Marc Andreessen (who is often wrong but never in doubt) has this detailed but very informative post on the relationship between our age and our “output”. Excerpt:
So what have we learned in a nutshell?
* Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.
* This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.
* Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. “Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.” High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.
* The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one’s career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity — taking more swings at the bat — is much higher payoff than trying to improve one’s batting average.
* Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.
So here’s my first challenge: to anyone who has an opinion on the role of age and entrepreneurship — see if you can fit your opinion into this model!
Found: here.
And after reading the full article. you should also check out Naval Ravikant’s follow-up to this article which manages to add more interesting thoughts to this topic. Well worth spending the time required to read these long articles.
Over the past few years I’ve exchanged several emails off and on with Dean Simonton, the guy Marc Anderseen is talking about. Dean is essentially a regressions guru, and while he derives careful and sophisticated inferences from his data, the limitations of the method are that it doesn’t provide conclusive causal explanations. I have my own spins, and they mostly relate to ideas developed by Richard Hamming on WHY age seems to have the effect it does. Google “You and your research, Richard Hamming” to find an online copy of this phenomenal speech Hamming gave at Bell labs.