 30 list. Someone has to recommend you to the list and people often buy themselves in. So it's not really a true representation of the successful people under 30