[pgustafs]

I vehemently disagree. Not with your explicit reasoning, but with the implicit assumption that there is some 1-dimensional metric of specialness or greatness that we're all being measured against.

The great thing about life is that it's so multidimensional. If you want to be the richest person in the world, of course you're setting yourself up for failure. But if you want to be the best version of yourself, you can easily be the best father-husband-son-coder-blogger-walker-painter to your children+wife+colleagues in your city in July 2021.

More than that, you can do things no one else has done. If you like research, the frontier is endless and extremely high dimensional. Find some niche that you enjoy and crush it. If you like helping people, there will never be an end of people you can help. You don't have to be average -- you can be in the 1% of what you're passionate about, easily, because there are so many possible choices of passion.

[Godel_unicode]

You said you disagree, and then you repeated their point with different words.

[arkano]

The comments are similar, but the energy is different.

One of them read to me like "go and strive to be great in one of the million directions possible" and the other was "you won't win on any direction more than average, so settle down and live simple".

[truenindb]

I zement to differ!