People are already telling you that eighteen is not too old to learn programming. And they are correct. People start at forty and fifty.

I have a different point to make.

There will always be someone smarter than you. Someone who started younger, learned faster, accomplished more. They're smarter than you are now, and they'll probably always be smarter than you.

Just get used to that as quickly as possible and move on with your life.

Now, in fact it is easy to be the world-champion of something if you qualify it enough. (I probably still hold the world record for building an efficient triangular planar semiconductor ring laser, for example. Nobody cares. Least of all me.) If you insist on occupying the top of some hill on this earth, you can always find a way to build that hill. The easiest way is to build it in your own mind. Don't laugh: People find genuine, lifetime happiness by doing that.

And it is true that genius is ill-defined, and that if you define it by a specific criterion, and then win that criterion, many people still won't accept that you're the biggest genius, because, hey, it's only chess. Or Jeopardy. Or music. Or literature. Or astrophysics.

And it is probably true that, even if you could become the biggest genius in history, no contest, you've won, you're the proverbial Einstein… you'd find it to be a big letdown. You'd feel just as confused as ever. You'd just be confused about harder problems. And meanwhile you'd find yourself surrounded by people who do not understand the most basic and obvious things.

But, no, these weak forms of my argument will not make you strong enough. I want to make you very strong, so I want you to visualize the person who is better than you in every way, and also twelve years old. And then I want you to get used to the existence of this person. And get on with your life.

Because other people's genius is not a problem. (Indeed, it's often really handy: Geniuses and prodigies can be good people to know. They do strange and wonderful things. It is fun to be their fan. It can be really fun to be on their team. This is a big reason why I live near MIT.)

If someone else's genius is a problem, it is probably not your problem.

---

When I was eighteen I was a fairly good math student. I enjoyed high-school math competitions, like the AHSME. I did pretty well. One year, based on my statewide ranking on the AHSME, I got invited to join a team of the top math students from my state to compete against an all-state team from another state.

This was one of the most valuable experiences of my life and I heartily endorse it. Because here's what happened: I got my ass handed to me. My teammates were freakishly smart. It turns out that the distribution of math-contest talent is not at all normal, and that being in the top 1% of contest-takers doesn't mean that you're within hailing distance of the top 0.5%. Oh, no.

As I remember it, one of the people on the trip wasn't an official member of our team. He was too young to compete, but was tagging along for fun. I think he might have been twelve. He was a better contest-problem mathematician at twelve than I've ever been in my life, that's for sure.

So what happened? As I remember, I had fun at the competition. I spent the time doing what amounted to janitorial work for the power-solvers at the head of our team: Filling in obvious missing steps, sharpening pencils, whatever. I don't remember. What I remember is that I got to hang around people who really liked math. And then I went home and kept on liking math, but stopped worrying about whether or not I was going to be the second coming of Galois, because I obviously was not.

I have found this attitude helpful, because if I were all hung up on the fact that I'm older, slower, and stupider than many of the folks I hang around with, my ego wouldn't last five minutes around here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

(HN veterans will have figured out, ten paragraphs ago, that this whole essay is basically an excuse to revisit that link from the old days. ;)