Ask HN: How do you cope with realizing you mostly wasted your potential?

[throwawaynay]

Today I'm what I would a consider a mediocre software developer(and I'm not good at anything else). I may get harassed by recruiters because of the current state of the market, but I really don't think I'm good at (almost) anything I do. I learned a bit about selling myself but I'm not good.

I feel like I could have done so much more, I had so much potential, objectively(could have skipped like +4 grades if it wasn't for the terrible social consequences it would have caused(my father only accepted that I skip one), IQ higher than 99.8% of people(probably lower now tho), started coding in primary school...)

It's really, really crushing my spirits, when I see people who were really similar to me mentally until a certain age(but unlike me didn't have to live through poverty, extreme violence and in an overall terrible environment(or mental health issues cause by all that)), achieve so, so much more, whether academically, professionally or even in their personal life.

And I read or hear about this kind of people all the time because of the topics I'm interested in or because of the people I know.

I don't think I'd feel that way if I was born average. Weird metaphor, but I feel like I had a winning lottery ticket that was destroyed by the rain in front of my eyes, and there was nothing I could do but watch, and I rarely stop thinking about it.

Does anyone here have a similar experience? How do you cope?

[rednerrus]

There's no such thing as potential. There's just doing. Right now you're not doing what it is you want to be doing.

If you're dissatisfied with where you are, do something different. Get up tomorrow and start down a different path.

I had a half assed job until my mid 30s. I woke up one day and decided I want to do something different. 7 years later and I'm crushing it.

Examine where you are and ask yourself if it's not really where you want to be.

[malux85]

This is exactly it, I 100% agree.

Potential is extrapolation accelerated with wishful thinking.

Those who can, do, those who can’t, don’t.

Start doing OP, otherwise your greatness will never be bigger than the tiny brain-cells it occupies

[fblp]

Or, learn to appreciate "not doing"

[reureu]

It's pretty common for gifted kids to wind up with a slew of issues when they get older. It's also pretty well known that "high achievers" often have a lot of leg ups that other people don't have -- or, stated another way, that poverty, child abuse, and other social determinants objectively hold back many very talented people. I'm sorry that you've gone through this, but also know that you are not alone.

One of the themes from "Hamilton" is "who tells your story?" This sparked a surprising amount of reflection and struggle for me, that ended with me realizing that, like most people, nobody will tell my story. Our lives are ultimately ephemeral, and I'm ok with that. In a lot of ways, it's a total relief to completely let go of the notion of a "legacy" and instead focus on doing things for my own enjoyment.

So, if I'm not worrying about my legacy, then I'm also not worrying about my success and potential. I need to make enough money to live and to support things that I enjoy, but I don't really need more than that. Nobody needs to make 500k/yr. And, frankly, very few people need to make 150k/yr. You can live off less, and the lower paying jobs are often the ones that have higher impact or more interesting work or better work/life balance.

There are TONS of non-profits, academic labs, and governments that would kill for a "mediocre" software developer to solve some pretty basic problems for them. As fancy as blockchain, VR, AI, whatever is, it's really not what's impacting people's lives today. I literally had a phone call at work today about setting up a git repo for a researcher so they could track changes to their analysis code. They literally don't know how to do that, and I added value to their lives and to this research project by clicking a button in GitHub. I'll go further out on a limb, and say that creating a git repo impacted their lives more than Tesla's self-driving cars or Apple's VR headset or Facebook's metaverse will for years to come. And they were actually thankful for my help... which is a relief from some of the toxic startup environments I've worked in before.

I guess, to borrow your metaphor, how do you know your winning lottery ticket was for something you even wanted? Maybe you won a lifetime supply of lutefisk, and you let the ticket melt away. But who cares? Stop thinking about the lutefisk, and instead go dancing in the rain. There's so many cool things out in the world.

[thanatos519]

It is never too late to be what you might have been. — George Eliot

You can't do anything about the past, but you can do something about the future. I can't begin to tell you how much potential I have squandered, but I'm making the best of my remaining time. Don't limit yourself!

[beamatronic]

As someone in my 40's, it's too late for me to be a cool, popular guy in my 20's.

[mehphp]

Not crazy about that quote. It is in fact too late, for example, for my dad to have been a good father. I'm a grown man with kids of my own, that relationship can't be fixed to "what might have been".

I get it, I'm probably being too pedantic, but it really is too late to do or be certain things sometimes.

With that said, I agree with your quote, you can't do anything about the past so do what you can with the future.

[annie_muss]

Let me start by saying I feel exactly the same way as you.

I had a great start in life and then couldn't follow through. In my twenties I had a string of jobs, each lasting less than 6 months. I got diagnosed with ADHD at the start of my thirties. It explains a lot.

Now I'm stuck watching my former classmates with their successful careers while I try to scrape together $400 for rent. Staff engineers at Google, CTOs of companies and so on. They likely make more in a year than I'll make in my lifetime. It feels bad.

I think a lot of advice on this topic will focus on how to get successful. How to get the job. How to get the house. I think that's the wrong way to go about it. Focus on the small things you already have, however tiny. Actively seeking out the joy in the mundane, everyday things is a great start (and however much money and success you have, your everyday life is usually quite mundane).

[Schiendelman]

Are you being treated for your ADHD?

[kgin]

Listen, you are being overly harsh on yourself.

You say that your intelligence was “given” to you, like a gift. But then you turn around and say the parts of you that made choices that didn’t result in the life you compare yourself to… those parts you say are 100% your fault. You’re saying your positive qualities are from the outside, but your negative qualities are all you. You’re not being fair to yourself.

We make choices, yes. You can choose to take job A instead of job B. But you can’t choose to be the kind of person who chooses job A instead of job B. Or if you can, you can’t choose to be the kind person who chooses to be the kind of person who chooses job A. At some level, there is something that you don’t choose. It just is. It’s not “choices all the way down”.

This powerful feeling inside you right now is a gift, as awful as it feels. You can, if you want, channel it into the energy you’ll need to confront the things that held you back. Change takes incredible amounts of energy and this feeling combusting inside you might be enough to nudge you in a different direction. Or if you want, you can sublimate that energy and apply it to something like helping bright kids growing up in tough circumstances. You may not be the elite 10x graybeard you imagined, but you probably know better than anyone how to help kids who are growing up like you did. Or you may take that energy and channel it into something totally different.

The way you get past the regret is to use this fire for something. But please, please do not take this fire and turn it on yourself like a blowtorch. Don’t use it to beat yourself and make yourself more timid and more afraid and more hobbled by your past.

You’re going to be ok.

[thomshea]

Beautiful

[coreten]

IQ isn't the only factor. Actually - beyond a certain threshold it doesn't add much. Happiness, success - a huge part of it is mindset, and having the mental/emotional resilience to start again and again after failure.

However, growing up in a harsh environment does more damage than you can perceive. You can be the smartest person in the world, but if you have limiting beliefs, unprocessed/unhealed trauma stemming from bad experiences early in your life, it will be more difficult for you to achieve/go further. But this in itself is a unique gift in a way - not everyone has the opportunity to truly develop one's inner strength and grit through this kind of life experience. I'd say the majority of the world's truly successful/influential people did not grow up with silver spoons in their mouth, but developed character through tests of adversity.

In the end, the power lies within you. You decide your life through making choices. You can decide for yourself who you want to be and who you want to become.

You can decide to not let the past affect your future, to see it as a gift (or you can chose to use it as an excuse to avoid making the neccesary changes you need...)

You can decide to start healing, to start working on your limiting beliefs, and get support (or you can make the choice to continue to be held back by the unhealed parts of yourself ...)

You can decide to adopt mindsets and perspectives that empower you (or you can choose to do nothing, and stay stagnant. Often it's the easier and lazier choice).

Take this as an opportunity to re-write your story and to shift your perspective. Show some gratitude for yourself for overcoming so much already. Sometimes it might not seem like it, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel, though the tunnel may be long - so remember to always be kind to yourself. There will be brighter days ahead :)

[akkartik]

My wife says my pep talks always have the opposite effect. So if this doesn't work for you, just go read another comment. But it works for me.

The way I stopped worrying about wasting my potential was when I realized I still had potential -- and I wasn't done wasting it. That realization helps me stop and smell the roses, slow dance with my baby, listen to "7 years" by Lukas Graham.

Yes, what you get out depends on what you put in. But it also depends on luck, a million factors out of your control. And on not putting so much pressure on yourself. No matter what you achieve, death comes eventually to limit your upside anyway. So relax, do something fun. Then maybe you'll be like Feynman with the spinning plates (https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html). Or not.

[Minor49er]

Everyone's lives are different and hindsight is always 20/20. If you're comparing yourself to others and feeling like you're falling behind in some way, think about what it is that you want to achieve, understand why you want to achieve it, and go after it sensibly.

[PaulHoule]

I have a high IQ, got bullied in elementary school, was sexually invisible in high school on college. Went to grad school, did not fit in at all. Worked a lot of random jobs in the software industry, local and remote.

I am working at the uni again as a software dev, I like the team I am in, I like having an office that overlooks a baseball field.

I had the goal of charming a group of grad students on my floor and thought I would have a hard time explaining myself having bombed out of the academic track.

What amazed me was that most of them felt afraid of being bound by the decisions they have made and aren’t sure if they can or want to follow the professor route. They were really inspired that I was able to do all those random things over a long period of time, work for startups, work for big cos, do maintainance programming, make a neural network search engine before neural networks were cool, etc.

I started seeing that my career went in a straight line and I was getting very positive results.

Now there was a postdoc that I wound up anti-charming and I let the evil come out, I told a story that combined five lines that were interwoven about my personal suffering, the suffering of a well known person in my field, not feeling safe to raise issues with the methodologies we were using, thousands of bad papers written, a community that is just getting to grips with this.

I hurt him pretty bad and he hasn’t talked to me since. I wanted to apologize to him but he left the country. I wasn’t able to ensorcell anybody at all for a long time because I felt guilty.

I am now looking at problems that date back to feelings of hostility I have that came on right when I entered high school that are screwing me up still today. I am working super hard to get better results but if I don’t fix those feelings I am going to get effects like I had with that postdoc.

That bums me out pretty badly. But I want to change. A war against hostility sounds like an oxymoron but it is what I am up against. I know if I can beat it I can get what I want.

[ReaLNero]

Is this a GPT-3 bot? Genuinely asking, I don't understand what you're trying to say.

[flippinburgers]

You need to find a way to give yourself enough space to find something to pursue. That can be very difficult depending on your situation. It doesn't help, I find, that distraction is easier and easier to fall into in this day and age.

Skipping grades doesn't really matter, I think. You need to do your best to dedicate yourself to a path. If the potential is about financial success, you are just going to have to study and interview until you get a higher paying job.

I say this because I am in a similar boat in terms of feeling like my life has been wasted (in this case by me) and, yes, it sucks. Do keep in mind that the people who "succeed" are the ones we will typically hear about on HN. So ... there is a lot of unspoken failure out there.

[me_me_mu_mu]

I pretty much gave up trying to chase something, instead I will experience life and maybe the good things will come. I figure I'm 30 and I'm finding that since I'm quite mediocre at things compared to the people I compare myself to, I am just gonna appreciate that I'm healthy enough, and I have a 6 month runway in cash if things were to go from $current_speed to 0.

So.. there's tomorrow hopefully so just gonna keep doing what makes me happy. Last time things went to 0, I had enough saved up for a month or two to change careers into tech. If it happens again I have at least a bit more breathing room.

[syntheweave]

It's all a relative thing. If I visit the park and watch the ravens, I can see this. Ravens are pretty smart, but their lives are simple. If something bothers them, they don't have to negotiate or fight, they can just fly away from it. Nature is not asking them to be "30 under 30" or "award-winning". That's a feeling you get from seeing other people be praised for their efforts.

If you can feel OK with yourself just living and surviving, that is the first step to doing something more ambitious, because it takes some pressure off: "oh, but even if I fail at this, I will still have a warm bed and food" should be enough to feel confident. Getting it in your head that you need to conquer the world is actually rather poisonous because it makes you chase after the same things as everyone else. You are most likely too smart for that, and see downsides in terms of life balance that make you hesitate and stay beneath the radar. Other people are less smart and more persistent, more willing to put up with the repetition, begging and borrowing needed to achieve that particular form of success. Smarts are just a way of solving a problem after you have been motivated to work on it.

[RoddaWallPro]

If you grew up in poverty & violence & a terrible environment, then your brain is going to work in different ways than someone who wasn't raised in that env. That's the bad news. The good news is that there are professional counselors (who hopefully as a software developer, you/your insurance can afford) who have dedicated themselves to helping clients understand the sub-optimal ways brains can operate, and work with those clients to figure out better ways of thinking and living.

I started seeing one about 4 months ago, as I also grew up in a fairly physically & emotionally violent environment and finally realized I cannot undo the effects of that upbringing without serious professional help. The info & wisdom my counselor has given me has been like turning on a light bulb in a room that illuminates new colors I didn't even know were there. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I have a much better ability to examine the state of my mind and emotions and body and motivations, in a way I didn't even know was possible 4 months ago. I cannot recommend enough seeing one. You don't know what you don't know.

I hope you find peace & purpose, whatever you end up doing!

[whatsakandr]

I have felt the same way. You play the hand you're dealt in life. "Wasted potential" is just regretting your past circumstances and blaming yourself for them. But you are not to blame. If you want to "not waste" your "potential", start studying something you think is worth studying. You might find you enjoy it, and want to work more on it. You might not. When I did that. I realized I just wanted to play video games and hang out with my wife. So am I wasting my potential? Just focus on living a life you're proud of. Who gives a shit if you're mentally capable of doing higher level stuff, you might not be emotionally capable. Value your mental health over any "accomplishments" in society.

[kleer001]

> How do you cope?

Focus on the future, be grateful for your one precious human life. Get off social media. Exercize.

[lookalike74]

Learn more about being grateful for what you have and selling yourself won't be such a chore

[soc340]

I feel the exact same way. I'm a computer science student at Stanford. I only decided to study CS in first year of college, since it seemed like a safe bet to good money and I enjoyed math.

2 years later, I'm just an average CS student working at big tech. I don't particularly find my work fulfilling and I don't impress anyone.

Every day I question whether I made the right decision to study CS and become an engineer. Like you, I know I'm smarter than the vast majority of people and I was an academic talent when I was little (through high school).

I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

[prirun]

Here's something that helps me not have regrets:

Most of the time, people assume that if they had zigged instead of zagged, things would have turned out much better. But we don't know that, do we? Maybe if we had zagged, things would be worse.

So while I do have some regrets, mostly about things I didn't do out of fear, carrying deep regrets that make us feel like failures is really a waste of time. You don't know it would have been better if you had made different decisions. Just make the best decisions you can at the time you make them.

[BMc2020]

I suggest you go to a medical doctor and get a complete physical. Eliminating organic disease is always a pre-requisite.

When the doctor asks if there's anything else, show them this note and say, "I want to find out what's wrong with me."

Thanks to Dr. Todd Grande, we know IQ is only about 4% of personality. So, absent an underlying medical condition, it's a problem with your personality. That's one of those things that's almost impossible to identify in yourself but is much easier for an outside observer.

Go see a real human doctor.