Digitan said:
We had teams of A+ students designing systems without knowing what they would be used in. Eventually, I turned my back on the whole thing and it ruined my life.
No, you used your experience and instincts to make what at the time was an obvious judgment call. My experience and the information I've learned of the most successful people seem to indicate that you made the right decision. Swimming against the stream is quite possibly the right and best thing for you to do. That said, no one promised it would be easy, but the fearlessness to venture onto the frontier is part of what separated you from the crowd in the first place.
15 years I spent trying to master electronics.
Psychologists typically say it takes about ten years to become an expert in any given field. There's a difference between being an expert and knowing everything. The trick is discovering what kind of expert in your field you are, and working that to your own best advantage.
That's diligence you can't find on a 4.0 scale.
That's true, so to my point above, applying yourself to situations that hold a 4.0 in high regard as part of their scoring system of their game is not going to be using your particular attributes to your best advantage. What you ought to try doing is think about applying yourself to situations where your dligence (and other tools you
do have) can work for you, and where a 4.0 (and other tools you
don't have) are of little consequence.
Above all, I believe electricity is the most easily-harnessed force we have. Almost no objective is out of its reach. Reading about nerve stimulation, brainwave entrainment, and high energy devices in high school...I figured EE was my ticket to fighting some of the undue misery in this world.
And yeah, I don't pretend to be some kind of saint.
It's great that you're so passionate about what you're interested in. I'm a strong believer in peope doing what they love to do, and choosing to love the things they have to do. That said, don't look to EE or any other one thing to be a catch-all solution to your or the world's problems. I'm just saying that because you might subconsciously be putting a bit too much pressure on yourself: EE is great, but sometimes an electron is just an electron, you know? Realizing that will at least make you better able to empathaze with people for whom EE is not a prerogative, which if you think about it, will be the largest audience requiring your skills (people who already share your same interests and priorities will tend to already be as self-sufficient in that area as you are!).
Get your mild-mannered secret identity in check before you start setting yourself up to be a superhero. Be a hero for DigiTan, and make his interests a priority. Once you have that in place, there'll be more opportunities for philanthropy than you'll have if you don't take care of DigiTan first. My mom used to always say, "Don't carry the world on your shoulders," and I never really knew what she meant at the time. Looking back, I understand now that she meant I was using my false sense of self-righteousness to justify my ideas and actions: I'm a philanthropist, because my ideas and interests are so great that the world would be a much better place if only people weren't too stupid to realize how great I am. Obviously there's something wrong with that way of thinking. It may seem selfish to say, "Well, I gotta take care of me first," but it's not if you really think about it. If you don't take care of you first, you're essentially passing the buck of doing that onto someone else. Take care of you first: plan to become a philanthropist when you start getting closer towards the Bill Gates benchmark.
I pissed away a lot of opportunity, lashed out at people who maybe didn't deserve it, became moderately anti-social when things started going downhill in college.
Live and learn. Stress is a *****. You weren't the first. You won't be the last. This isn't unusual. These feelings are normal (for guys like us).
That said, let's talk about our feelings. They're the sort of things EEs will tend to look down their noses at - that is, until neglect creates problems. "Feelings" is just another word for the psychological decisions and influences that affect the direction and interpretation of your life. Check your aggression: be aware of it, and beware of what it does to you and the people around you. Be aware of how feelings shape the values of your society, and consequently, you.
Sometimes I even come across as mean-spirited, but only because I get a little over-determined. Everything I build is orange cause I've got fire in my veins.
Keep the fire, keep the energy. Nobody wants you to burn out, or be burnt by you. There's a difference between actively pursuing your passion and being combative. I'm only just beginning to realize this now, but wish I had years ago. You don't have to waste any time or energy fighting if you don't have enemies. So don't have enemies: don't fabricate them in your mind. Don't enter the ring: there are other venues, compassionate rather than combative venues.
Anyway, I was hoping to use this EE job money to start up a small R&D lab and eventually apply for patents or start a manufacturing firm before 2011.
That's the spirit! Set goals, make a plan to achieve those goals, and at some point assess how things are going. It's an experiment, or moreover, a series of experiments. Seems weird, but the history of successful people is filled with people who made more mistakes than they did successes. All of them made several mistakes, and most of them became successful by just getting one thing right! Their secret to success is that they reached out for opportunity, and the first, second, third, etc time they failed, they kept reaching. The reaching almost becomes a kind of practice to achieving success, and the more you keep at it - like anything you practice - the closer you get to achieving your goal. Part of the challenge is risk management: making sure that a risk taken will not compromise the opportunity to take future risks, even in the event of failure. The trick to mastering risk management? Patience. Work for the little successes, build on those successes, and it won't be long at all before the little successes are huge successes. When it happens, you'll be so use to the gradual building of successes, that the huge things will barely seem like much effort at all. Get that first little success going: that's the one that takes the most patience.
Then I'd be equipped for the next stage, whatever that may be. Now my dream is dying. The past 3/5ths of my life is looking like a cruel waste. Why did I even live so long if this is as far as get to go? What was the point?
You're luxuriating in your own misery somewhat. Suppose you knew that you were going to die tomorrow? If you knew you only had one day to live, you'd probably try to have a good time by whatever means were available to you between now and then. Well, I have news for you: you're going to die eventually. You might get hit by a bus, you might get sick, you might live long and have plenty of children, but eventually you're going to leave this place regardless of what you think will happen to you after you die. The best thing about dying is that it requires no effort or concern on your part, so other than knowing that'll happen someday, I suggest you forget about it.
But how can you have your cake and eat it, too? I suggest you live each day as if it were your last, but responsibly enough just in case it isn't. Drop the notions of "once I do this, once I accomplish this goal, once I pass this stage, I'll be happy." Be happy now. You don't want to get hit by that bus and your last dying thought is, "Dang, I wish I'd put being happy a little higher up in the schedule." How do you be happy now? Do what you love, and love what you do. Choose to do the things you love to do, and choose to love the things you have to do.
I can't remember if I wrote this already, but if you sat down and had a good think about what you'd choose to do if you were already a millionaire, you'd probably be surprised at how many things you'd choose to do then are actually at your fingertips right now. If for all intents and purposes you're already at the "millionaire benchmark" that would be the "go" signal for being happy, what difference does it make if you're a millionaire or in debt right now? The notion of indebtedness in the 21st century is very different than it was 100 years ago. There still might be the lingering stigma (because people still watch shows like
Oliver), but for the most part that's irrelevant and incomparable in today's world.
Even three or four decades ago, the notion of someone being in their twenties and in debt, and then two decades later being the next millionaire, seemed laughable. But did indebtedness stop Noland Bushnell? Did it stop the myriad of over-night millionaire twenty-somethings cashing in on the Internet in the 1990s? Intellectual property (and that's not just what you know, that's most importantly how you know how to use what you know), is a much more tangible resource than it seemed 100, or even 20, years ago.
The most innovative and lucrative advances in the past twenty years seem to suggest that people who risk marketing their intellectual property will be rewarded. Just keep that risk within your means. Your history suggests that you're familiar with thinking outside the box - most people aren't, so use that to your advantage. Keep an eye out for situations where the masses are aware of the need for a solution, but are incapable of realizing the solution themselves. If you can see the solution and the means to market it, that's your intellectual property working for you.
If you had to set up a lemonade stand tomorrow, could you? Could you make it work? If you saw some kids selling lemonade tomorrow, would some ideas occur to you on how they might do it better? Maybe lemonade's not your thing, so if not, what is? What's the thing you love and loved doing so much that you invested your time and energy in developing your intellectual property and made it grow? You don't have lemons, you have electronic ideas and skills. So don't look for hot, thirsty people. Look for people who have a deficit of things you have in surplus, people who are willing to pay for what you have. Based on what I've seen you've done, I'm convinced those people are out there: you just need to make the right product that works to your best advantage, and make a sign (or website... hint, hint) advertising what you've got.
I know I've said this before, but geography still plays a huge part in determining a market surplus or deficit. It's not just the labour market, that we've discussed before, that's affected by geography. Ebay, Internet sales, etc work because they market
to an international market base, but the essence of why they work internationally is because there is a surplus in the market one place, and a deficit of the same market in another place, and people willing to pay to move something from one place to another. Sell in a deficit market: if this were real estate, that's what's called "a seller's market," one where the advantage goes to the seller. The Internet's a valuable tool in being able to connect businessmen with deficit markets, so think about how you can use it to your advantage (since you already seem savvy with that sphere anyway). Not to beat a dead horse, but the willingness to relocate is a huge bonus for workers looking to take advantage of deficits in the labour market, too. That said, it's extremely unlikely that anyone will give you a $1M job - you'll have to, and can, make that on your own.