Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
You need to find a new metric of success than comparing yourself to others' achievements. And at the same time, your comparison of your age to others is completely broken. No one under ~20, or over ~80 matters as points of comparison to "career age" and on that 20-80 scale, you're very young, so your obsession with your age as somehow being old and "too late" is quite simply, stupid. The bottom line is, I think you still haven't found a sufficiently interesting project that you compare yourself to yourself, rather than to others.What you seem to care about is working on a "great project" as defined by others rather than something you think is interesting and therefore great all by itself no matter what anyone else thinks. This is classic lack of self-confidence.And as for finding motivation to overcome procrastination, sometimes you need to merely be disciplined to overcome it. You have to recognize, and trust your assessment of the proper priority of a task, and when it's important enough you just do that task as a matter of discipline, not as a function of enjoying it. And sometimes you need to plot procrastination and just enjoy it.When you're 80, I pretty much guarantee you you're not going to say, "fuck me man, I wish I would have worked more."