It’s ironic that the type of person who is capable of obtaining success is incapable of enjoying it. By most people’s standards, I’m probably doing very well already. After all, I graduated first in my undergraduate class, I received my MS in one year at age 22, I’m on track to receive my Ph. D. in at most 3 years total, probably 2, and the job offers are still streaming in, with starting salaries that have just officially broken the 6-figure barrier. By my own standards, however, I still have yet to accomplish anything earth-shattering. After all, aside from my divisor function and quantile tree research, I haven’t really discovered anything on my own. True, I have lots of hypotheses, but they don’t do you much good except from a theoretical standpoint unless you have the equipment, resources, or public response to follow up on them. Even if I did have such resources, I don’t have the clout to ensure that my ideas are heard. By my own standards, I am not successful.
I will be, though. So long as I am given the time, I’m sure of it now, because I’ve realized that the capacity for success is an innate property. True, I have skills that are extremely in demand, which is very much helping me get jobs among other things (and data mining/machine learning jobs pay a lot), but when I speak of success, I seldom mean money, and I almost never mean something that depends on the support of other people (because as I’ve seen over the past few years, society does not make enough sense to consistently support pretty much anyone).
No. I’ll succeed because I’m able to do things many people cannot. Most people can only handle one area of specialization, yet I’ve utterly refused to specialize, even while society attempted to actively force me to, and yet maintain expertise in almost every field I’ve touched. In some fields, it even extends beyond that of most specialists, and I’m still rather young and nowhere near the apex of my skill (except perhaps in mathematics, where skill declines after the late 20s and where I now feel confident enough to extend my previous research in the direction of Robin’s Theorem and GRH after finishing my dissertation). I embrace principles such as the universality of ideas, the ability to fit insane workloads into arbitrarily small amounts of time (while I was winning all those awards, I was also doing research, programming on the side, writing music, taking an 18 credit load, and working three jobs, all at once), and the use of the subconscious as an idea factory endowed with all of the power of the conscious mind but none of the effort or attention required of conscious idea generation because I’ve not only theorized but demonstrated them.
Most people dismiss such philosophies because they are either incapable of following them (and thus presume them false from their own experiences) or because they disagree with their premises or potential consequences. Either way, it simply makes my philosophy all the more unique. There’s strength in that difference.