When I was 23 I decide to travel whilst I was young and enjoy my youth. I’m so glad I did. I feel like I seized an opportunity that most people watch pass them by.

I’m now a very career focused and motivated Web Developer. Now that I’ve reached a certain point in my career I’m starting to make grand plans for the rest of my career and I feel like my ambition will take me along the lines of striking out on my own.

I certainly don’t feel like I want all that right now, I’m not ready, but I do constantly feel like there’s something I need to be doing. I’m at work during the day and in my time off I’m reading three technical books at once, I’m doing a side project with a colleague, doing analysis for an architecture overhaul on the software I work on at my day job and trying to maintain a blog.

I certainly feel as if I’ve fallen behind because of the time I took off to “be young”. Whilst I was doing that my peers were slowly surpassing me in experience, skill and knowledge. Although I can see that it would be easy to turn this into negative energy I certainly don’t harness my situation this way. I use the notion of me being behind as a motivator. I accept that the time I’ve not spent focused on my career is gone and I won’t get that back, but equally every moment I don’t spend working on furthering myself is another moment that is lost.

I think the effects of this feeling of falling behind is all a matter of perspective and how you harness it. For me it’s something that I use to make myself happy. I’m happy in the knowledge that I have defined my path through life, or at least my next steps, and even though I’m behind I have the ability to focus on not letting myself slip further. I find this is motivating. If I spent my time wishing for my time back or thinking about how much further I could be if I had have just focused for those extra couple of years then all the sentiments of your post definitely apply.