A young friend of mine was complaining about how older freelance web designers seem to talk down to younger freelance web designers because of their age and relative inexperience. I gave him this advice:
My advice to you is to believe in yourself, and be brutally honest with yourself about your abilities and your limitations.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something, because only you can be the judge of that.
If you ever happen to hit a wall because of your relative inexperience, learn from it, and don’t make the same mistake in the future. Marc Andreessen was 17 when Netscape became a multi-million dollar company. Filo and Wang were in college when Yahoo! made it big.
Listen to everyone’s advice, young, old or middle-aged; everyone’s got some truth to share or experience to pass on. Use your own internal BS filter to separate the useful nuggets from the useless crap.
Be humble. No one likes an arrogant smart ass, no matter what age he or she is.
Here endeth the lecture. (Steps off soap box)
Flyback Transformer 