what helps me the most is closing my eyes and envisioning the life I want to have and know that there's nothing stopping me from achieving this but myself.
Except intellectual barriers, education, political turmoil, high unemployment, lobbyists, and of course legal barriers?
"I will never look back on life and say I wish I had, only I'm glad I did". If you want to do something in your life there is no reason that you shouldn't do it.
See above... I have pursued things with all of the passion, intelligence, hard work and ability I had (which I'm sure your average joe would say is considerably more than most people are capable of offering)
I've had those things crumble around me many times...
That's when I found out... I was doing it wrong. Now I've had, by far, the most success I've ever had... because I gave up my dreams, intellectual goals, and own interests and pursued one assumption:
"The world is
full of mind-blowingly dumb people. Not only is it full of them, they make up the overwhelming majority. How can I capitalize off the fact that it will all burn to the ground soon, and most importantly what will people still spend money on as it all burns around them..."
Trust me when I say, the money I was making when I worked for bulge brackets in college is nothing compared to what I'm making now... My retirement date is tentatively next May.
I plan to never work a day as a nuclear engineer (even though I'm quite passionate about well-fusion and believe it is attainable within a decade if properly funded). Rather I believe I will go and selfishly pursue my garage tinkerings, building sail boats, and sailing around the Mediterranean.
For whatever reason the world values allowing some moron the "right" to go to community college to pursue physical therapy degrees rather than attainable, and cheap, fusion.
In particular the 10^9 fusor relation to radius is actively and, apparently, being scaled up without serious issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell This project is not being done where i go to school unfortunately, but I have been doing a lot of research on the Tehran effort.