For all of the drawbacks, and despite all of the data to suggest the opposite, people in their early 20’s still have a significant advantage when it comes to high risk endeavors like starting companies.

This isn’t because they lack the fear of not being able to pay the mortgage or their kids college — although those are real fears.

The problem is that as time marches on life starts to show you how difficult things can be.

This is especially true in the startup game where at some point you just see too many bad things happen. You have to fire too many people who you thought were amazing, or run into issues with partners, or have bad clients, betrayals, etc. As you get older non business life has more problems as well; friends or family get sick, divorces, etc.

Over time the dataset you use to form your perspective of reality gets full of bad examples and this starts to skew what you think it really possible in life.

The younger you are the larger the advantage you have because you’ve collected less data that can effect how you see things.

This is the reason why we need to make sure we really examine our thoughts as we age. Bad examples have a tendency to run wild and that can can easily skew our perception.

So take some time and think deeply about what you believe to be true and ask yourself “am I filtering this through bad data”?

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