Editor’s note: Justin Kan is the founder of Exec, the fastest way to get your jobs or errands done in real-time. He previously co-founded Justin.tv / TwitchTV, which recently spun off Socialcam. You can follow him on Twitter @justinkan and check out his blog here.

When I was in college, I had a fixation on weight lifting. Like many other young men, I was obsessed with working out, with a disproportionate concentration on upper body muscle-building exercise. Despite what it may have appeared, my focus wasn’t on being fit (I rarely did cardio, had no flexibility), it was on appearing fit and having an adequately muscular build, especially when in comparison to my peers. Fit enough wasn’t “fit enough to my own standard,” but rather “looking more fit than everyone else.”

My mother always told me that if something was worth doing, it was worth doing your best. Unfortunately, the message got a little garbled in translation, and what I internalized was that if something was worth doing, you had to be the best. And ever since I’ve entered my adult life, I’ve always had a small knot in my chest every time I’ve done anything that can be compared; a small worrying reminder that I’m not the best at whatever it is.

Of course that is true. With over six billion human beings on the planet, there’s always someone better than you at everything you’ll ever do. Someone who will achieve more, younger. Someone who has made more money, earned more accolades. Better at music, luckier in love.

Silicon Valley has an unhealthy obsession with the being at the top. We’ve canonized Steve Jobs and idolize Mark Zuckerberg. TechCrunch headlines are almost entirely about companies being successful, acquisitions and funding rounds and “best thing ever” product launches; how many articles are about companies headed to the deadpool? I’ve had friends whose startups have grown much larger and more successful than mine, made orders of magnitude more money, and I’ve felt envy at times. I’ve seen other friends obsessed with keeping up with the startup Joneses, abandoning long-term thinking to try to find success, money and status as quickly. There is even competition for who is having the best time; at events I always hear not-so-subtly masked bragging about who is experiencing the most growth, having the most fun with their startup. I know I’ve contributed to it myself. It is insanity.

I bought into the race completely. I used to think: if we just grow to another order of magnitude of traffic, everything will be feel great. If we reach the next revenue milestone, light will shine down from the heavens and I’ll finally be successful. But we always hit our goals, and mentally nothing changed.

One of the most simultaneously depressing and enlightening moments for me was when I learned that human beings don’t get any happier day-to-day once they’ve reached a certain level of comfort. In America, that’s around $75,000 of salary a year, something which pretty much anyone reading this blog can achieve. Making more money or having more titles beyond that doesn’t do anything for you: you might feel great for five minutes, but afterwards that just fades and you have a new, higher standard of living to maintain.

It was extremely difficult to accept this; after all, I’d always lived to get to the next milestone. Go to a good university, launch a company, get funding, hit a product, hit a growth goal, raise the next round. Each time expecting that the next time would change the game. To accept that no matter what happened, I’d never feel any better than I do now, well, that was earth shattering, even though I’d experienced the same brief, fleeting high and return to earth every time. To be perfectly honest, while I theoretically accept it I am still working on internalizing it.

I have to remind myself from time to time that I want to be happy doing what I’m doing now, not after some next step, accolade, or achievement beyond my peers. The truth is that it isn’t a bad thing if I can’t get any happier: I was quite happy to begin with. For the most part I enjoy immensely my day-to-day of working on products and creating something new, something that no one has seen before. Still, I try to regularly re-evaluate that I’m doing the things I’m doing because I want to be, not for some next level of achievement.

Being successful doesn’t have to mean having the most employees or making the most money. Yes, it can mean that you do create a huge company that has massive impact and you reshape the world in your own image. But it can also simply mean that you enjoy your day-to-day and the people you work with. Have fun with what you’re doing. Do it because it gives you opportunities to grow and learn new things, and because some days are great, even if there are just as many days that are awful. No life is perfect, and that is an ok thing.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do a startup and strive to grow something big, amazing and self-sustaining. If it sounds like a challenge, then go for it, even though it will be hard and probably make you very unhappy at times. Don’t do it because you expect that there is something magical waiting for you at the other end, some state of nirvana for the rich and successful; there is always something next to attain. The journey is its own reward; if it isn’t, you’re on the wrong path.

[photo of Banksy graffiti via flickr/Duncan Hull]

Editor’s note: This guest post is by Justin Kan, cofounder of Justin.tv and TwitchTV. You can follow him on Twitter and read his blog.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was interested in doing product management at a startup. He was working as a consultant, but wanted to join a company like foursquare as a PM. However, he wasn’t getting any return calls and was becoming frustrated, and wanted my advice on why. I told him this:Guess what? Everyone thinks they are the next Steve Jobs, but they aren’t. The odds are you aren’t God’s gift to product design. And even if you are, no one will be inclined to believe it, because you have no evidence: you’ve never 1) started a startup, 2) worked at a startup, 3) worked in product management, 4) designed products as side projects. All your experience is in another irrelevant field; why should a successful startup give you a chance?

The risk that each party takes has to be equal. You are taking a risk in tying your career to a startup: the less proven the startup is, the more risk you are taking. The startup is taking a risk by assuming you will be an effective producer: the less direct experience you have, the more risk they are taking. Many times I see younger would-be employees not understand this: they think they should be able to get a job as a PM at a Dropbox or Airbnb, not realizing that they are taking practically no risk on the company. At the same time, they have no PM experience themselves, so the risk the company would be taking on them is quite high. Consequently, they rarely get the jobs without exceptionally good self-salesmanship.

Sometimes these young people watch The Social Network or read stories about other Millennials founding companies with no experience and think they should be able to join a startup with little domain background. After all, they’ve seen their friends leave their jobs and start companies in completely different industries, right?

This is a fallacy, however. Only one person gets the benefit of the doubt at a startup: the founder. That is because the founders of a company are taking the most risk, and consequently the company is by necessity willing to take the maximal amount of risk on them. This doesn’t apply to later employees, where risk has been vastly reduced.

So what should you do if you want a career switch to a job at a startup you don’t have any experience in? In traditional industry, you might go to business school, after which it is socially acceptable to switch job tracks, but everyone knows having an MBA doesn’t go too far in a startup.

Instead, I’d recommend a couple things. First, consider looking at startups where you can get in on the ground floor; generally, companies with less than 10 people. These companies are unproven and won’t likely have throngs of experienced people banging down the doors. By matching yourself to a company where you’ll be taking on as much risk as it will be taking on you, you’re likely to be higher up in the candidate pool than you would be at an already successful startup.

Second, consider applying for a job in an area you have experience in, and then once you’re in, work your way into the area where you want to be. For example, if you have experience in sales but want to work on product, join a company that needs sales, prove that you are competent in sales and then you will be taken much more seriously internally when talking about product. Eventually, you might even get the opportunity to do product directly: companies are much more likely to give chances to employees who are already doing well in another area. This is because you’ve reduced the risk associated with you. When considering a new employee, there are many risk factors: will she be productive, have a good attitude, fit in culturally. By being a competent existing employee, you’ve just removed several of those risk factors, making it easier for the company to take a chance on letting you work on something new.

Third, spend much, much more time and effort on your “application” than you would for a traditional application. To startup founders, it is always flattering and attention grabbing when someone takes the time to think in depth about their relatively unknown business. Sometimes, job applications are more like a series of conversations about the vision and future of the product. That’s how we hired Jacob, our first designer for Justin.tv / TwitchTV, who did several rounds of mockups for the product without even being hired as a contractor. That’s how Tristan Walker secured his position at foursquare, by sending a series of emails to the founders and flying out to NYC on his own.

Lastly, try to give yourself some experience. In your spare time, design something. Almost anything goes a long way to differentiating yourself from the throngs of people who want to work on products but have never done so. Even an unsuccessful web application is better than nothing; it shows that you at least can produce something basic.

You can get your dream job at a startup and get into the tech world, even if you have limited experience. You just need to expect to go above and beyond, and be flexible in where you are starting out. No one is going to go out of their way to make it easy for you.

Image credit: Shutterstock/IKO

Editor’s note: This guest post is by Justin Kan, cofounder of Justin.tv and TwitchTV. He is 28 years old. You can follow him on Twitter and read his blog.

In his New York Times opinion piece yesterday, William Deresiewicz calls the Millennial generation, those born roughly between the end of the 70s and the mid-90s, a generation of salesmen. Emotionless, aspiring to be liked by all, because that is what will attract the most customers. “No anger, no edge, no ego.”

He got some things right. We have a distrust of large organizations. We don’t look down on people creating small businesses. But we’re not emotionless, that couldn’t be further from the truth. We have anger, which flares up to become the Arab Spring and OccupyWallStreet movements. We have ego, which I see in every entrepreneur who thinks their tech startup is the best thing since sliced bread. We have passion, and an intense drive to follow our passions through, immediately.

Our generation is autonomous. It is impatient. We refuse to pay our dues; if we start an entry level job then 6 months later we want to be running the department. We hop from job to job; the average tenure at any job for an American 25 to 34-years-old is just 3 years. We think we can do anything we can imagine, whether it is rise to fame like Deadmau5 for our music or launch a new product on Kickstarter, and hate the idea that we should ever be beholden to someone else.

We do this because we have been abandoned by the institutions that should have embraced us. The past decade has shown us a massively inefficient government that has spent millions in foreign wars, incapacitated by partisan dogma. Politics are controlled by the old, people who don’t understand technology, a situation which seems immutable. Corporations have turned their backs on us: many of us came to age in the 2008 financial crisis, and even though we were promised that a college education was the key to a blessed life we couldn’t find a job post graduation.

So we’re making our own way and making our own jobs. We create our own tech startups, we’re making a living producing videos on Youtube. We’re starting our own non-profits instead of joining stagnant, bureaucratic NGOs. We’re growing and selling our own organic food. We don’t need your jobs, your advice, your instruction. Pretty soon we won’t need your music labels or publishing houses; we’ll be doing it ourselves on iTunes and Amazon. We don’t need you at all, except perhaps as a customer.

We’re not salesmen, as Deresiewicz states. Selling is just one part of running a functional enterprise, and not the most important part at that. Our hero Steve Jobs knew that without a great product, selling is useless, and that’s why he cared about the products above all else. His showmanship around them was just a reflection of his passion. Before we’re ever selling anything, we have an idea for it, and that is where our love and emotion is revealed. Unlike previous generations, if we’re on the web or at a store and something we want doesn’t exist, our first thought is not “why?” but simply that maybe we should create it ourselves.

This isn’t the first time the Millennial generation has been criticized for what is perceived as shallowness, a lack of connection with others, or just a materialistic nature. David Fincher spent an entire 121 minutes trying to pillory Mark Zuckerberg with a made-up fable, and all he did was inspire another generation of would-be entrepreneurs.

We are a generation of makers. A generation of creators. Maybe we don’t have the global idealism of the hippies. Our idealism is more individual: that every person should be able to live their own life, working on what they choose, creating what they choose. If you want to build a company to change the world, go for it. If you want to be an independent knife maker, what is stopping you?

We follow our passions. If we do it as a business, then we can create the ability to support ourselves doing what we love, and with some measure of security and autonomy that no institution is going to grant us. The Millenial path to self-actualization is the individual path, each man to create it for himself.

Is that selling out? We’re just doing what you regret not having the balls to do.

Editor’s note: This guest post is by Justin Kan, cofounder of Justin.tv and TwitchTV. You can follow him on Twitter and read his blog.

Everyone knows there’s a war going on today in Silicon Valley: a war for talent. Startups are competing for a limited supply of engineering and product design labor, largely constrained by the failure of the US to invest in STEM education and a terribly restrictive immigration process for work visas. Meanwhile, big companies like Facebook and Google are paying out millions to either retain or rehire engineers through talent acquisitions.

This system is under even more pressure from seed funds (Sorry: I’m a part-time partner at Y Combinator, so I’m probably contributing to the problem). Not only do you have to worry about your engineers going to your competition, you have to worry about them getting seeded to run off and start their own company. It’s often hard to compete against the “grass is greener” dream of being a founder, especially when the theoretical upside of doing your own thing is nearly infinite and there are investors ready to write you a convertible note check today. No cap necessary!

If you want to attract and retain the best talent, you’re going to have to work hard at it. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned in the past couple months:

1) Have a vision

When our main product was JustinTV, no one wanted to work at our company. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration, but few talented engineers said to themselves “Oh my god! My dream has always been to work at a general live video platform: you guys are the perfect fit!” We hired several talented people, but mostly because we were a YC company, had a few interesting technology scaling challenges and we seemed really cool.

When we launched TwitchTV, a community around broadcasting and watching video gaming, everything changed. We started to get a LOT more inbound candidates: it turns out the overlap between programmers and pro-gamers is pretty high. We had a new vision to bring competitive gaming to the masses, and there are many people out there who share that vision and want to be a part of making that world a reality. By communicating a vision that harnesses the passions of a certain group of people, we tapped into a talent pool we wouldn’t otherwise have had access too.

2) Be the only option

If you want a job as a programmer at a social media site, all you have to do is walk down the street in San Francisco waving your front-end engineer resume and you’ll be employed in 30 seconds. The competition to be the best social network, photo sharing platform, event discovery engine, or Facebook for X is fierce… and everyone is losing to Facebook.

I remember reading an Elon Musk interview where he claimed that if you were an engineer that wanted to innovate in rocketry or electric cars, there really wasn’t anywhere else to work but Space X or Tesla. Consequently, they attract the top engineering talent in those industries. For every industry, there are some set of talented people who are passionate about innovating and solving the difficult problems. If you’re the company that happens to be innovating and solving difficult problems, then you’re going to end up the the default “Best place to work in X.” My recommendation: pick an industry where that title will be possible to achieve.

3) Create a cult

The buzz over perks, salary and fancy benefits wears off. Every time you give someone a raise or new title, she feels good… for a week. Soon after, it settles in and becomes a new baseline, and worse still it becomes leverage for her to get a higher paying job somewhere else.

Instead, focus on providing an environment that builds community within your company. Often heard example: provide company lunches. It isn’t just efficient, but it increases opportunities for serendipitous discussion over meal times and employees will be more likely to become friends. The more friends at a company, the more enjoyable the job and the more you want to stay where you are.

My friend Matt Brezina’s company, Sincerely, creators of postcard sharing app Postagram, goes beyond that. The entire company takes week-long workcations in Mexico. They heavily recruit within social circles and when a candidate flies in for an interview they will put him up in an Airbnb in a neighborhood he would be likely to live, and the team will spend the weekend hanging out with him. By building a sense of family, you build lasting connections between your employees that will keep them motivated and around.

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Your talented team is the most vital part of any startup. The way to retain the best talent is by having a clear vision, working in an area where you’re the only company and creating a place where people connect with each other.