The days are long but the decades are short

But there are very few scenarios where "you're five minutes late" is a sane thing for a manager to complain about. If you have someone with a consistent pattern of slacking off, that's one thing; if you have someone who is showing up five minutes late, but is otherwise a good employee, then just back off.

Or, at the very least approach them from a perspective of "is anything going on that I could help with?". As in, is there a way work could be more flexible to make things easier for them?

In that regard, it's all about calibration. If you're the smartest person in the room, good for you, but you should also find another room where there's more challenge to be had and more fun to be had.

Note that all levels of accomplishment are something to celebrate; I'm not suggesting the kind of "nothing is ever good enough" reaction that leads to kids doing things they don't actually have an interest in doing. However, when you find an area of interest, go deep into it and find creative challenges that push you to go even further.

Also, those kinds of competitions, whether sports or academic, aren't necessarily a sufficient view into human nature. For example, most competitions like that have a clear set of rules and take a dim view of cheaters, while many other aspects of life reward creatively "cheating" to get ahead over always doing things the long way like everyone else is. Consider how people talk about finding a creative solution that takes less work: "I could have written a complete implementation of $foo myself, but I cheated by hacking $bar into mostly doing it for me, and it worked well enough to get the job done." See also Larry Wall's praise of "laziness, impatience, and hubris".

A consistent process and consistent rules produces consistent results; that's good for not doing worse than normal, but it also means you'll never find a way to do better than normal.

Find ways to reward creative solutions over unthinking rule-following. Play games that rely on creative deception and hidden information. In a competition with rules, follow the rules; in life, have a set of principles you live by, but don't automatically respect every arbitrary rule, especially the implicit unwritten ones that nobody questions. Just make sure you understand the implications and consequences, because it might be there for a reason rather than solely for the sake of arbitrariness.

I never felt comfortable with people from my generation. I seemed to become friends with people older than myself. I didn't do it on a conscious level, but it happened. I would buy things like 8 person rafts, double kayaks, huge tents. Everything I planned for had another close person/girlfriend in mind.

They all passed away.

As to money, save that money you made in your 20-30's. For some reason(I think testosterone) most of the people I knew in life made the big money in their 20-30's. These were people without fancy degrees--four year degree at best.

Oh yea, you can be the best at a lot of things, and feel like you are on top of the world. You can feel like you can accomplish anything. All that can change overnight with mental illness. I had a slight nervous breakdown(not psychotic), and I went from being one of the better students in graduate school--to someone who couldn't drive to the school a week later. Life has been a struggle since. I tried therapy and it just didn't help. Prescription drugs did alleviate some of the missery, but I am now addicted to two drugs going on twenty years. There was no history of mental illness in my family. I didn't even feel stressed when I brokedown. (I did have a fear of death. I had typical worries of a twenty something year old.) I just blew a gasket. Yes, after dealing with psychiatrists who really didn't have any answers--that's what I feel what happened. I know it's rare. None of my classmates from high school/college experienced anything close to my symptomology. It did get better with time though. I usually don't tell anyone because I know it's rare. I do have a innate understanding of homelessness because of my condition though, and cringe when I hear, "You can do anything! It just takes proper planning!". Sometimes your brain just goes haywire.