[mjfl]

I spent a good 10 years of my life in a legitimate attempt to become an NFL player. If you saw me, you would have said it was a long shot - of course it was - but I didn't let any of this get to me and I worked extremely hard to get to that goal. But I failed. I started for 3 years on my D3 college football team but at the end of my senior season I was still laughably far from NFL caliber. When I put my pads away for the last time it was devastatingly clear that I had completely wasted on average 20-30 hours every week for the past 10 years of my life, hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person.

You know what I did? I moved on, fast. And that is the solution to failure - move on quickly. And I did move on, and have found success after.

[sage76]

I consider you lucky, you had a big goal and you went all out to try and get there. There has to be some satisfaction in having put it all out on the line. Most people live fairly mundane lives, directionless and sans ambition.

I wish I had that kind of singular focus on something when I was 10. Considering where I was born, I had little opportunity to pursue sports/music/whatever at a young age, my society pushes kids to become bookworms. I feel I greatly missed out.

> hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person.

It's overrated, and you can have normality when you're old.

[gkya]

"Normality" is really very overrated indeed. I learnt rather late that one had to come to terms with his particularities and that "normal" was not that good of a thing to be; realisations before which I was suffering in agony because I wasn't "normal". Conforming to the society without compromising oneself is okay, trying to fix defects one's own personality is okay, but all these are possible without becoming "normal", which implies mediocrity, ordinariness.

[wslh]

> ...it was devastatingly clear that I had completely wasted on average 20-30 hours every week for the past 10 years of my life, hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person.

Beyond the "making friends and/or becoming a normal person" issues, don't you think that training for 10 years on a single goal gives you an idea of complexity that you can apply to other fields? I was (90%) healthy obsessed by developing software in my youth and that gave me an edge on how far, now, I can help others to solve software development problems.

Indeed, I love all this subject about high competition analysis, but, to see how you can apply it at a humble level.

[exit]

what did you move on to?