Published on: December 7, 2025
There’s a specific kind of anxiety that doesn’t come from failure, but from awareness.
You look around and feel late.
Late to skills.
Late to credibility.
Late to momentum.
I started feeling like I was already lagging behind.
Not because I had done nothing, but because I could finally see the game and didn’t like my position in it.
Writing this was my way of stepping back and identifying a few fundamentals that cut through that noise.
These aren’t motivational ideas.
They’re structural truths about how life actually works.
The most underrated fact about life is simply being alive, followed closely by being healthy.
We tend to compare ourselves horizontally with peers, but forget the vertical comparison:
think about all those people who had enormous potential, high performance, even early promise with great track record, but couldn't even live till your current age.
You are alive now and still in the game, being alive is the ultimate currrency of potential followed closely by being healthy.
You don’t need gratitude here.
Just accuracy in your perspective.
You don’t choose the cards, you choose how well you play them.
Some are dealt time.
Some capital.
Some early clarity.
Others uncertainty, late starts, or wasted years.
The players with the ability to consistently deliver high quality performance regardless of the cards they get are the ones who will be the Most Valuable Players.
The players that are consistenty trained on playing with the worst set of cards striving to deliver high performance/output eventualy become extraordinary players.
These games are not isolated subsets of life.
Life itself is the game.
Lost time, missed opportunities, lack of ideal skills or resources, if these are the cards you are given, your primary perspecctive shouldn't, by default, be as you are in a position of high disadvantage, rather you have the opportunity to train and strive to demonstrate high performance with those cards.
Be aware of your cards, use creativity to convert constraints to advantages, demonstrate high performance
A new entrant in an industry probably lack the ability to make fast, high quality decisions under pressure the way seasoned experts can.
And the seasoned expert probably lacks something the newcomer still has: the ability to look at problems and opportunities from genuinely fresh perspectives and directions.
There is no position that’s objectively superior.
Only different tradeoffs.
The mistake is assuming that not being in one position yet makes you worse, rather than simply different.
The trick is to put yourself in a position that makes your traits a functional advantage over others.
We secretly expect progress to be linear:
put in input, get proportional output.
Real life doesn’t work that way.
Outcomes are often the result of sudden shifts, inflection points, and compounding effects, where small events can create disproportionately large consequences.
If progress isn’t linear, then comparison by age, timeline, or checkpoint is fundamentally flawed.
Late movement doesn’t mean late arrival.
Your past explains how you arrived here.
It does not decide where you can go.
A fool can become wise.
A coward courageous.
A person lived a non-technical professional life can learn to code and build breakthrough products.
Someone who looked like a “late starter” can become a great leader.
The past constrains you, but it doesn’t lock you out.
You can choose a harder path later and still become extraordinary.
The only thing you can’t do is wait indefinitely and expect outcomes to change.
Your history may explain your starting point.
It does not fix your ceiling.
Feeling behind isn’t always a signal of failure.
It just signals that your execution has not caught up with your current awareness yet.
The goal now is to have a razor thin gap between awarness and execution.
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