"'As grad students, most of us imprint like ducks on the first good idea we come across, and spend the rest of our careers elaborating it.You laugh, but you know it's true!"
-- Alan Kay, at a UW CSci colloquim circa 1980.
The number of synapses in the human brain -- and our learning ability -- peaks at about the age of 18.
Months.
Thereafter, it declines exponentially.
Most great mathematicians completed their best work by the age of twenty-two or so, and thereafter mainly refined their earlier results.
By the age of twenty-five, intellectually, we're running on empty.
By the age of thirty we're running on fumes.
The best advice one can give a young geek is:
Devote your teens and early twenties to the stuff that really matters -- understanding what you care about.This is your last chance!
Forget money.
Forget everything else.
Everything else can wait.
You/we did pretty well on this front. Spent ten years as an undergrad, intensively hacking on what we most cared about. :)
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