Failure at something is far from the worst you can do. The worst you can do is wait, because there’s a good chance you’ll have a very difficult time getting started at it again. There are a few consequences of this that I have considered: The first is to start fulfilling your life aspirations early. Perhaps you will fail at them, but you’ll have plenty of time to pick up the pieces and keep trying, whereas if you wait, you’ll spend a long time learning nothing about how to attain these goals. Delay perpetuates itself. The second is not to wait for anyone to catch up to you. Working in a group is invariably a slowdown, and it very often takes orders of magnitude more time to get something accomplished as a group than you could accomplish it individually. This happens with all groups, no matter how competent; the most competent group I’ve ever put together is still guilty of it. If you find a group lagging behind on something very important to you, don’t wait for them – do it yourself and go around them. Finally, as it applies to groups, it applied to other exogenous factors. Don’t wait too long for conditions to be right, as they may never be perfectly suitable and you may lose one chance waiting for another.

I think that’s one of the reasons I have so many accomplishments under my belt: while everyone is busy waiting, I’m doing. I started programming at 8, and since then, the scope of my aspirations has only continued to grow, even in the face of harsher and harsher external conditions and more insurmountable roadblocks.