Being "Early" Is Hurting Your Career

I regularly see the sentiment that people are scared of falling behind they feel like they have to keep up with all the new stuff and if they just want to watch this Channel or talk with their friends about attacker manage to get a good job in the future that they have to keep up with everything as it changes they used to have a term for this I called it the dino effect because back in the day when I say back in the day I mean like fiveish years ago the original creator of node yes nodejs decided he wanted to rethink node and made a thing called Dino you might not have heard of it in fact statistically a lot of you haven't but that's fine Dino was expected to take off and at the time I saw so many messages so many tweets so much concern that if somebody learned node instead of Dino they were going to fall behind that's what I want to talk about today that feeling that if you don't get to something fast enough you're going to fall behind you're going to be at a disadvantage and you're not going to find success because you got to things too late the reason I want to talk about this is I think it's a myth I could just say that but you're not going to listen so instead I'm going to show you some examples where to all of us it's kind of obvious imagine you're a developer in the early 2000s you love games and you're really into building the best possible things and keeping an eye on the future you have aspirations to be really successful in The Game Dev World more and more of these powerful phones are coming out that are able to play games so you decide that's the future and let's be real it was obvious once the Blackberry started happening the future was obviously going to be mobile we never knew how far it would go but especially nowadays there are way more smartphone users than there are computer users it's like 4 to one which is crazy so if you had started building computer games at that time you'd be at a disadvantage obviously ly right because there's all these people who are doing mobile that are going to reach this massive audience but you're scared of losing out so instead you go all in on mobile and you go all in on the future the Nokia engage which shipped in 2003 if you were building apps for this you were building janky Java applets and you could do cool things with them like I found footage of Tony Hawk running on an engage if you went in real hard real early cuz you knew mobile was the future you have this Insight you are positive the future isn't building computer games the future is building mobile games so you become the leading expert in Java applets for future phones now let's step a few years into the future not even that far the original iPhone came out just a few years later the App Store came out a few months after that when that happens and there is this new platform that just a year or two afterwards can run Unreal Engine who's better off is the better off person the one who was building these Java outlets for engage who went all in on mobile because they wanted to be first to mobile or is the person who's better off the one who just stuck with building computer games learned the normal tools and then when the mobile Revolution happened they got in a couple years later the point I'm trying to make is the person who's better off in this situation so obviously so is the one who waited for the market to exist instead of trying to preempt it with an awesome new thing because they were just so excited about it that said if you're excited go all in following your excitement will rarely lead you down the wrong path for too long because you'll know when you're going down it because you care a lot about the thing and you can bounce back but if you're chasing after this idea of getting to something because you're scared of falling behind you're going to be making a whole lot of end gaug apps and that's only going to slow you down a person who built and became the expert in these crappy Java outlets for these terrible feature phones is fundamentally worse off than someone who ignored it until 5 years even after the iPhone came out not only is being early not necessarily helpful it actually seems like it can hurt you because if you go all in on those end gauge apps and now the iPhone happens you're going to be one of the people saying why would I ever do that I can do everything I can do there on my end gauge totally fine why would I ever want the iPhone Apple's shipping something that is behind and you're inability to get out of the mindset because of the sunk cost the years you spent in and How Deeply you understand the thing that you were building for it doesn't matter that you were building for the wrong thing you're stuck there and this is so insanely common I see so many people jumping on a new language a new framework or new technology new platform AI because they're scared of falling behind all of the things I am great at all the things I am known for I got good at well after the peak of getting into it I only started writing react code in 2018 and now I'm one of the more prominent react influencers and regularly talk with the react team I only started doing YouTube in 2022 and now I'm however big I am on here by the way hit that sub button doesn't cost you anything I just did these things when I wanted to not because I was scared of falling behind and the result ended up being I got to Leap Frog my peers because my peers were too obsessed with the mindset they formed before the market understood the problem if you're getting into something like AI right now if you're getting into a new language right now if you're getting into a new framework right now you're getting into the endau it might end up being the next big thing but it also might not be and you really don't get anything from being there so early so maybe just maybe sit it out a little bit focus on building things you're actually proud of and stay away from the hype trains until there's one that you're genuinely hyped about that's all I got to say on this one till next time peace nerds

Channel: Theo - t3․gg

Views: 26,794

Keywords: web development, full stack, typescript, javascript, react, programming, programmer, theo, t3 stack, t3, t3.gg, t3dotgg

Id: PqUjzXiDQ2A

Length: 4min 59sec (299 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2024