One of the biggest reasons it gets harder to do new things as you get older is that new things are generally undignified at first (indeed, this is an excellent heuristic for discovering them) and the older you get, the more dignified you're expected to be.
A while back I got an email from a fellow who asked:
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"I’ve been trying to think about my next B2B play but everytime I think of an idea I stop myself due to how saturated the markets are. How do you still win in a packed category? I feel like it’s a lot harder to win now than it was 10 years... See more
Or take HEY. HEY has tens of thousands of paying customers. For us that's a win. For Google/Gmail it would be a huge failure. They need a whole lot more to make something worth it. We need a whole lot less to make it a spectacular success. HEY has tens of thousands of users. Gmail has a billion. So are we "losing" to Gmail? Or are HEY and Gmail... See more