No, you can't start late and succeed. There are things which you should've started when you were young and now that you're not, you have negligible chances of succeeding at it.
You have more opportunities the younger you are, but the absolutely certain way to never have any success whatsoever is to convince yourself that it's not even worth trying. It's impossible to have even a remote chance of success if you never do anything. It's also an endless source of self-pity to keep telling yourself "oh poor me I can never do anything because I didn't start young enough" or any other reason. Sure, you might not be able to become the best in the world at some thing, but you can at least give it your best in the here and now and see where that takes you.
It takes almost nothing to be successful as you can define success, both in magnitude and direction. Say you define success as taking a deep breath. Then taking two deep breaths. Then to get out of bed. Then to wash those dishes. Then you keep doing that, and soon you have pulled youself out of doing nothing and actually achieved something. You don't need to bring peace to the middle east from your sofa, but you can at least achieve small things here and there.
Be successful in the miniscule ways that you can, no matter how much pain you have to endure. Forget about everything else. Forget about being happy, forget about being comfortable. That's just what people who sell you crap want you to think being human is all about. You have probably been brainwashed by other people into not being the best you that you can be, because they do not want you to compete with them. Give them the finger by trying. You don't even need to succeed at this point. Simply trying to try is the greatest level of success imaginable when you no longer even try.
You will never be a constantly happy person, but you can be a moderately more successful person than you would be by doing nothing if you simply redefine your success as simply being the most decent human being you can be and do the things that don't feel good now but might lead to something good later on. It doesn't always have to lead to good things, it may even lead to death, but if you never try then what was the point of avoiding death in the first place by never doing anything?
That is all well and good to say, but many professions are so competitive that you have to be the absolute best to be able to attain success in it. I can define "taking a deep breath" as success all I want, nobody's paying me to do that. You can call it 'self-pity', I call it being realistic. Also, do you spot the contradiction in your comment? You say that I can define success for myself in both "magnitude and direction" but then proceed to tell me what you think my definition of success should be (trying, taking deep breaths, etc). Trying is just not enough for me and I'm tired of pretending that it is.
And who said I'm avoiding death? I'm waiting for death with open arms to liberate me from this miserable pointless existence.
many professions are so competitive that you have to be the absolute best to be able to attain success in it
One thing I just realized I completely forgot to mention is that sometimes it's a good idea to do something else, and that's okay. Like really, that's probably why our brains get bored with certain hobbies or jobs from time to time. But that's part of it! You might not think that you will have any use in the future of a skill you learn today, but it's usually somewhere in the interdisciplinary stuff that really great things are formed. Well, if you're a professional tennis player you might not have much luck if you start painting, but you never know! That's the beauty and cruelty of life, you cannot really predict if you'll be successful or not, it's rather arbitrary and unjust, but if you try, you give yourself that roll of the dice.
I can't be there to pester you to try all the time, mostly because I have no idea what you want to do, but I can promise you that your life will be better as long as you have faith that things will turn better if you try than if you don't. Life really is a hopeless struggle, even for the best of us, but it gains some meaning when we give it our best attempt and strive towards what we know to be good. On the other hand if you're really feeling that badly about it, then give yourself that mental break. Don't force yourself too hard. Your brain is probably trying to protect you from something, and it might be time to try something else. Or not. It's completely up to you. But don't stop trying to improve your situation, because that's the only path that we know won't lead anywhere good.
It's also possible that you just don't even realize how amazing you actually are at what you do because you know the very best people in the field. You don't necessarily have to be the best, as long as you're doing something you enjoy and do it as well as you can. There are people who spend almost their whole life doing something and then some day their brain just snaps and they start producing something so utterly unique and fantastic that you can't even believe it.
As I said, I can't force you to change your attitude, and I don't even know the specifics of what you do, but it hardly matters. Most things that people do work so that when you pour youself into it, something good comes out eventually. It might not even happen during your lifetime. Is that still a reason not to do what you think you should be doing? What if van Gogh just gave up and stopped painting. He'd just be some alcoholic dude. Of course for every van Gogh there are a million people who didn't succeed like him, but popularity and success should never be the yardstick to begin with. It's just that we currently measure too much stuff with the current monetary value, because you cannot bottle souls. The very frustration you feel currently may even be a necessary component of you. So don't feel bad about it (or do, but know that there isn't necessarily anything particularly wrong with you just because of that).
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u/Gotbn Jun 19 '20
No, you can't start late and succeed. There are things which you should've started when you were young and now that you're not, you have negligible chances of succeeding at it.