This is good advice but I'd enforce that you should not fear not achieving them. That will just be another opportunity to evaluate what went wrong and how to do better next time. If you always set yourself up with an out then there really wasn't a goal worth striving for in the first place. Really, you may just be enforcing negative coping strategies.
Over the long haul of a couple decades, I can assure you that chalking up yet another failure to "your learning curve"
gets seriously old. It's all very fine and well to flounder when you feel like, in hindsight, you didn't really know all that much, and really didn't have all that much time put into it. Like a couple years, are you a God at something in only a couple of years? But if one manages to continue with patterns of failure for
decades, in subject areas you
claim to have expertise and focus in, it can really rattle you. You can find yourself standing back and saying, "
WTF is my problem??" I do think people need to try and fail at things, that that's normal, and to be expected. But there comes a point at which you've put a
lot of effort into something, and performance
does matter.
When assessing WTF has been going wrong over a really long time, there are a number of conclusions you might arrive at. One may be that the problems you set yourself to work on, were a few orders of magnitude harder than you thought. So, do you still think it's important to work on them? Some of those kinds of things, I'm not ready to give up on yet, I'm gonna keep going. But ask me again when I turn 50 how I feel about this shit. Hope I've had "the breakthrough" by then, otherwise it may be time to hang it up and do something else with my life.
Another conclusion may be you're not actually very good at something, and you've been unwilling or unable to apply yourself in a way that would bring any significant improvement. You may end up having to say you are what you are and it is what it is. That wasn't too difficult for me regarding signature gathering for instance. 4 years of that, and my lack of talent and drive at it was clear enough. I was only good at the parts that weren't actually worth much money, like standing up to security guards, and making signs. It wasn't the core of the job, and I kept on trying to do things I liked better than the actual job. So I quit, and frankly I'm never going to gather signatures for money again. I might do it volunteer if something really really important came up, but for heavy lifting on that, I'd just as soon see the pros get paid to do it right.
A third conclusion may be you simply don't have time to do it all. Not enough hours in the day, or years in your life. You might have to make some hard choices about what you will and won't apply yourself to.
So, uh, yeah, if you're young and your "big plan" doesn't work out in 2 years, don't wallow in self-pity and despair and think you can never amount to anything. 2 years isn't a very long time. But don't get yourself in this mindset that your job is to fail indefinitely either. Performance
does matter and it
does erode your self-esteem when you consistently fail year after year after year after year.
Actually I think what holds me up, since my indie solo game development career is pretty much a wreck, is that I've gotten some other things done in my life meanwhile. So I'm not a
total failure, I've just been consistently failing in the one area that I claim is most important for me to succeed in.
I can fix cars, I'm actually skilled at that. I can even fix them to some extent under real world survival pressure conditions, like "the fucking thing has broken down and I'm stuck here". I've gotten out of a few of those now. That situation sucks, but there's less fear each time, because I have a track record of prevailing.
I can repair computers in my sleep, but who cares. Fucking computer industry, I hate them. Shitheads.
I've painted a few decent things, although my art side is in a tailspin because I don't currently see much value in the images that come to my mind. That might change, but anxiety over needing to make progress on game stuff, tends to rob me of creative energy. That's a balancing issue really. Computers have been sucking the life out of my artistic energies for a very long time. Then when
art itself sucks the life out of my artistic energies, it can take many months to recover from that.
I've done a decent job raising my dog. I can be proud of that. One less dog in the world that would have suffered a horrible fate, had I not rescued him. I've also twice saved my Mom's cat from bad fates. So I've got like these animal rescue merit badges.
I do have a viable social life in Asheville, it's just not complete. Basically, no dates. But I get plenty of intellectual stimulation and people like me well enough. Kinda sucks having to leave for Florida in the winter though.
The survival stuff, living out of my car, is no big deal now. It's pretty much second nature. It's actually a skill to live this way. This becomes more apparent when one meets someone who's recently become homeless, and one sees how freaked out and impractical they are about living out of their car or whatever. Plus I can do a fair amount of forestry stuff, although I don't do so much of that anymore. That said, I think I'm throwing the camp stove in the car and running off to the woods a bit this fall, before the season is over.
My current long term plan is to retire at 55 or earlier and I am currently on target to achieve that.
Thankfully I'm in a field where I have no reason to believe in retirement. I can program until I'm dead. Or paint, if that goes somewhere someday. My 'plan' is someday I'll just make a huge pile of money somehow, on some game or something. Won't need all that long term savings crap. Only thing that will stop me in that regard is some kind of apocalypse, and I can handle that too!
but low wage jobs in my experience are the most stressful and you zippo autonomy. Plus, in the US at least, low income=poorer health outcomes etc.
