Ask HN: I've tried lots of things but haven't finished any.

- Wrote a program to model the stock market. (The capital I needed evaporated during the credit crunch).

- Worked on a paper with a professor. (The professor bailed and they had access to lots of equipment I would have needed to finish it myself).

- Worked on a second paper with a second professor in another department. (Same story).

- Applied to Harvard, MIT and Stanford, the three big startup schools, twice, got rejected by all both times. (The school I'm going to is good academically but produces zero startups).

- Tried to start a company over the summer. (The other two people working with me bailed in August and are refusing to acknowledge that I own the rights to the portions of the code I wrote. Don't know what I'll do since I can't afford to sue them.)

- Tried to start a second company the previous summer. (Found out that that particular business had much larger capital requirements than I had thought.)

- Submitted my own paper to a conference, gave a talk there, but the paper was never published. (The special issue of the journal they were going to publish it in was canceled, and I haven't found another journal that would accept it.)

- Submitted second paper to second conference in different field. (Same story.)

- Applied for research internships last summer. (Rejected by all).

- Applied for finance internships this summer. (Rejected by all so far, not heard back from some yet, would appreciate suggestions if anyone has any).

- Helped to write a web application last summer. (No one uses it, and the other people working on it, who have a great deal of needed expertise, have moved onto more interesting projects).

- Did another webapp for one of the student clubs. (Someone else also wrote one and theirs was better, so everyone (including me) just used that instead.)

- Half a dozen math/science contests which I've entered. I recruited some fellow students to help practice and then we met weekly to work on our strategies. (Did badly in all of them.)

- Tried to start a blog, worked on it for two years. (Pretty much nobody read it.)

Am I doing anything wrong, just in general?

(Formatting fixed, sorry).

You seem to be on the right track. From what you've written, doesn't seem like your doing any specific thing wrong (except maybe spreading yourself too thin, but that depends on many factors that I can't know from just reading this).

You can't buy back your youth, kiddo.

I'm sure the school you go to has great resources. I'm a freshman at Emory and even though there is no reputation for startups here, the business school and the library still offer extraordinary resources. I've been emailing around searching for local business men to connect with.

If you reach out you will find people with similar interests and I have found partnership to be a superb motivator for getting stuff done.

Persistence is key.

I mean, physically, yeah, it's pretty much all downhill from there. but everything else gets much better.

I would not worry too much if your social life doesn't pick up until you are a little older. Mine did not.

Also note, if you don't connect with your peers, consider finding new peers. For me, moving to the San Francisco bay area (I'm in the south bay) has massively improved my social opportunities. Also, as you get older, the other nerds start to come out of their shells. At your age, many of them either studiously avoid other people or pretend to not be nirds.