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

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!

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.

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.

If you were so smart and gifted then why did you sit on your butt for so long? Maybe there was no potential to waste. But the best time to start is now, or else you might die wondering what you could have done.

Hey, at least you have a decent job and probably no need to worry about the future. You could have done much worse.

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.

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).

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.

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

Learning to be more grateful for what you have will make selling yourself much easier.

This feels a little close to home, although in different ways.

I can't say I feel exactly the same. I had a good home growing up mostly (although suffered abuse by those outside the home, in the sense that people went to prison), good family, and have done well in some fundamental ways. But later in my career I ran into some serious problems working in a pretty bad place, and people (friends, colleagues, family) blew me off when I was basically pleading for help (mostly because I had been doing so well before then and I think they figured I had nothing to worry about?). The short version is that the environment became abusive and dysfunctional (I see reports of similar institutions' management getting fired very publicly for behaving the same way) and I probably didn't respond to it well. I could get into ways in which I would have responded differently now, but part of my conflict is I'm not sure if it would have actually been better. I see my friends in places they probably should be, doing well, and know I could be in the same sort of places but screwed up, not taking advantages I had. I end up feeling like a failure for not doing things that now seem obvious in hindsight, but also am kind of aware of the circumstances and how different they were from those of people I know, and know some of them would have reacted the same. Most of the time I go back and forth between being hating myself, angry at others for not being helpful at a critical time, angry at society for being so superficial in not recognizing these things, and not being more understanding and seeing potential with second chances. I have trouble sleeping most nights because of it.

I'm not sure I have a lot of advice to offer because I feel lost myself. But you're not alone.

I do think it's worthwhile to think about what you would have liked to do and why, and to figure out what steps it would take to happen. Even if you can reclaim some part of that, wouldn't that be better? Start another degree, or reach out to some researchers to see if they need help, or write that book or start the blog, or make a prototype app or whatever it is. I have no idea because I don't know what it is you'd want.

I do think it's important not to get into the success trap. I know some people who are objectively very successful at what they do, but who have been very unhappy personally, or who got there through questionable means. Part of my current circumstance is because I was tired of the corruption around me, and wanted out. So it's better to think about what you would like to be different, what would bring you reward, rather than what would bring you success per se. I think people can be kind of cliched about that and unhelpful, as if success shouldn't matter, and that's not necessarily what I mean. I just mean I think it's as important to think about what you would like to be spending your time doing as it is to think about achievements.

I don't know. I wish I had answers myself. Life is more unfair than society recognizes, and I'm tired of people who say that being treated as if it's just sour grapes. People get a raw deal sometimes, period.

You can't improve your past but the sooner you let go of it the more likely you are to see other opportunities -- in the now.

Your closing question was "How do you cope?" and I do think that your primary challenge at the moment is to work on changing the way you (habitually) think about the situation.

> How do you cope?

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

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

past remains in past. You can only control present and plan future. You can start living up to your potential starting tomorrow.

A couple of years ago I decided that I needed to work on a significant project that would occupy me for the rest of my life, plus or minus a few decades.

So I did.

Kindly allow me to share my experience with you.

I grew up being told almost every day that I was special, smarter, and destined for great things. At school, I always aced every exam possible. In my mind, teachers could only give me A+ or F, there were no other grades, whatever the matter: math, history, English, phys-ed, etc. But outside school, I always felt average: neither attractive nor ugly, neither talkative nor shy, neither stupid nor smart.

Then came high school, and this decisive moment when I was supposed to know what I wanted to do. Some wanted to be doctors, I thought I was not capable of becoming a doctor. Others wanted to be lawyers, but I was never attracted to that world. Science? I didn't realize I could have chosen engineering, or some STEM faculty, I just didn't think of it. Nobody told me I could go there either. I studied economics, it wasn't hard but I felt outrageously bored. Year 2000 came, I noticed people could earn good money doing websites, so I bought some books and gave it a try. From that moment, IT jobs came one after another: always well paid, somehow interesting. I was never bad at them, nor brilliant. Years passed rapidly.

When I think about it: no one ever told me how to be successful or useful. And no one "pushed" me under the train to something big. Maybe this could be your issue? I often envied those who get it, who actually "do something" with their life. I never solved this problem. I even tried volunteering: serving soup at christmas, spending time with children in hospitals, becoming a monitor during summer camps for socially disfavored children, tutoring students with their homework, I always had the same answer: "you're too late, we don't need more people".

I noticed a lot of people around me, especially at work, always get things taught, coached, mentored, etc. I never landed a job where my manager just dropped me into some training or certification course. I always had to figure out things by myself. One time after I was named manager, my boss refused to pay me some training. A few months later, a colleague was promoted to the same position, he ended up in a 3 weeks leadership/management program, all paid by the company. I asked my boss why i didn't the training, her answer was simply that she didn't think I needed training.

I often get invited to speak at conferences, I even was invited as a keynote speaker. I refuse. I am not scared of speaking in public, I just don't have nothing particularly interesting to tell.

Starting your life being told you are "special", "smarter", or whatsoever puts a lot of pressure. For more than 30 years, I think my parent's way of telling me they believe in me just made me feel like a complete failure, and prevented me from ever feeling happy with who/what I am. I do nothing very well, I am not very intelligent, it often takes me more time than others to understand all the intricacies of a social situation. In society, I struggle when I must interact with fake, selfish or imposters (and there are many).

One day, I realized I was "mediocre". My parents are/were even more mediocre than I think I am and my hypothesis is that they saw me as smart because they were mediocre. This realization freed me. I started forgiving myself and became more benevolent towards others. Being told you are a "10" and feeling like you are a "5" is agony. Realizing you are a "5" and feeling you may live as a "6" made me see life completely differently, and much more positively.

All things considered, it appears I do well enough for a few people to thing I am worth their consideration, their attention, sometimes even their friendship, and ultimately, their love. I have good friends, I love my family, I love my wife and every minute I spend with her. I have a respectable job, a nice boss, nice colleagues, etc. Since I accepted my "fate", I generally feel much happier in my life.

I ...

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.

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.

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!