Don't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted that - in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basic feature of life - how regret seems 'objective', but it's far from it.

"Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. ...Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. ...Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. ...Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. ...This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life." - Kierkegaard, Either/Or

(The Preface of Either/Or even says about the book's chapters "Read them or do not read them, you will regret it either way."!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken

> Frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.

> According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Source: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misr...

edit: whoops, someone beat me to it and already posted the link

" The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. "

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misr...

To add to your description: The author of this article suggests that The Road Less Traveled is not about the action of taking the riskier or more adventurous path. It is about how, in the future, we need to justify the decisions we made in the past.

"According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives."

There is a lot of advice on this thread, so I might have missed it, but perhaps what I can contribute to the OP is that they should reflect on what they have the ability to change, and what they can not.

Be realistic about what you can contribute now, and what in the future you will be able to contribute with a concerted effort. Focus on your short-term ability and try to dovetail that with your long-term goals.

I don't really like quoting Tech Barons, but here's a good one from Bill Gates.

"We often overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in ten."

"When his advice was asked whether to marry or not, he said, 'Whichever you do, you will regret it!' "

- Diogenes Laertius, Life of Socrates, from Lives of the Philosophers, ~200AD

https://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcast/designing-the-life-you-...

How does one regret hanging himself?

Seriously though, one of the consistent things said by people who attempted to commit suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate bridge but survived were (paraphrasing) "At that moment, I realized that of all the problems in my life, this(jumping) was the only one I couldn't fix".

At that point, when it was too late, they regretted it.

https://abc7news.com/society/second-chances-i-survived-jumpi...

I couldn't personally get through the second volume yet, but I plan to some day, when I'm older. In the meanwhile, I would quite recommend the first volume, which I've read twice.

This point of you'll regret it anyway is wrong in my opinion. I believe you are way more likely to regret things you've never done than thing you have done.

And that's why it's wrong, you can make relatively sound decisions using degree of regret as a measure as opposed to assuming you will regret it equally ... when you look at your life and project yourself to your deathbed imagine how you'd feel.

Still they exist, just look for them on parenting forums, reddit threads, facebook groups. But yes, a lot of them is about having chrildren too early

Take it with a grain of salt though, it’s purely anecdotal.

In any case, how you feel on your deathbed is about the least relevant feeling you will ever have in your life.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/07/11/more-champagne/

Regretting that you haven't done anything significant in your life is as probable as regretting you haven't had enough fun.

Here is a nice article that made me think about this https://medium.com/@rikardhjort/the-deathbed-fallacy-5e54d96...

Plenty of people who lost their jobs and opportunities because they shirked on work wish that. I've personally wished I'd spent more time at the office, so it is definitely not "no-one" who wishes that.

The broader point here is not to confuse what we want to be -- either the stories we tell ourselves or chew-on from emotionally inspiring stories -- with what we actually are as animals trying to survive in this crazy world. It's not conventional wisdom that what you think now matters more than on your deathbed, but one shouldn't be a slave to conventional wisdom so severely that they can't conceive of non-conventional wisdom as true.

You also don't need to worship someone's word just because they were famous. If Keynes wanted to contribute to my happiness, he needs to do more than produce trite quotes. Perhaps champagne would have lead to that, but it is doubtful. In any case, real people aren't playing a statistical game; whether or not I am likely to regret something is analogous to whether or not I am likely to live with a German Shepherd. Statistics say "no", but the truth doesn't need to confirm or support that, because the statistics are based on missing information that I actually possess. The information you possess about your own life is a tool you should leverage to ignore such silly quotes.

> Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

> Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

> Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.

I got bored at high school and life in general. I discovered programming and thought that it's fascinating. So I decided to learn programming. I self-learned and started building my own projects, big and small.

But now a couple years after my biggest regret is exactly the same, why did I waste so much time at high school and why didn't I start earlier.

How long does it take to get a bachelors in college? 4 years? How many years do we have in a lifetime? Not including our youth? 60? 70?

All it takes is dedication and persistence to learn the things we want to learn.

Persistence is a pretty good quality to have for learning most anything.

my own example, i have literally zero free time to pursue any opportunities at all, whatsoever. i work, i come home and take care of family, i sleep for a precious few hours, repeat.

dedication ain’t the issue.

and i’m a highly paid worker. the people that live 2 hours away, the g bus drivers and so on, they do not have opportunities that can be addressed merely be dedication.

> So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2]

> We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We've taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What are your abilities?

The future is unknown, and we are actually making decisions for our future self. When you're 18 or 25 you don't even know what interests you will have when being 35 or 40, at least I didn't know.

What Graham is saying is to make decisions that will allow you more choices in the future.

From their homepage: "You have 80,000 hours in your career. Make the right career choices, and you can help solve the world’s most pressing problems, as well as have a more rewarding, interesting life. We’re here to give you the information you need to find that fulfilling, high-impact career. Our advice is all free, tailored for talented graduates & young professionals, and based on five years of research alongside academics at Oxford."

The 80000 hours podcast can be long winded but is at times also quite interesting.

This means giving 10% of my income to cost-effective charities that help other individuals is entirely within my means.

Over the years, within the Effective Altruism (EA) community I have met amazing people - devoting their lives to solving important, neglected problems, people who give 50% of their income to help others, and more. I'm consistently inspired by them to do more - and it makes life a thrill.

https://80000hours.org/career-planning-tool/

The EA worldview takes some getting used to though.

Utility is fine. Packing shelves is fine. Do you have time to follow your passion out of work? Can you make your passion pay enough? Most people I've met who gave up on their passion seemed to want praise, fame and/or notoriety rather than the 'art' or whatever they were producing.

Somewhere in here there's the Peter principle that people rise to their highest level of incompetence... it's true in art as well as engineering/business.

Utility for the win! Following your dreams is fun and all, but the risk/reward ratio is just way out there.

My undergrad AI lecturer told us that it was widely "known" AI was soon going to be generally smarter than humans when he was an undergrad. He wasn't convinced evolutionary changes were going to get us there. It was some 15 years ago I was listening to him, probably 20 or more years before that when he was an undergrad. We still seem to be saying it's 10, 20, or some other made up number of years away.

I'm not even sure there's a significant future problem here. Not on the scale of, say, becoming a multi-planetary species or resolving issues with antibiotic resistance.

(That probably has nothing to do with the actual AI Safety problems studied today in regards to pure AIs. But damned if this isn't an important-A-F cousin of the problem.)

This is something I care quite deeply about so it is the "problem I decided to solve", as OP puts it. I think what we do in professional life will most likely not involve solving meaningful problems, since most industry is not focused on such things (and can't, because it is often the cause). For me, I try to work on political and especially labour issues outside of work, since that seems to me to be the most likely way to achieve significant improvements in society.

The fact that 80000 hours has seemingly never discussed ideas involving labour unions or grassroots political activism but rather focuses on think tanks and other elitist top-down approaches is pretty telling of their neoliberal bent.

Now, if you think you can pull a Nelson Mandela, go for the activist approach, but most people can't, and 80,000 hours is in the business of giving advice to maximize expected utility.

This is also the reason EA gets a lot of hate from various quarters. They take picking your battles to an extreme, and essentially come right out and say that many worthy causes are not the right ones to be fighting for.

But it was very anti-climax and frustrating for me when they announced that their problem was to help other people find their problem. Too... comfortable solution I guess, I don't know. Not judging their choice here, just stating that as an expectator, from an entertainment point of view, it was frustrating.

Be honest with yourself, balance your desire to do good (utilons) with your need as a human to feel good and recharge your altruism batteries by feeling connected to your good work.

As someone who has been orbiting two poles of education and CS for my whole career, I'd also suggest reflecting on why energy and AI are currently more attractive to you than healthcare. There doesn't have to be a reason, but sometimes I feel like the attraction of pure science fields is that they don't involve the messy human issues that come with social science, like identity and culture, power and your own positionality.

As engineers and humans, we like to do good work, in a field where we have the autonomy to choose best practices. Health care makes it difficult to do that. I don't think it's productive to call people out for choosing not to work in a field where they have to deal with arbitrary and capricious rules, ignorant bureaucracies, and massive amounts of incidental complexity which has nothing to do with the primary objective: keeping people healthy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_834_Enrollment_Implementa...

Sounds like a terrible pain that you understand well enough to be able to solve. When you have, it might remove a major bottleneck and open the floodgates for more smart people to join, ultimately benefitting healthcare in a massive way.

Make people want to work in that industry :)

I think it would be truly revolutionary if we could change the format, but what I think would be almost a better step is to write open source parsers that can accurately translate X12 into something sane and keep the interchange the same so that everything can be balanced out like a checkbook. Check out the 835 format for this part as it's supposed to be a data stream of transactions. Too bad the dozens of flavors of X12 are locked behind licensing and thousands of dollars of books for the rules :/

Additional reading on this god-awful data format: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19398-01/820-1275/6ncv5s178/inde...

Long answer: It's not like people don't understand that the current situation is suboptimal. It's that any kind of change implemented unilaterally will leave you unable to communicate with your counterparties. The severe consequences of this (not getting paid, being out of compliance with HIPAA) means that any kind of change to health-care IT at a system-wide level requires an absolutely massive amount of politicking and often fails to improve the situation.

The problem is that health care institutions are so interlinked that driving any kind of global change is a process best measured in decades. Combine this with the fact that the culture in health care is very conservative, and people tend to be hostile towards change by default and you have a situation where it's often easier to leave the industry and save your sanity than to remain and continue bashing your head into a brick wall over and over again.

https://xkcd.com/927/

The whole field feels like such a mess to deal with what basically boils down to text/numerical data. You could probably spend the rest of your life just writing parsers to consolidate different data formats. I truly don't believe healthcare will be solved by technology until there is a single ubiquitous format. It's really a problem of policy, and I won't purport to know the answer or who should be solving the issue, but I don't think it's ever going to be solved by one person at a keyboard.

There are standards such as HL7/FHIR, but in my experience, most companies incorrectly or partially implement the spec, and then it might as well be something else.

Great point. What startups that are trying to infiltrate "old/traditional" industries like hospitals or healthcare are realizing. Need to shadow doctors to see their workflow, not just propose a solution based on your observation or reading articles about hospital shortcomings.

Being an outside can sometimes mean that you call attention to that, and show better ways. And with the internet and publications, can be an effective way to do that.

Most of the times however, there are reasons and you should at least understand why. But for those cases where "why" isn't defined, poke at them.... You're likely to find something interesting.

There is always a reason why things are done a particular way "It's always been done that way" is shorthand for "I don't know why it's done that way". Like history, you need to understand the reasons behind a process before you can effectively change it, otherwise you are doomed to make the same mistakes and very soon your shiny new process will start to look as cobbled together as the previous one.

The way the system works in whatever country you live in has shortcomings. Finding ways to fix those issues higher up the chain will provide the most value.

Something to help with the paralysis is to note that you are in a very privileged position. Majority of the world is not plagued by this issue because the problem they have to solve is how to survive. So, in other words, there is no wrong answer here. Whatever you choose will bring positive value to the world. Do not get paralyzed on if it is the most value you can provide because there is no way you can foresee this or measure it.

I will advise that you pick the one that seems to generate the most passion in you, not in the follow your passion sense, but more of the fact that there will be HARD times ahead when solving HARD problems and only the love of finding the solution is gonna take you through it. If you pursue a path for any other reason (except survival), when the going gets tough you will always measure if it is worth the trouble. In your case, your heart seems to be in Energy and AI, while your practical side tells you Healthcare is very important to the world. I will say go with Energy and AI cause who the hell knows. Where I live a major problem health centers have is consistent energy and who knows you may come up with some AI that Diagnoses better than a human can for a specific disease. My point is I have found that following where my interests really lie always lead me to where I am supposed to be. You may start in Energy and AI and somewhere bridge the gap into healthcare or you may jump in and solve problems you never imagined and be fully self-actualized. The most important thing out of all of this is that you start.

This. Don't think to big. In the end you will spend your time wrestling problems, you'd better love those problems and the tools there are to go at them. That's priority one, I'd say.

This is useful and not always talked about.

Whatever you choose you're going to have to deal with crap you don't like: where are you more willing to put up with it?

Also related to this: think about which process (daily grind, slog…) you prefer. Not just the end goal/success.

This is simply not true.

There are many jobs where the company's profit and your income come from hurting or exploiting others. Yes, you would be "surviving" like everyone else. But I think you have an obligation to do some kind of good, or at least not screw over people less fortunate than yourself. This is especially true if you are coming from a privileged position.

If you have options, pick something that doesn't hurt others.

I don't mean to pick on you. I understand that none of the OP's or your suggestions are actively harmful. It's that I often hear people with options justify choosing careers that are bad for society this way (especially in tech).

The things that bug you -are- the things you care about.

Some people care way too much about things they shouldn’t but that’s a whole other discussion all together ;-)

I started my career in CS with zero knowledge of what I really wanted to do out of college. However back in early 2000s, I was extremely frustrated of how difficult/buggy online banking portals were for managing my finances, so I decided to get into Fintech for a couple years. Eventually that led me to designing a nationally awarded banking portal that was ahead of its time in relation to its online features.

Then I became a gamer as a young adult, and decided to get into social/mobile gaming as I couldn't find any games on those platforms that really catered to a traditional gamer. I ended up building a few real-time action-rpgs and strategy games that ran within the browser and on mobile.

Then I got really technical in driving better gaming/interactivity in the browser, because I was hitting so many annoying limitations. So I joined the Adobe's Flash and open standards team to push these boundaries. We managed to add 3D gpu rendering to Flash, and while making progress with browser standards for better native multimedia-related features.

Now for last few years I've started to expand outside software and dive really into academic political philosophy, and I became really concerned with the current polarization in the US, and it's total lack of real genuine communication between people of differencing views. So (plug) I'm creating a self-funded startup that's a live debate platform called https://DinnerTable.Chat that hopefully provides a helpful communication medium for authentically discussing viewpoint differences (as it is, after all, an emotional journey to change one's mind). I don't know if this will work, but I've always trusted my intuition of following the desire to solve things that bug me.

edit: see my reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839530

By analogy with machine learning, instead of throwing lots of effort at a non-convex problem, you might instead choose a convex problem instead: e.g. what daily process allows you to achieve high problem solving output? what expertise can you acquire and put to use regularly, which is sustainable (no burnout, pays rent, etc)?

The "problems" that I solve, or try to solve, come mostly from the following sources: academic colleagues asking questions, natural questions that arise during math seminars, finding the optimal way to reach some goal specified by one of my bosses, finding ways to fix or understand ad hock methods invented by my coworkers, natural questions that occur to me while reading astronomy, math, AI, or economics articles, and lastly, answering mathematical or AI questions about games just because I love games and game theory.

Sometimes problems or questions will remain in my head for years before being solved. Many are never solved, but they are fun to think about.

It is very rare that one of my solutions affects more than 100 people.

Some people can work just for material benefit to themselves and their families. However, eventually that juice runs out because money is just not useful beyond a point. Depression is a first world problem, generally. Why is it that people who are materially better off than most of their peers in the last century become depressed?

The key, it seems, is to find a goal that is higher than immediate selfish interests of the individual or family. This might even mean staying in your current situation but just realigning "why" you are doing it to something higher. It is very hard to find an unselfish person who is depressed, unsure about what to do or unhappy in general.

The goal makes all the difference.

So, like a good git commit message :P

Jokes aside, good point and imo the number one answer to the question. Not sure why you got a dwonvote even. If you're ok with material benefits then yeah, anything goes of course. But that only gets you so far and indeed real value seems to lie beyond that. It took me alomost half a life to realize it, but altruism really does give me much more than materialsim.

Admittedly, material benefit to myself and my family isn't the only reason I work. However, the argument that "money is just not useful beyond a point" isn't a strong one in my mind. I'm in my late forties right now and make a reasonable sum of money. I doubt I will ever get to the point where making more money won't get me more of what I want. Right now, I need to weight priorities when it comes to spending money (generator for my house vs something else). Getting to the point where I don't need to do that (for important things) would be my "more money isn't useful" point. I doubt I will ever get there.

Now, what can money buy? Only things on the physical level, that is, _sense experiences_. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches. That's it. Money can't buy love or knowledge. Maybe a library, but not knowledge :)

So even in a naive examination money has limited uses which apply at the physical/material level. It's useful to note that happiness/wellbeing is largely a state of mind and thus you might find someone who is equally or more happy than you despite not having the generator. How is this possible?

The point is that as inherent motivation money just isn't good. People who are incentivised inevitably want greater and greater compensation or they burn out. In contrast, those fired up by a higher ideal (which, of course, includes the wellbeing of the family) are motivated by an initiative to work which is not dependent upon something external.

So, make your money, and install that generator. But don't make the mistake of thinking your wellbeing/happiness is dependent upon XYZ externally.

This is an oversimplification that detracts from the value of money. Your assumption that money can only buy sense experiences is incorrect. In reality, money can have a significant impact on the (emotional) and (intellectual) realms.

# Example for (emotional):

A couple with two children living together. The couple's emotional bonding is strained by feeling overwhelmed due to house chores. The strain can be significantly reduced by spending money on a nanny, ordering food when not in the mood for cooking, and other forms of domestic help.

# Example for (intellectual)

Working person with a family wants to pursue a second degree as a hobby. Unfortunately, they can't afford university.

It's true that, beyond a certain point, the returns from having more money diminish quickly. And I agree that as an inherent motivation it probably doesn't work for many people - only as a means to an end. But to say that money can only buy sense experiences is untrue.

What do you base your well-being or happiness in?

Of course, buying more expensive things and increasing your income is still a good feeling, but after some time they become status quo and your happiness is back at the same level as it was before the pay raise (especially since there are now new, more expensive things to seek).

That’s not actually true though. There’s pretty robust research to show that happiness is correlated with log money. It’s not a function that becomes flat after a certain point, at least not as far as any research I’ve read says. Although the correlation or causation question remains: do happier people make more money, or does more money make people happier, or is there some underlying third variable that affects both? But the fact that lottery winners do end up becoming happier suggests that there is a causal element in the money->happiness direction.

Do you have a source for this? Thank you.

"It is very hard to find an unselfish person who is depressed, unsure about what to do or unhappy in general."

That depression and unhappiness are more difficult to spot in people who are selfless does not necessarily mean that those people are significantly happier and less depressed - it could only mean that they care more about how others perceive them and may, therefore, be more likely to hide their true affect.

Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. But if your goal is to maximize your output having already accepted that your time on earth is limited, then the wise thing is to probably steer in directions that have high impact but for you feel disproportionately easy (compared to the general population).

Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved".

Archiving, for me, is a way of travelling forward in time. Think about "time capsules" and what not.

Here's what I mean by this: If you write a message on a piece of paper, and read it the next day, your message has successfully traveled forward in time by a day. But as the days pass, the message's survival chances diminish greatly.

The goal of archiving is to give information the highest chances possible to travel forward in time, as long as possible. It's hard to evaluate how good our chances are now, but 2000 years from now, if archaeologists find information on our current society, is it more likely to be the piece of paper you wrote, or an archive that was given the best chances of survival?

It's extremely rewarding and it truly is meaningful. Archive anything. Sort and order it, index it, describe it, upload it. Do it for something you work on. The odds for you to archive something that was not done by anyone else are very high.

Recently added OCR to the process, which makes retrieval a joy.

I have no logical reason for doing this, it feels like a compulsion.

Why do you do it and what tools do you use?

To travel in time :) And also because I believe human knowledge is the sum of the past it can learn from. If information gets lost, it can't be part of that. It's the same beliefs that drive me to support open source & free software.

> what tools do you use?

I do a lot of data-mining as part of my day to day operations, in video games mainly. These are the main things I end up archiving, so I write my own tools.

Largely, this mindset stems from a group of characters in the book "Anathem"[1] named the Lorites, characters who believe that all knowledge which can be learned has already been discovered, and recorded. While this is obviously fiction, and I disagree with the stance as an absolute, the idea that much of what can be discovered may already have been explored has saved me significant time; no longer do I find myself working on a problem only to find it has been studied and solved. Occasionally I'll find problems which have been studied, but not yet solved, and in these situations I'm pleased to have the fruit of others' data-gathering labors at my disposal as a result of the search caused by my initial assumption.

[1]: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, speculative fiction: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite

Access to electricity is a massive problem and the number of people without access is actually projected to increase [1].

We need more people working on the problem and we especially need people from SSA working on it.

We are working to inspire young people and to provide them with the tools and knowledge they need to go and solve the problem of access to electricity. [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-popul...

[2] https://localelectricity.org/

I tend to work the other way.

Some day we will have smart homes. How would they look like and how can I work towards that vision? Or, what restricts ubiquity of wearables? In my opinion wireless charging over a considerable distance. Then I contemplate how I would do it. For example embedded in ceiling lights with infrared lasers and a positioning system. And I talk about it in case someone else also finds it an interesting idea, because I've so little time on this planet...

I seriously doubt that. People who have no aptitude in a field, even if they are dedicated, will be competing vs people who are also dedicated, but have the aptitude. I'd say maybe that "almost anyone can reach top 50% of most non-athletic fields", but definitely not top 5%.

Now consider a niche sport, say Ultimate Frisbee. I would guess that much less than 350 million people even know the rules. So invest an hour to learn the rules and play it a little with your friends. Voila, you are in the top 5%. And that is for an athletic sport.

You are probably talking about 5% of the people actively doing it like being registered in an association. In this case, 50% sounds more realistic to me.

At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area.

If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5% (the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in.

>Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved".

Which is a self-aggrandising way for Theils to say that he helped solve some problems that wouldn't have been solved otherwise.

Unless you have tons of means to contribute (e.g. billions) to some cause, the idea starting out as some e.g. college student that "this problem wont be solved without my help" is 99.9999% BS.

> At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area.

I believe the GP is saying you can be in the top 5% of a chosen field, if you try, because other people are pursuing other things. So 100% of the population could be in the top 5% of something.

This is where I find deep meaning in the Cervantes quote, “The road is always better than the inn.” Accepting the outcome of the admixture of own’s controllable action and the infinitely greater uncontrollable action of the world as positive can go a long way to a kind of stoic peace and ultimately happiness with one’s worldly produce.

With enough specialization, everybody can become the best in one specific topic. That's the game most phd students play.

Given the rapid devaluation of Phds (never mind the big debts), it doesn't serve them very well in most areas of science...

If anything, it gives him a motive to say it (virtue signal) which is not "to tell the truth".

So, the advice might very well be true and we should very well follow it. But thus far we have absolutely no arguments as to if that's the case.

Exactly, I started reading his book Zero to One and quickly dropped it into trash-bin after scanning randomly. I am not sure why it got rated so high. In my view entire advise boils down to create businesses in uncharted territories and create a monopolies around them.

Also, there’s a ton of fairly specific problems that haven’t been solved yet, so chances of someone working on it are small.

Also, that's not really how regrets work. You will be comparing the path you took to what you imagine to be the roads not taken. It's very dependent on your own unique experiences and outlook, and very hard to safeguard against. Your way of evaluating your life will change over time, so optimising for your current values gives no guarantees. Best thing to work on is stoicism and self forgiveness in my opinion.

Thinking of alternative paths you could have taken might be a fun exercise or could yeild insights to make better future choices, but if you chose the best you could, there is no sense in regretting a choice, even when that choice hurt.

I think of this concept as similar to the excluded middle in logic. In hindsight, a decision is apparently either good or bad depending on the outcome. But it’s impossible to know the outcome with certainty the vast majority of the time. So a decision needs to be judged in the context of the information known at the time of decision - which does not include the information about the decisions outcome.

The value of a decision before uncovering its value is similar to the value of a lottery ticket before the draw. Before the drawing a lottery tickets value is nonzero-the aggregate value of the expected payout. But after the draw the lottery ticket is worth its realized value. When the pre-lotto expected value of the ticket meets or exceeds the cost of the lottery ticket the purchase of the ticket is rational. After the draw, the monetary value of the ticket is whatever the ticket won or did not win. Most likely the value of the ticket is 0$. That doesn’t make the purchase of the ticket irrational before the draw.

Find one thing that you do want to do: something that is silently but persistently pulling you in. Ideally, something you just couldn't not do.

I'm not a religious person but I really like the tone of the "$god works in mysterious ways". You never know what your choices and path will expand into: it might be something that's related to all three energy, AI, and healthcare but you never would've guessed in the start.

You can always out-smart yourself and convince yourself to do the thing that makes sense but the sensible thing often doesn't mean something that truly fulfills you.

Because future is extremely hard to know, or even predict, all you can do is follow your light.

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur/status/1074526838901202944

> Been having many conversations with people in their 20s about the paralysis that can arise from having too many life choices. My advice: commit to something and commit hard. Doesn't matter if you switch later. It's easier to prove yourself if you've had to do it once before.

> The quarter-life crisis can go on for quite a while--and you don't want to come out having little to show for your self-exploration. You learn just as much, if not more, about whether you like something by actually doing it, rather than thinking about if you might like it.

and then the somewhat morose conclusion:

> At one point in my mid-twenties, a friend observed that we were nearing the end of getting opportunities because of our potential and would soon be evaluated on what we've actually done. This was a real turning point in my thinking on how much space I should take to find myself.

I think there is a problem with trying to target your attention on world changing technology, in that it is very rare for the world to be changed in a big way by direct effort towards change. I think this is related to both the difficulty in identifying what will really provide benefit and also the difficulty in actually achieving anything beyond incremental change to mature technology. Ideas that really make a difference tend to come out of left field and are almost completely unexpected.

If you are looking for something to do that you will look back from your death bed and say "I did that", then you need to select something that you can actually achieve. This will not be the thing that everybody else is working on, because unless you are truely remarkable your effort will be lost in the noise of what everybody else is doing. You need to find something that your both enjoy, and after honest evaluation you have the ability to excel in and take to the next level.

If you were living in the early 1900's I would suggest working on the field effect produced when electricity is passed through centain types of silicon. No one will know your name, but transistors certainly changed the world. How in 2019 do you identify what will have a similar impact? Simply put, you can't. All you can do is pick something interesting and work at it. If you try to solve the big problem you will almost certainly get drowned in the problem, you need to work on something small that can be leveraged to make the big thing.

Sorry I ramble.

History is full of people who made big changes to the world. Those who made a positive contribution seem to mostly have emerged from obsecurity after spending years labouring at improving something small and succeeding in a remarkable way.

Very interesting. Can you give a few specific examples of this for me to look into? How have you come to the conclusion that this is a trend?

A digression, but topical today is "After the Warming" from the 80s about climate change. Quite remarkable if a little optimistic about our chances of doing something. Lots of 80s VR and CGI, which you have to forgive a little. Pleasingly free of dumbing down.

Probably some of these on Youtube.

This is a social zip bomb, and it's not very nice. Don't spend other people's time like this, do some research yourself if this genuinely interests you.

Now granted, my Google-fu could stand to be a lot better.

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever." - Steve Jobs

You can however increase the odds of things coming on your path that you'll be passionate about:

- Pursue a wide range of interests, jobs in different industries

- Fearlessly trying lots of different stuff, for ex. go skydiving, go rock climbing, go travel if you can, go from the beaten path of life

- Socialize and stay open and curious to different people, so you hear different viewpoints and get different interests

There will always be forces beyond your control that affect your life - be they natural disasters, other people's decisions (from personal choices like whether to date you and small-scale professional like whether to hire you; to which departments to cut in a major layoff; to enormous political/social upheavals), market forces and scientific breakthroughs that you can't predict, etc. If you don't roll with the punches on those, all you'll accomplish is to make yourself angry all the time.

But there are also choices you can make - such as how to spend/invest your money; what jobs to apply to; whether to start a business, and which one; whom to try to date or ask to marry you; where to buy or rent a home, etc. that will have massive, compounding effects on your stress levels and happiness.

- It gives you an opportunity to learn a lot about a specific field and become an expert in it.

- Better job opportunities and career security (being the founder of a moderately popular OSS project can help you to build your personal brand).

- You may be able to monetize your project by offering consulting, fremium model or add-ons; OSS can help you get your foot in the door at a lot of companies.

- You can use your own generic open source project as a foundation to create your own commercial projects. If one such project fails financially, it's no big deal, you can just refocus your energy on a different commercial project and still use your OSS work as the foundation so you don't start from scratch.

Also, the cost of participating in OSS are pretty low since it only uses up your time; you don't need to invest any money for marketing. The other thing about OSS is that sooner or later, smart people will figure out that your free solution is superior to commercial alternatives and this will give you an opportunity to form meaningful professional connections with these kinds of people. Better to have a small community of highly involved and intelligent people than a huge community of apathetic people who are only there because of marketing.

I've made dozens of FOSS contributions over the years but usually its "I want X fixed / working, I'll spend a week learning the codebase and fixing it". Sometimes I can find 2-3 of those in sequence on a project, but while I'd love to hang around in one large codebase (I was active in the Clementine music player for quite a while) a lot of the larger issues in a project like that are structural and would take months to develop and would require your commitment of time in the long term to support and maintain it.

Which I'd be all for, but employers really don't give a crap if you are only the #8 comitter in a project with 10,000 commits. Even if your ~500 is twice as much as you would have made developing your own stripped down clone of the project to call "yours" and get your foot in the door.

Just over the holiday break I was doing some patches for Krita - I'd never worked in the codebase before so there was a lot of exploratory work involved. I implemented the feature I wanted and left dozens of questionable design decisions and undocumented behavior untouched / refactored not because I wanted to but I realized if I want "resume cred" I can't be doing trench work like that. I implemented arbitrary button support for action events because thats something I can bullet point easily. "Refactored the input system to avoid memory leaks, wasted cycles, and streamlined the ergonomics with C++17 features" doesn't turn heads.

It just feels wasteful to have spent probably ~10 hours just reading ~5,000 lines of C++ to learn an entire subsystem of a program and to just leave it at that when you can tell there is a lot more room for improvement but its also much more nuanced. Its why everyone gets feature pull requests and none of the bugs get fixed because most bugs worth fixing are structural ones that would take a lot of effort for little "payoff".

Not sure about you, but time is my most precious resource. Having kids does that to you fast. Also being involved in the local community, having friends, hobbies - oh how I wish I had another 20 hours a week.

Being a serious OSS contributor is almost like having another full time job.

First, I am doubtful that we have the capacity to imagine what the world will be like at the end of your life. If you were asking this question in 1907, you wouldn't be able to anticipate the disruptive transformation and opportunity of automobiles. Cory Doctorow always says that good science fiction doesn't predict the future so much as it anticipates the present. That said, there is strong anecdotal evidence that the gadgets you see on today's Star Trek will be real things people aren't impressed by in 50 years. Maybe get working on food replicators. ;)

The second thing about five-year plans is that five years is a perfect amount of time for a chapter of your life where you really focus on something that excites you. I could be learning a skill, building a company, having a child. (Yes, apparently a child takes longer than five years, but the first five are the most involved.) The result is that you will be what others describe as an interesting person with broad, colorful experiences that give you lots to talk about with your friends and life partners. Incidentally, the #1 complaint of unhappily married women is that their husbands are too predictable.

Ultimately, nobody ever gets to the end of their life and things, "man... I wish I had made fewer interesting decisions!"

The likelihood of you being able to decide today what will be the most productive and exciting use of your entire life is extremely small. The key is to make sure that the next five years is as interesting as possible. Rinse and repeat.

Meaningful work is one of the pillars of mental health, don't take that away form yourself unless you have to trade it for another pillar.

[1] It's a bad advice because it often turns people to soul-sucking cafe ownership, hand-to-mouth musician careers, and other loveable but hurtful things. A much better advice is to find an intersection of (things you love) and (things that pay well enough for it to not be a bother) and (things you might be good at) and (...).

For example, you could work on AI to help radiologists identify abnormalities in imaging or robotics in surgery. Or address energy issues in hospitals by optimizing building automation or enterprising with energy performance contracts implementing renewables. The right intersection can keep you motivated by relating to your interest and keep you fulfilled by relating to a noble purpose.

If you can't find an intersection there's nothing wrong with finding a job that allows you the ability to investigate as a hobbyist. Maybe in time you'll build the skills to contribute to those intersection points.

Business aside, there is also a huge discrepancy between the romantic image of happily hopping about a cozy little shop and the crushing burden of 18-hour workdays for near-zero pay, demotivated or thieving employees, obnoxious customers, flaky suppliers, rising or unexpected costs, your own failure to plan for this or that, and all that with no hope of things becoming different in the future. There were profiles in the NYT which I can no longer find, but here is one I did find just now: https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/why-to-never-open-a-res...

If you are contemplating this nearly-suicidal move I highly recommend interrogating an acquaintance who's been that and done that before investing any further effort.

My computing life started with Commodore64 when I was ~4, and I loved the text interface. Then I got a 486DX w/ DOS when I was 7. This led me to decide to "Learn what computers are all about and learn to program these beautiful things".

Then Windows95 happened. I didn't like the GUI first interface. This led me to find Linux. Around the same time, I found demo scene. This made me to appreciate "the raw power of computers". I decided to write programs which leverage this raw power.

At the university, I was unable to leverage my Linux knowledge, and I was getting ready to be a Windows programmer, then my second internship threw me to one of the best Linux shops in existence in my city. I've learnt low level Linux programming, and decided Linux is a requirement for me in my career. Learning Linux and loving low-level and high performance tasks formed my graduation project, which earned me the best project award. I got a call from a different department of the company that I've spent my second internship before I graduated, and I'm working there for 12 years as an HPC system administrator. As a side academic gig, I write high performance code and publish papers. What I've learnt from my job is feeding my academic gig, and my academic gig is feeding my office work. I also got Master's and Ph.D. during the process.

So, let the coincidences and events happen, then try to leverage them to my best interests. You also learn during the journey. Nothing is set in stone in the first day. I wanted to be a pure programmer in my day job, but it's much more stressful and not always enjoyable. I do what I enjoy (R&D, programming high performance stuff), and have an interesting and cutting edge job (building and managing HPC systems with latest hardware), so life is good for me. Hope everyone reading this have an even better life at the end. :)

There is debate whether the above is really from Aristotle. The idea behind it works however, and it works in a way that --at least anecdotally-- is satisfying. I was lucky enough to encounter it by accident.

In 2005 my grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. His hand often shook with a slight tremor and it made using his computer nearly impossible. I built software[0] to stabilize the mouse and give him back control.

I created many things between then and now. Most of them have faded away into obscurity. The works that really lasted and retained meaning always involved others. The meaning is not really in the software itself, or the technology, but in the people tangled up in the journey and in being needed. The excitement, once in a while, when the talents we have honed over the many years actually apply -- nothing compares.

[0] https://www.steadymouse.com

1) Prepare like your life depends on it. It does. Your time may not come for 40 years, but if you're not prepared, you'll never know. So study hard. This is where Paul Graham's "swim upstream as long as possible" comes in.

2) Knowing how to code makes you a code monkey, human materiál, an interchangeble part. Same with doctors, lawyers, etc. They're essentially interchangable. If you know something else, (medicine, geology, rockets, whatever) then knowing how to code makes you a magician. In both realms.

3) Develop a 5,000 year old mind. Understand where you are in the world, and where the world is, so when your critical opportunities arrive, you will recognize them and know what to do.

4) Most successes come around age 50. If you're 20, 25, 30, 40, and think you've seen what there is to see, you probably have.

What do you mean by this? Don't most of those who make it big do so while young?

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/20-year-old-ent...

As supporting evidence, we also know happiness kicks up after your 40s

https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2010/12/16/the-...

https://www.google.com/search?q=happiness%20vs%20age

The meta question is one that is more important, do I work on a problem that pays me a lot of cash or one that is important. Bill Gates showed you can earn a lot of cash and then work on important problems, but I don't think the odds favor that approach.

I don't regret doing this at all. I feel like I contributed (not for as long as I'd have liked to), and I learned tons of stuff working there.

I think AI is also pretty interesting as something that "should be worked on", and the pay is possibly also better than it is in the energy sector.

Personally, I believe the most important problems are mostly relationship problems in other words politics. The solutions there are simple but not easy. For example, world peace is simple: Everybody just stop killing each other. However, getting everybody to agree on that is ridiculously hard.

My general thoughts are:

1. I have a certain set of skills and strengths that I can contribute. I should use them instead of doing stuff I'm not good at because that should optimize the global productivity.

2. I should work on things where return of investment is best. So do not work on things where a return is unlikely, e.g. intergalactic travel or fixing email, or where the return is not worth it, e.g. cheaper ice cream or a flappy bird clone.

3. Keep track of big problems where the time/opportunity has not come yet. This is inspired by Hammings talk on research. It also applies to lots of free software though. For example, if Twitter would shut down tomorrow, then the Fediverse would be there to catch the fallout. So it is of some importance to work on open alternatives to popular services. The iPhones success was mostly waiting for the right time, when mobile Internet, mobile computing, and app-store market structure all were ready enough.

Unfortunately, in terms of my hobbies I'm still mostly suffering from the Paradox of Choice. Too many options to make a decision, so I don't do anything. Let check Hacker News again...

I decided two years ago (33 now) to devote my 30s to creating telepresence, narrative entertainment with live actors.

I think I want to spend my 40s on hobbyist prosthetics.

50s: I don’t know yet. I hope we’ve made contact with aliens by that point so that I can devote this decade to building systems that help us collaborate with them.

I finished a PhD when I was 31, and the most useful piece of advice I got from my advisor was “do the thesis that only you in the world would be able to do”. My 30s project is a mix of stuff I have special expertise in, that I get repeatedly told is weird in unique. So I’m chasing that for a while.

If I had more choice I'd choose things that interest and fascinate me anyways and serve some good. This would be (socially beneficial) science and empowering information tools for the web.

¹ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

² Need a product manager for a cool product? Please let me know.

- big player fin-tec: it only makes numbers grow for rich people

- selling dreams: preying on peoples hopes, knowing they probably won't come true

- broken product: not selling value

- long contract times: just shady

- e-commerce: Coercion in to buying stuff they wouldn't have bough otherwise or simply funneling the money to our clients instead of others. No benefit for society either way. It doesn't even have to be cigarettes, could be butter or anything.

Your situation reminds me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass

Start small! Make any move, even not ideal one. Just leave your comfort bubble and try each idea.

Any potential client/startup that comes to me asking for help with their e-commerce business, unless it's something truly unique, I always say, get a Shopify/Squarespace account first don't waste time on designing for something that has so many established design patterns already.

Whereas if someone comes to me for help with robotics, crypto, trading, AI, complex services in healthcare etc, that's where I want to help.

I have recently further decided to focus on industries with jobs aren't desk related (i.e. where you don't sit in front of a computer).

These make up 80% of the just that exist out there yet only get around 1% of the actual investments from ex. Sillicon Vally investors. So our venture studio is now also focusing on that which is a very interesting space and kind of allow me to come full-circle with the kind of jobs my parents had (cleaning lady and plumber).

* Contractor just in it for the bucks

* Contractor in it for the freedom

* Working with a great team on interesting consulting projects

* Start-up co-founder in a space I really believed in

* Comfortable job that provided for me and mine while working on interesting projects and having autonomy.

I suggest that you pick a direction and go for it (given my extremely limited understanding of your situation, probably in the energy or ai field--better to pick something you want to do than something you feel like you should do). Better to have some movement than to idly tread water.

While every decision had consequences and closes off some options, every situation has good lessons (and that no place is perfect, at least that I have found). It's also worth realizing that not many decisions are irrevocable, if you are willing to make sacrifices.

Also, these fields are not evil or useless like weapon design or hedge funds. They are actually useful to society, so you feel like contributing to the general good.

Don’t worry about healthcare, there are thousands of people who work on healthcare.

And, if I may, if you did work on healthcare, your very own contribution to solving this problem would most likely be very small. Unless you somehow become the Elon Musk of healthcare... which you know, may or may not happen.

Sure Oncology is nice but I really only like the genomics/bioinformatics part and to be honest I could probably do this type of work in another field (what I love is Linux clusters, open source software, not worrying about details but using other people's algorithms and glue them together to do cool things, that other people (colleagues) appreciate).

I would not pick something to work towards, I would try to find out what problems you like to solve and the methods you like to use, and try to do it/them as much as possible. Then, organically you will end up in the right place. How exactly? By pulling fun stuff towards you (project manager is ill? You lead the meeting, give yourself some fun work!)

I am 36 now, I feel I just got into a field I truly love, it combines my (irrational) love for Linux and computers with my training in Biology and it is that being in a unique position (with a unique background) that I can do thing my colleagues appreciate. I think that is also a big part of what fuels me (colleagues that say: wow that is really nice and you did that so fast!). It took a lot of time and it also takes some conscious attention but you'll get there.

My advice: Don't work on what you feel you should work on, think hard on the kind of stuff that makes you forget time, that gives you energy. Don't have any? Try other stuff until you find something.

I find myself increasingly drawn to biology and medicine over the last few years, considering going back to university for a second degree in fact, but the ROI on that doesn't seem great.

2. If the first thing is too hard - e.g. few novelists can live off their writings -, don't despair. Keep your passion as a hobby, find a stable source of income and have fun.

Assuming that you're still somewhat young, here is one additional advice from someone who has made a mistake in that respect: The older you grow, the more important financial security will become. You may think you're immune to this effect, but you're not. You'll want to have a fairly decent, constant stream of income when you're 40+, no matter what you think about that now.

If you feel that you need to help the world, you can always donate a percentage of your earnings to people that need it the most. For a lot of people, this is the most effective way they can help others.

After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

In my 44 years - I have not met anyone else who says this other than me and a very small group of my friends.

:-)

But it does seem that many people who say that to you aren't doing much chopping and carrying. Because, you know, you are.

But they still need to maintain themselves. Eating, washing, etc, etc, etc. I could come up with a hardcore basic riff on that saying, but it'd be gross. So I'll let you imagine it.

    got BS, and worked in industry
    got bored, and read a lot about [cool basic-science stuff]
    started grad school re [cool basic-science stuff]
    got PhD and did a couple postdocs in [cool basic-science stuff]
    got horrified by academic rat race, and got interested in [cool NGO stuff]
    [almost went to law school, to do patent law]
    got a job doing [cool NGO stuff]
    got frustrated by slow progress, and tired of being poor
    [almost did another postdoc]
    got a job doing [well-paid litigation stuff]
    got tired of the pressure, and started playing more re privacy-related stuff

What I get is that basically I like to play. I've rarely managed to be well paid for it, however.

It’s not as easy as it sounds to turn a hobby into a business and have it still be fun. The only real time that happens is if the hobby is building businesses (it happens).

Still, there must be a component of your work that you like. If not, there must be some work out there that has such an element? I can not believe there are humans that really only want to sit on a couch with a controller playing a game. I think the situation is pretty troubling in that case. In that case you are only consuming, that has never worked. Same goes for eating.

My way is very simple - I have a job that gives me moments I enjoy (adrenaline rush and connection with broad and interesting groups of people), but I would never do it on the weekend - I find it far too mentally draining. On the weekend I do things that are completely different. Whether they be sports, video games, social events or whatever, by being diverse in my work-hobby mix, I make sure that I don't burn out on just one thing.

This does not make me one of the cool kids at programming conferences, does not land me a spot on the olympic team, does not get me 10,000 viewers on Twitch and does not make me a member of the social elite, but it does make me happy, so I guess it's working out.

Have you ever been convinced to re-read a horrible book you were forced to read in school, and discover that it's /brilliant/?

Have you ever been forced to re-read one of your favorite books on a strict deadline, and discover that it's a slog?

I've been paid for doing my hobby a couple times, and it quickly becomes work; I don't even enjoy those hobbies anymore.

My 2 cents:

Anything, when forced, is less enjoyable than when you're doing it just for enjoyment.

Don't kill a hobby by turning it into work.

Find tasks, types of work, etc. that you enjoy, and find a job that lets you do those things. It's still work, but most of the time you don't really notice it, and you don't kill a fun hobby.

My job says I have to implement a CSV parser for a customer’s unique idea of “CSV”, and by the end of the week whether I find it interesting or not.

(Well, not my job, thank $DEITY. But for many.)

The HVAC application is so niche that it could only be a hobby project. Basically, I don't want to dogs to fry in the RV in the summer. Some temp sensors, a few relays, and the GPIO pins on the Pi, and when it gets too hot it can kick on the generator and turn the A/C on for happy dogs. While I'm there, I might as well program in the algorithm I do in my head to tell the wife whether or not she needs the generator to make supper. "Lessee, if we've got two hours of daylight for solar that is currently putting out 221W, and the battery is at 74%, using a 1200W griddle...". Let the Pi do that math, and turn the generator on or not.

On the other hand "chop wood" to me means don't get too caught up in the results. Don't beat up yourself because you are next the next Elon.

I’ve been alive nearly 40 years and everyday become more confident that the answer is no.

It's arguably an unworkable plan for most hobbies, I admit. And it depends on how much you need to be paid. For example, when I started NGO work, I basically got warned that it'd never pay much, and that most people who did it long-term had trust funds. Or didn't mind being poor.

I suspect you could do more good for science by working a lifetime in some well-paid career and donating a hefty portion of your profit to some science-funding organization than by trying to do science yourself.

Science needs your money far more than it needs your brains.

I loved most of the advice other people have given you. Follow the advice that you think is the best, but remember, You are more than the work you do.

You are being too hard on yourself - take care of your mental health as well. Talk to someone you trust.

Your life goals and priorities will change throughout your life. In the end, everyone will have some regrets (for different reasons). You just get to choose your own.