[greg7gkb]

You don't need to be competitive to be successful or happy. My first question is: what do you want?

If you enjoy life in the most boring way, then it sounds like something in your life is already fulfilling. Boring and exciting are entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Especially early in your career it can be daunting to see the success and skill of other people in the field but recognize that their success took a long time to build up, and probably some amount of thrashing around too.

So again, what do you want? Do you enjoy continually learning new things and getting satisfaction from exploring new ideas? Do you enjoy the act of building something new from scratch? Do you enjoy optimizing parts of what you build at a small level until the details are just right? See if you can clarify for yourself what you really care about and focus on doing more of that.

For now, I would also counsel against avoiding being 'a boring copy-cat'. It already sounds like you have an interest in going broad - embrace that.

[throwaway1183]

> Do you enjoy continually learning new things and getting satisfaction from exploring new ideas? Do you enjoy the act of building something new from scratch?

These are something I do just for fun. But I never go deep enough to be good at it. That habit has cost a quite of opportunities!