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Comment by lcc | Hacker News Reader

As another washed-up former athlete (one of my old teammates will be playing in PyeongChang any day now), what resonated most with me was how the author grappled with her self-identity after quitting. It is easy to define yourself when you have a concrete goal and can pour all your time, energy, heart and soul into it. And it is devastating when you lose it.

It's even harder to redefine yourself when you used to be good at whatever it was you lost, because you know just how much time and effort it took to get there. It can seem impossible to achieve the same level of mastery of anything else.

It's been almost 5 years since I quit and, while I've picked up new hobbies that I enjoy, I still haven't found anything that inspires the passion I used to have for my sport.

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I spent a good 10 years of my life in a legitimate attempt to become an NFL player. If you saw me, you would have said it was a long shot - of course it was - but I didn't let any of this get to me and I worked extremely hard to get to that goal. But I failed. I started for 3 years on my D3 college football team but at the end of my senior season I was still laughably far from NFL caliber. When I put my pads away for the last time it was devastatingly clear that I had completely wasted on average 20-30 hours every week for the past 10 years of my life, hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person.

You know what I did? I moved on, fast. And that is the solution to failure - move on quickly. And I did move on, and have found success after.

> ...it was devastatingly clear that I had completely wasted on average 20-30 hours every week for the past 10 years of my life, hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person.

Beyond the "making friends and/or becoming a normal person" issues, don't you think that training for 10 years on a single goal gives you an idea of complexity that you can apply to other fields? I was (90%) healthy obsessed by developing software in my youth and that gave me an edge on how far, now, I can help others to solve software development problems.

Indeed, I love all this subject about high competition analysis, but, to see how you can apply it at a humble level.

I consider you lucky, you had a big goal and you went all out to try and get there. There has to be some satisfaction in having put it all out on the line. Most people live fairly mundane lives, directionless and sans ambition.

I wish I had that kind of singular focus on something when I was 10. Considering where I was born, I had little opportunity to pursue sports/music/whatever at a young age, my society pushes kids to become bookworms. I feel I greatly missed out.

> hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person.

It's overrated, and you can have normality when you're old.

"Normality" is really very overrated indeed. I learnt rather late that one had to come to terms with his particularities and that "normal" was not that good of a thing to be; realisations before which I was suffering in agony because I wasn't "normal". Conforming to the society without compromising oneself is okay, trying to fix defects one's own personality is okay, but all these are possible without becoming "normal", which implies mediocrity, ordinariness.

what did you move on to?

If you're interested in changing how you process failure, consider "The Practicing Mind" by Thomas Sterner.

A significant personal struggle of mine which I had from a very young age, was a difficulty accepting my own failures and shortcomings. My parents always taught my to shoot for the moon, but never built a mental framework for me of how to process and understand crash landings.

This book along with some light additional study of the concept of "The Beginners Mind" has given me such a framework. I no longer struggle with failure. Even past failures which I would carry around with regret and anger, I've been able to re-cast into a different light and move on.

Anyways, it's a mental model that worked for me. YMMV.

I still wonder whether it is better to quit cold turkey or to struggle on in the same field (senior competitions, coaching etc).

As a chess master I am blessed and cursed with something that I can play at a reasonably high level until old age while watching my skills slowly yet surely decline.

At age 40+ you realize that you will not be really good at anything you start learning from ground zero.

Whatever seeds you planted at an early age are the ones you have to grow.

So the only answer to improving at an older age is MU. Just set aside your competitiveness and enjoy the occasional break from mediocrity.

>At age 40+ you realize that you will not be really good at anything you start learning from ground zero.

At age 40+, there is no human endeavor that you are starting at ground zero from.

What does "MU" mean?

http://wiki.c2.com/?MuAnswer -> the question is unaswerable

> At age 40+ you realize that you will not be really good at anything you start learning from ground zero.

This is only true if by really good you mean world class.

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