I am ALMOST 40. If you are in your 20s or 30s, watch this. transcript

In a few months, I will turn 38. That means my 30s is almost over and I will be in my 40s soon. And if you told the 25-year-old me that at almost 40, I'd be running my own mentorship, building my own company, living in Seoul with my wife and a kid, and pulling in more money than I ever imagined, I would have laughed in your face. Probably while hungover, probably while playing Madden on a Tuesday afternoon. Although, I still do that sometimes.

But here's what nobody tells you about your 20s and 30s. You don't waste them by being lazy. You waste them by being busy doing the wrong things. I wasn't sitting around doing nothing. I was ambitious. Extremely ambitious. Just in all the wrong directions. I was ambitious about partying, ambitious about chasing girls, and ambitious about, and I'm not proud of this, how to flip substances for quick cash. That was my startup idea.

So, when someone DMs me saying, "Phil, I feel like I've already thrown away my best years." I look at them and think, "You haven't even scratched the surface of throwing away your best years. I was the undisputed champion of that sport." But you know what? I'm almost 40 now, and the last decade proved something that I need you to hear. It doesn't matter how badly you've messed up. What matters is what you do after you stop messing up.

So, sit with me for the next 15 or 20 minutes. I've got almost a decade of hindsight and scar tissue to share. And especially stick around for the end, because the last point is the one thing that actually rewired how I think about everything. When I was 30, hungover on my couch in Korea, staring at a coding bootcamp brochure my mom on the kitchen table. I had exactly nothing to protect. No career, no savings, no reputation.

And paradoxically, that was my biggest advantage. Here's what I mean. When you have nothing, every bet you take is lopsided in your favor. The worst case scenario is that things stay exactly as bad as they already are. But the best case, your entire life changes. I sold my car to pay for that boot camp. People called me crazy. But what was I risking, really? Going back to being broke and miserable? I was already broke and miserable.

Now, here's where most people in their 20s get this completely backwards. They think they need to wait until the conditions are right, until they feel ready, until the market is better, until they've saved enough, until they've read enough tutorials. But readiness is a trap. It's procrastination wearing a business suit. So, here's what not to do. Don't sit on YouTube watching tutorial after tutorial and call that preparing.

That was my mistake for the first stretch of boot camp. I watched hours of video every night and felt productive. But I was learning absolutely nothing. I was consuming, not building. The night I closed a tutorial and opened my code editor, that's when everything shifted. You don't prepare your way into a new life. You act your way into one. One of my students this past year came to me after nine straight job rejections in 7 days.

Nine. He could have spiraled. Instead, he looked at the pattern. His resume was the problem. No real work experience. So, he started contributing to open source repositories and listed those contributions as professional experience. The next week, he landed his first interview. He didn't get hired that round either, but now he had a new problem. He was failing at the interview stage, not the resume stage. That's progress.

He kept adjusting, tailored his portfolio to match the companies he was targeting, reached out to hiring managers by name instead of dumping applications into a portal. Eventually, he walked into a major bank with three offers. That entire transformation started because he had nothing to lose and was willing to look stupid. The formula isn't complicated. Bet on yourself when the downside is cheap and keep adjusting until the number flip.

Now, here's where I have to admit the dumbest thing I did in my first year of tech. I bounced constantly. One week it was Python, then PHP, then JavaScript, then Java. My boot camp encouraged it. They shoved three languages into three months like some kind of developer speed run. And I walked out feeling like I knew everything but could build absolutely nothing. So, here's what not to do. Don't fall for the learn everything trap.

Don't let anyone tell you that exposure to a dozen frameworks makes you versatile. It makes you shallow. You become a tourist in every language and a resident of none. The turning point for me was embarrassingly simple. I picked one framework, Vue.js, and I told people out loud with my full chest, I'm going to be the best Vue.js developer in the world. But it gave me a filter for every decision. Should I take this course?

Only if it's about Vue. Should I build this project only if it deepens my Vue knowledge? Should I go to this meetup only if Vue developers are there? Think of it like a character in an RPG. I used to play Necromancer in Diablo II. You get talent points and the temptation is to spread them across every skill tree, but the real power, it always lives at the bottom of one single tree, the deep skill, the one you can only reach if you've committed fully to one path and ignore the rest.

In programming, that means pick one language, one framework, one stack, build one project all the way to a polished deployable product. Not a tutorial clone, not a half-finished experiment sitting in a private repo. A finished thing. That single finished project will teach you more than a hundred abandoned ones. I built a board game directory app because I was obsessed with a card game at the time. It wasn't revolutionary, but building it end-to-end, handling the bugs, deploying it, iterating on it, that process was my real education.

More than boot camp, more than the 19 Udemy courses I purchased, more than all the YouTube tutorials combined. One polished repo will outperform 20 scattered ones on any manager's desk, every single time. This is advice I wish someone had screamed at me. Every year, without fail, I watch my mentees try to skip Git. They want to jump straight to building flashy front-end components. They want the dopamine of seeing something on screen.

Git feels boring, terminal commands feel boring, writing documentation feels boring. So, here's what not to do. Don't skip the fundamentals because they don't look impressive on a demo. Don't skip Git. Don't skip how HTTP actually works. Don't skip reading documentation. Don't skip writing tests. Don't skip learning how to communicate in pull requests. I call this ignorance debt. It's exactly like financial debt. You can ignore it for a while and it feels fine, but interest accumulates.

And one day you're in a team meeting and you can't resolve a merge conflict in front of your colleagues. Or you deploy something that breaks production because you never understood branching. And suddenly you're the person nobody wants to pair with. Every skill that feels tedious right now, Git, terminal workflows, deployment, pipelines, writing clear commit messages, is a skill that separates people who get hired from people who get fired.

The boring stuff isn't a detour from your career. It is your career. And here's what I've realized approaching 40 that I absolutely couldn't see at 30. The developers who last in this industry aren't the ones who build the flashiest things. They're the ones who are reliable. They push clean code. They write documentation that makes the next person shop easier. They review PRs thoughtfully. The boring fundamentals are what make you indispensable.

I avoided Socket.IO for years. Every job I had, there was some way to dodge it. I'd use simpler tools. I'd find workarounds. I told myself I'd learn it eventually. But when I started building Led Social, my own product where I had no coworker to hand the hard parts to, I had no choice. I needed real-time functionality and Socket.IO was the answer. The first week was miserable. Bug after bug. Errors I couldn't understand.

Moments where I genuinely considered scrapping the whole feature. But then something cracked open. I got it and the feeling on the other side wasn't just relief. It was genuine excitement, something I dreaded for years became something I was proud to use. So, here's what not to do. Don't use I'm not passionate about back end or I'm a front end person as a shield against learning things that are hard. I did this for years.

I called myself a front end developer because it sounded like an identity, but really it was just an excuse to avoid discomfort. Here's the truth I've earned over almost a decade. Passion doesn't come first. Competence comes first. You do the hard thing, you suffer through the confusion, you break through, and then only then does enjoyment show up every single time. I've played guitar for over 25 years, and the songs I once hated practicing are now the songs I love performing the most.

Mastery creates the love, not the other way around. So, when you catch yourself saying, "I'm just not interested in that part of the stack." Ask yourself, is that a genuine preference or is it fear dressed up as a personality trait? Here's something that took me way too long to understand. The people who make money in tech aren't the ones with the best code. They're the ones who ship fast and iterate. So, here's what not to do.

Don't wait for the perfect job posting. Don't wait until your portfolio is flawless. Don't sit on a project for 6 months polishing it in private while the job market moves without you. Don't turn down a 50K job because you think you deserve 100K when you have zero experience. That 50K job, it's not a failure. It's a training round. It's where you build the skills, the resume line, and the relationships that eventually get you to 100K.

I know developers who turned down decent offers because they were holding out for something worthy of their talent. And a year later, they were still unemployed with a gap on their resume that got harder to explain with every passing month. Move fast, ship ugly code, apply for jobs you're under qualified for. Send that email to hiring managers even if your voice shakes while you type. Every action teaches you something.

Inaction teaches you nothing except how to stay exactly where you are. And this applies to your code, too. Don't hoard your work until it's perfect. Push it, let someone roast it in a code review. That feedback is worth more than another week of solo polishing. The reward for action is always greater than the reward for waiting. Always. I'm almost 40, and I've been in tech for about 8 and 1/2 years now. And I'm telling you, I'm learning more aggressively right now than I was at year one.

Right now, I'm deep in AI since layering that on top of everything I've built over the years. JavaScript, React, Node, the whole stack. And here's what's beautiful about this. None of my previous knowledge became obsolete. It compounded. The problem-solving muscles I built wrestling with Vue.js years ago, they're the same muscles I'm using now to architect AI-driven features. The debugging instincts I developed fixing broken APIs, they transfer perfectly.

So, here's what not to do. Don't think of your career as a sprint with a finish line. Don't think, "Once I land the job, I'm done learning." The developers who get comfortable are the ones who get replaced. Every single layoff wave, and I've lived through several, the people who survive are the ones who never stop being students. Think of your career in seasons. First, you learn, then you build, then you teach, then you lead, but even when you're leading, you circle back to learning.

It never stops, and it shouldn't. The moment you stop learning, you start dying professionally. I tell my mentees, if you're not consistently on the edge of what you understand, coding might not be for you. Not because you need to be a genius, but because this craft demands curiosity, permanent curiosity. The stack will change. The frameworks will change. AI will reshape the tools, but if you've built the habit of learning, you'll adapt to whatever comes next.

Your 20s are for building the foundation. Your 30s are for compounding it. And if you play it right, your 40s are for reaping what you planted, while everyone else is still wondering when to start. Here's the part that completely changed how I see my own life. For years, I carried my past around like a weight. No degree, no connections, years of bad decisions. I was the guy who got kicked out of school, who ran with the wrong crowd, whose mom looked at him with silent disappointment when he stepped off the plane in Korea.

And I used all of that as evidence for why I couldn't succeed. Every rejection email confirmed it. Every confusing JavaScript error confirmed it. My story was, I'm the screw-up, and screw-ups don't make it. So, here's what not to do. Don't let your history write your future. Don't use I don't have a CS degree as a reason not to apply. Plenty of senior developers don't have one. Don't use I'm too old to switch careers as a safety blanket.

I switched at 30. My friend switched at 40. Don't use I wasted my 20s as proof that your 30s are already decided. Your code doesn't know your backstory. It doesn't care if you partied too hard or picked the wrong major or spent 5 years in a job market you hated. Your terminal doesn't ask your GPA before it runs your program. Every developer you admire, every one of them, typed hello world on day one. Every one of them Googled basic syntax.

Every one of them had a moment where the screen was full of red errors and they wanted to close the laptop and walk away. The difference between the people who made it and the people who didn't isn't talent or age or background. It's that the people who made it decided their past was fuel instead of a cage. I'm almost 40. A decade ago, I was broke, directionless, and convinced my best years were behind me. Today, I run a mentorship that's placed over 50 developers into companies like Amazon and American Express.

I built my own product. I have a family and I wake up every single morning excited about what's next. Not because I was special, because I decided to stop telling myself the story where I lose. So, here's what I want you to do. Drop a comment below. Just write I'm starting today. That's it. Nothing fancy. And when the hard days come, and they will, scroll back to that comment and see how far you've walked since then.

And look, if anything in this video hit home, if you're sitting there thinking, "Okay, I'm ready, but I genuinely don't know what the actual next step is." I've got something for you. On May 30th at 7:00 p.m. EST, I'm doing a free live masterclass. No fluff, no pitch deck energy, just me walking you the exact things I wish someone had sat me down and explained when I was getting started. We're covering how to escape tutorial hell and start building real projects that actually matter.

How to pick your stack and stop second-guessing yourself every other week. What companies are genuinely looking for in a junior developer right now in 2026. Not what Reddit thinks they want, what they actually want. And how to position yourself to get hired even if you don't have a CS degree. Because I obviously didn't have one either. The link to register is in the description. masterclass.letfill.com After you sign up, join the WhatsApp group from that page.

That's where I'll send the actual masterclass link on the day. And I'm capping this at 500 spots because I want it to feel like a room, not a stadium. So, if you're serious, lock yours in now. If I could turn it around from where I was, you absolutely can, too. Now, go open your code editor. And remember, if I can do it, you can do it, too. Coding saves lives.