Your gymnastics achievements are pretty cool, I have to admit. I wish I’d ever had a body like yours; I can barely touch my nose to my knee without bending it, and I still can’t do a simple handstand, even backed by a wall. And it’s a huge step up from many, many high-schoolers who spent those same thousands of hours playing Mario 64, getting drunk, and screwing.

With regard to high-school achievements, though, what do you think of Julian Assange, Jon Lech Johansen, William Kamkwamba, and Aaron Swartz, who were high-school-aged at about the same time you were? When they were 14-18 years old, they disrupted overseas nuclear research; enabled free software to play DVDs; electrified their town with a windmill built from scrap; and contributed to defining RSS, published a standards-track RFC on RDF, and defined the Creative Commons metadata standards; respectively.

(I’m not saying this to make you feel bad. My own achievements in high school consisted of learning calculus, learning a little about the internet, and not getting anybody pregnant.)

It’s true that most presidents from a hundred years ago are forgettable. I can list quite a number of people from before 1910, though — let’s say people who had a substantial impact in the 1890–1910 period: off the top of my head, Edison, his assistant Dickson, Tesla, Bell, Michelson, Morley, Einstein, Carnegie, Hollerith, Curie, Becquerel, Röntgen, Hearst, Gandhi, Jack London, Mark Twain, Darrow, Susan B. Anthony, and Cixi.

Looking these folks up, here are their achievements during that time. I deleted a couple from the list above because they didn’t achieve anything significant during that time.

Edison: funded the invention of motion-picture cameras and projectors and did some of the inventing. First commercial film piracy in 1902. Electrocuted an elephant in 1903 to publicize the dangers of AC electricity. Developed first commercially practical fluoroscope, killing his assistant Dally in the process. Invented prefabricated concrete buildings. (He did a bunch of other stuff, but that was before 1890.)

Dickson: led the team that did most of the inventing, founded the first film studio.

Röntgen: discovered X-rays, received a Nobel prize.

Tesla: supposedly discovered the skin damage caused by X-rays before Röntgen discovered the rays, invented RF oscillators, built the first (?) radio, maybe invented transformers, built a radio-controlled boat, fought for AC, supposedly invented ignition coils and spark plugs, invented AND gates (?), invented the bladeless turbine, built history’s largest Tesla coil, went broke and somewhat mad. (Too bad I didn’t think of Bose, Marconi, J.P. Morgan, or De Forest off the top of my head.)

Bell: led the Bell Telephone Company, built hydrofoils, commercialized the phonograph.

Michelson: made improvements in the manufacture of diffraction gratings. Michelson grating ruling engines are still in use today. (His famous experiment with Morley was in 1887, and his high-precision measurements of the speed of light were even earlier.)

Morley: Replicated the Michelson-Morley experiment to much higher precision with Miller.

Einstein: in 1905, published papers explaining the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy.

Carnegie: prevented the annexation of Cuba, launched Carnegie Steel Company, sold it for US$225 million, founded public libraries all over the US and UK, founded half of CMU, founded TIAA-CREF, failed to settle the Homestead Strike, which ended up killing a number of people.

Hollerith: founded one of the four companies that would eventually merge to become IBM and led the technical development of tabulating machines.

Curie: discovered that radioactivity made air conductive, discovered that thorium was radioactive, discovered polonium and radium, invented the word “radioactivity”, received a Nobel prize and many other awards.

Becquerel: discovered radioactivity, received a Nobel prize, died.

Röntgen: discovered X-rays, received the first Nobel prize in physics and several other awards.

Hearst: co-invented yellow journalism with Pulitzer, founded a national political party, and (again with Pulitzer) started the Spanish-American War, initiating US imperialism.

Gandhi: was accepted to the bar, failed at establishing a law practice, moved overseas, founded the Natal Indian Congress, led civil-rights activism in South Africa, survived a lynching attempt, organized a volunteer ambulance corps to support the British war effort against the Zulus, began to abandon his racist beliefs, gave up sex, and invented satyagraha.

London: got arrested for being a Socialist, and wrote The Call of the Wild, The Unparalleled Invasion, To Build a Fire, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, all of which are still read today.

Darrow: represented Debs in the Pullman Strike case, once successfully and once unsuccessfully; helped organize the Populist Party; successfully defended Big Bill Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone; published his first book.

Twain: wrote Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Mysterious Stranger, Letters from the Earth, his autobiography, and a vicious literary criticism of the Leatherstocking series that’s better reading than the Leatherstocking series itself; did a six-year around-the-world lecture tour; survived a depression when everyone he loved died; introduced Helen Keller to the rich benefactor who paid for her education; became VP of the American Anti-Imperialist League; received an honorary doctorate; died.

Anthony: created the National American Woman Suffrage Association; worked for universal adult female suffrage in the US until six years before hear death. She succeeded 14 years after her death.

Cixi: led a coup d’état against her nephew, the emperor Guangxu, bringing herself to power, and later poisoned him with arsenic; abolished the imperial examination system; and, through political miscalculation, ended 268 years of Qing Dynasty rule in China and 2133 years of imperial rule in China; but kept China independent.

๛

So, I don't think it's hopeless to try to achieve things that will be remembered in 100 years. People do it every year. It's just that getting elected president isn't a particularly effective way to do it.