Those are all very solid points towards accomplishment, but I wanted to play devil's advocate for a moment. I'm in the same boat - started programming at 12, am 35 now with no real monetary success to speak of. However, I've gone deeper into computers than I ever thought I would. I could build a computer from the ground up, everything from logic gate design to mask layout to microcode and assembly language, up through the most abstract concurrent algorithms, networking, 3D, AI, you name it. So almost everything I read now feels old hat or a reincarnation of something discovered decades ago. People's ideas seem generally pedestrian, etc.

So I think perhaps it's good to take a step back and stop thinking in terms of what you should "do" and more in terms of what you would like your life to be like. If the current startup scene bores you because of an endless series of negative feedback, just realize that many of us feel the same way. The problem is very much the world's, not yours. It's always been that way, and always will be that way, for any individual in any time period. That's when I finally realized that no matter how hard I worked or how hard I tried, I could never achieve happiness through my accomplishments alone. That's a bitter pill to swallow for someone who built their life around self actualization.

I had a bit of a midlife crisis last year and let it all go, and tried a new way of deciding what to do based on whatever presented itself. If a problem had a smell to it, like I was halfway up Mt. Everest and had to reach the summit before I could even begin working on the crux of it, I said no to it. If you want to try some mantras to get through the day, maybe you could try picturing how to solve a problem without doing it yourself. Like, could you find someone to do it for you, could you do the problem after a few beers or on an island somewhere, things like that. That's how wealthy people approach problems, so you can copy what they do and even though you won't get wealthy right away, you'll start to earn income in the form of time and feel wealthier for less effort. Most problems don't require a superhuman effort to solve, they just require communication and teamwork and patience. A small multiplication of your efforts through others can surpass your own ability. Plenty of people have lived rich lives with no money to speak of.

Anyway, I wish I had some deep insight or miracle cure but I'm still trying to figure it out myself. I guess, whenever I'm not sure about something, I try to ask which option will reenfranchise the most people, or is most in line with how I would like the world to be in the future, regardless of the immediate benefit to myself. It's weird because if you start approaching the world in those terms, opportunities start falling in your lap, because people somehow sense that about others. There is plenty of wealth in the world, maybe a quadrillion dollars or some unfathomable number, so if the game is to be part of that, it's a more effective strategy for people to share it with you of their own accord than to somehow win it from them through sport. I guess that's why I'm starting to have more and more doubts that the startup scene can create the kind of world I want to live in, even though it's one of the best tools we've got right now. Probably the orders of magnitude higher per capita wealth on something like Star Trek is going to come from cooperativism and automating society's basic needs so that people are free to explore further into what it means to be human. So this musical chairs game people are playing with capital is distracting us from the infinite potential we each have inside us. Staying in the casino too long means you never won. Someone else did.

If you have kids or are responsible for someone, disregard my advice because I have absolutely no idea what to do in that situation. It scares the crap out of me. So I know I only have half a theory here and wish I knew how to generalize it.