I guess this is entirely tangential, but one of the stories in here resonated with me.
I had much in common with a childhood friend. We bonded over similar interests in electronics, then video games, then computers in elementary school. He was definitely smarter than me when he could motivate himself to learn things. But in retrospect, I had dogged persistence on my side. As we moved past high school, I went into the military but kept my computer interests while he went to an art school and sort of floundered for a number of years. Getting into and out of minimum wage jobs and various MLM schemes. After I got out of the military and starting my first IT job, I tried to convince him a few times that he would be awesome at the same things I was doing at the time and would make a lot more money than he was at the time. But I guess it just wasn't what he wanted.
Fast forward a decade or two and he now owns a very successful potato-chip distributing business where he lives and bootstrapped a second side-business doing video drone photography for real estate listings. I think we make about the same amount of money, except he doesn't have a desk job, gets many more vacations, and doesn't have to sit through multiple hours of meetings a day.
So it seems he turned out alright for him despite not taking my advice. (Or possibly anyone else's!)
Going to an art school sounds very hard, because the measure of success is very erratic, so you can never congratulate yourself or hold yourself to a plan. Maybe he has as much grit as anyone and such studies aren’t good for motivation.
I had much in common with a childhood friend. We bonded over similar interests in electronics, then video games, then computers in elementary school. He was definitely smarter than me when he could motivate himself to learn things. But in retrospect, I had dogged persistence on my side. As we moved past high school, I went into the military but kept my computer interests while he went to an art school and sort of floundered for a number of years. Getting into and out of minimum wage jobs and various MLM schemes. After I got out of the military and starting my first IT job, I tried to convince him a few times that he would be awesome at the same things I was doing at the time and would make a lot more money than he was at the time. But I guess it just wasn't what he wanted.
Fast forward a decade or two and he now owns a very successful potato-chip distributing business where he lives and bootstrapped a second side-business doing video drone photography for real estate listings. I think we make about the same amount of money, except he doesn't have a desk job, gets many more vacations, and doesn't have to sit through multiple hours of meetings a day.
So it seems he turned out alright for him despite not taking my advice. (Or possibly anyone else's!)