I used to be this guy. The guy with the lofty ideas, but who thought the implementation was "beneath me". The guy who would sit around, waxing poetic about various features, user acquisition, header alignment, etc. Don't get me wrong I had serious technical chops, but fixing that annoying localization bug? Blegh. Form encoding off? Don't wanna get my hands dirty. I had "big ideas"! I was going to change the world! People who change the world don't do the dirty work! So I'm very empathetic to the Obama Administration.
Like them, I needed a real wake up call. In my case, a friend who had implemented an idea I had sold the software for a lot of money. When I confronted him about sharing the profits he started running git blame on files across the project. My name came up maybe once or twice, across a multi-k LOC project, and even then on nearly inconsequential lines. It hit me then that while ideas may have value, the implementation usurps all of it. An idea alone is powerful, but once it's implemented the idea becomes worthless. At that point it's all about rolling up your sleeves and getting shit done. When you focus on that problems like an "ID generator" becoming a bottleneck (I had to read that bit several times over... apparently I need to start raising my rates to the hundreds of millions) disappear. It's a hard lesson I had to learn, and it's one the Obama administration has hopefully learned as well. Of course, I had just turned 17 when I learned my lesson, and Obama is now a lame duck with less than 2 years left on his final term. I guess this exemplifies my greatest struggle with the Obama legacy, in that it has become one defined by squandered potential.