Ask HN: How do you accept your place in the world?

The older you get then the less relevant the opinions of others are about you. Be what you are and what your want so that you feel self-fulfilled. Don't measure your self worth relative to others as there are always more relevant people to you in the world. Ultimately we all realize that we mostly don't matter in the end.

Be grateful. Really really spend time thinking about all you have, your obvious intelligence, skills.

If you had the privilege of studying in good schools that helped mold you, acknowledge how rare that privilege is worldwide.

If you are self-taught,be proud of yourself, many people lack the discipline or motivation.

Once you reach some goals and get some recognition, youll probably start hanging out with people who also have great accomplishments, and invariably some of them will have greater accomplishments than your own. Its a balance between being inspired but not comparing youself to others.

Its similar to how it works with money, you make some, buy a nice house and a BMW x3. Then the guy next door gets an x5, So you get an x6. Then at the golf club you hear some people are only flying on chartered planes, you start doing that and you start meeting people who have their own plane. It never stops.

If it makes you feel better my own mediocrity in life despite passion and interests has gotten me to realize/reconcile a couple of things:

1. You cannot control results, just your efforts. So keep at it and don't worry about failures/lack of brilliance (don't seek failures ofcourse). 2. Trust there is a higher power (you don't need to be religious about this). There is pretty big chance you just stumbled into your bad luck the same way most of the "great folks" stumbled into their greatness (I am pretty sure you are not working orders of magnitude less than them).

Where do you get your belief system from? We all have one. Mine teaches me not to think of myself more highly than I ought. It also teaches me to work hard, not seek poverty or wealth, and to think deeply on what I am ambitious about. My ambition is to follow Jesus's teachings. One of the best people (and workers) I know recently died of cancer. People celebrated how good a man he was at his funeral. There was no mention of any of the projects he had worked on bar how much client's loved working with him.

I have been testing this belief system for 35 years. It has worked well for me and given me a perspective on time, ambition, tough times and good times.

This is not something that’ll happen in the short term, but consider abandoning the idea that your life needs to be more significant than anyone else’s.

I found I’m much happier and more secure when I began to think of others more as a collective that I’m a part of, instead of as a bunch of atomized competitors.