[flashgordon]

If it makes you feel better my own mediocrity in life despite passion and interests has gotten me to realize/reconcile a couple of things:

1. You cannot control results, just your efforts. So keep at it and don't worry about failures/lack of brilliance (don't seek failures ofcourse). 2. Trust there is a higher power (you don't need to be religious about this). There is pretty big chance you just stumbled into your bad luck the same way most of the "great folks" stumbled into their greatness (I am pretty sure you are not working orders of magnitude less than them).