I sometimes think tech might be the busiest field in the world.
At any given moment, someone is learning to build something, building it, or shipping it. There's no off switch. New languages show up before you've finished the last one. Frameworks rise and fall in the time it takes to build a portfolio project. And now AI has arrived to change the ground under your feet every few months, just to make sure you never quite get comfortable.
You hold your breath for too long, and you either pass out or get left behind.
Then you open LinkedIn.
And there they are, CEOs, founders, people your exact age, already "building the future," already raising rounds, already speaking on panels about problems you're still trying to understand. You scroll for two minutes and something tightens in your chest. Not quite jealousy. Something closer to a quiet, uncomfortable question:
What did they take that I didn't?
The Feed Is Not the Story
Here's the thing about that feed, though, it's a highlight reel, not a timeline.
You're seeing the launch post. The "excited to announce" post. The panel photo. What you're not seeing is the eighteen months before it, the failed first idea, the co-founder who left, the version of the product nobody wanted, the months of rejection emails, the day job they were quietly still working while "building in stealth." Nobody posts "still stuck on the basics" or "third attempt, still not sure this will work" with the same energy as a funding announcement.
So when you compare yourself to that feed, you're not actually comparing your journey to theirs. You're comparing your whole, messy, ongoing story to the one carefully chosen slide they decided to show the internet. That's not a fair fight. It was never supposed to be.
I say this not because I have some tidy proof that it's true, but because it's the only way I've found to make the restlessness feel less like an indictment and more like noise. Just noise you have to learn to filter.
I Don't Fully Know What They Took
I want to be honest here: I don't have a clean, three-step answer for "what separates them from the rest of us." Anyone who tells you they do is probably selling something.
What I've noticed, watching people move through this field, some up close, some from a distance; isn't one dramatic advantage. It's smaller, less cinematic things.
They started earlier than it looked like they did. By the time you see someone's "launch," they've usually been quietly tinkering for a year or two before anyone was watching. The visible timeline is short. The real one rarely is.
They were willing to be bad publicly, sooner. A lot of us wait until we feel "ready" to build in the open to publish, to ship, to put a project on GitHub with our name on it. The people who move faster often just skip that waiting period. They post the ugly first version. They ask the question that might sound uninformed. The discomfort doesn't stop them the way it stops a lot of people.
Their constraints were sometimes just different. This one's less comfortable to say, but it's true; time, money, safety nets, and access to people who already know the terrain all shape how fast someone can move. Not everyone's "starting line" is the same distance from the finish. That doesn't make anyone's effort less real. It just means the comparison was never apples to apples in the first place.
[This is a good spot for something real, is there someone whose path you've actually watched closely, at Zone01 or in a hackathon or in the Kenyan tech scene, where you saw one of these patterns up close? A specific memory here would do more work than anything I can generalize.]
Holding Both Things at Once
What I keep coming back to is this: the restlessness is real, and it's also not the whole picture.
It's real because the field genuinely doesn't slow down for you. Go, JavaScript, cloud infrastructure, whatever comes after the thing you just learned, the target keeps moving and there's a real cost to falling too far behind the tools people expect you to know.
But it's not the whole picture, because "falling behind" is usually measured against a highlight reel, not against your own actual starting point. The question isn't really "why haven't I caught up to that person on LinkedIn." The more useful question is something closer to: am I further along than I was six months ago?
That's a much smaller, much less glamorous question. It doesn't make for a good LinkedIn post. But it's the one that's actually answerable, and the one that actually moves you forward.
Where This Leaves Me
I don't have a neat ending for this, and I think that's honest. I'm not a founder. I'm not on any panels. I'm someone learning Go and JavaScript in a bootcamp, building things that mostly matter to a small number of people so far, still figuring out which direction; cloud, DevOps, something else might actually be mine.
But I've stopped asking what the founders on my feed "took" that I didn't. I don't think there was a secret ingredient. I think there was mostly time spent building, quietly, before anyone was watching, plus circumstances that looked different for each of them, plus a willingness to be visibly unfinished in public.
I can't control the circumstances. I can control the building.
So that's what I'm doing. Restless, some days. Behind, some days. Building anyway.
