I have a big issue when somebody tells me that I can’t do something because of my age, or that I soon won’t be able to because I’ll be too old. Usually this has to do with abilities. I should join a startup now because as I get older I will be less able to. I should be creative now because people get less creative with age.

I don’t think this is right. I think there is a correlation, but there is no direct causal link. In other words, if you control for the factors that are usually causing these limitations, you can avoid them despite getting older.

Take joining startups, for example. I actually think that we don’t do it because we’re risk averse, not because we’re old. As we get older we tend to be more risk averse, but the point of noting the actual cause is that you can do something about it (unlike age). For example, train yourself to be less risk averse–lose a bunch of money taking risky bets, quit before you have a new job to hold on to.

After I think about it, a lot of things people tell you you’ll be too old to do have a much better proximate cause than age: experience and commitment. We’re risk averse because we have too much to lose later in life. We don’t go back to grad school eight years after graduating from college not because we get dumb, but because we’ve experienced enough in life to know what we like and don’t like.

A nice thing about that is that while you can’t ignore consequences of age, you can for experience and commitment (although the latter is very hard). When someone tells me that I can’t write a book when I’m 35, I’ll just think about what makes older people less likely to write good books (“Aha! they’ve experienced so much that it’s hard for them to write something new”) and control for those factors.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 12:24 and is filed under changes/cyclical, for reflection, retrospective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.