There is a time for everything. Unless you have some exceptional talent, you have to follow the route held up as the best practice. It's like the recommended hunting grounds for each level in an RPG. For example, I think that up through college, learning methods are what matter. More precisely, methods for studying for exams. Anyway, I think college is the best window for building those methods well. Up to that point, you have to do well on the college entrance exam and earn good grades. If you're aiming for a big company, you also have to prepare for English tests and aptitude assessments. Things like how to understand a text well, how to memorize well, how to do mental math well, and how to read the test-writer's intent all seem important. College is the last stage at which you can properly build this kind of general learning ability.
People also say it's never too late in life! and bring up the story of the KFC founder who started his business at 62. But that's a message about having hope from the standpoint of success. There are definitely things that can be too late. If you don't develop a feel for romance and a sense of how to treat the opposite sex in your teens and twenties, you're in trouble. I'm saying this half-jokingly, but you can end up in the news, like in the screenshot below. If you'll never be interested in the opposite sex your whole life, it doesn't matter. But if you develop an interest late and act clumsily, you can't even get feedback. People talk badly about you behind your back, and if you cross the line, you get reported.
A learning method you didn't build properly as a student will hold you back in whatever you do from then on, especially when you take on something new. In that sense, acquiring something at the right time matters. People send their kids to English kindergartens because language is best acquired in early childhood. Conversely, there are stories of brilliant geniuses who skipped grades, lost the chance to play with friends, and ended up with weaker social skills.
And this is just my opinion, but the productivity you failed to build between college and your early career will also hold you back.1 There is clearly a period when you need to optimize and establish how you work, just like with the learning methods above. Sadly, most of us, myself included, weren't born geniuses or with silver spoons, and we probably have middling abilities all around. We have to work diligently to make a living, while also studying and letting our attention wander. If you're thinking about having kids, you'll have to take care of child-rearing too.
After high school, as you become an adult, lives diverge. They diverge again after college graduation. I studied mechanical engineering in college. Among the people from my department, quite a few didn't go to big companies and run restaurants instead. I, too, who work as a developer, took a somewhat unusual route. Anyway, for people like me who took the typical knowledge-worker track, productivity becomes important. Execution becomes important. This is a somewhat different ability from studying. It's the ability to handle work across many different contexts quickly.
When productivity drops, you can't do other things even if you want to. Work piles up and you may have to stay late, or you may collapse when you get home. This leads to a loss of control. As a student, you can endure studying all day, because there's a set time when this hard stretch ends. But from the working years onward, there's no set time when this life ends. There's no vacation either. Of course, life doesn't go as you want, but the feeling of losing control leads to a vicious cycle. Whether you become a leader, start a business, run a shop, or raise children, it holds you back.
The world itself is uncertain these days. Jobs are uncertain, and it's even uncertain whether my occupation will exist in the future. A few days ago, an AI developer reportedly appeared. With things so unstable, it's become an era in which you always have to keep an eye on "side paths." If you use LinkedIn, you'll have noticed that the number of people posting there has increased a lot recently. They don't trust their jobs, so they're building a personal brand. In the past, writing on LinkedIn itself carried a hint of "that person must be about to switch jobs," so people couldn't write easily. Yet the world has become so untrustworthy that people push through that reluctance to build their brands. Come to think of it, isn't that the same reason I run Productivity Billion Sian alongside my main job as a developer?
Even when the world isn't unstable, continuing to try "small adventures" on top of a "stable for now" present is a good strategy. In Antifragile, this strategy is introduced as the "barbell strategy." It's easy to say, but stabilizing your current situation while attempting adventures that might fail is hard. Put another way, it means "perform excellently at work and secure the spare capacity to do side projects," but if you haven't built an image as someone the company would hate to lose and then say "I'm doing YouTube, writing a newsletter, writing a book...," you'll catch flak. And if you pour everything into the company, you won't have the energy left for adventures.
You have to take care of your main job and your side work too, and learn all the knowledge pouring in from every direction. It has become a truly complicated world. I suspect my life, working as a developer by day with a side persona as a productivity creator, isn't all that different from other people's. You also have to look after rest and play. Perhaps what we needed productivity for was to have a bit of control in a world where we don't know how things will change, and in a marathon with no end date.
Footnotes
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That's why I secretly expected my content to be read mostly by people in their 20s and early 30s, but surprisingly, people in their 40s make up the larger share. ↩