Ask HN: I feel so shallow and dumb when I see what other smart people are doing

This is a delightful sentiment, and I'd go further and say that things as simple as being kind to the people around you, cleaning up after yourself, etc. are similarly important and impactful. They sound trivial compared to acts of "genius" but a ton of people are jerks, every day. It's not trivial at all to make the people around you feel better, it's not easy to do it every day, and if everyone actually did it, the world would be a vastly different place.

Don't fall into the trap thinking that the Rollercoaster Tycoon person is merely talented, and a kind of measuring stick for what talent is. They are extremely gifted and if you're not that then you can still be OK and impressive in your own right! There are many other things that can be said, but start with that.

It's very hard to compare oneself to others.

There's an arcade bar I frequent to play DDR. If I go later in the evening when it's busy I will always get someone who is a bit awestruck and says "I've never seen anyone so good at that game" and I'm like "yeah, there are better people than me" or "the machine tells me exactly how bad I am". But it does not really matter to this audience that my technical skills are less than perfect because what they saw was astonishing regardless. And for me, it's a personal journey in returning to a game that I played for a while when it was new and then returned to many years later, after realizing that having it there filled in a "missing piece" of life and the actual thing of being good at the game was not really important.

More recently, I've been doing some digital illustrations for fun and have gradually built up a process that is hugely digital in its design: composite reference images together, do some tracing over them to study the proportions and planes, then redraw as needed with a simplified design, using art fundamentals to guide me. Doing this has largely eliminated "guess and check" and gives results that are extremely accurate and detailed in their representation, more than any freehand from-imagination result. But that's just one measure of success in the imagery. I'm still going to be a bit jealous of artists who have great control over their freehand lines, but I can finish work this way instead of sitting and dreaming. So it's a great step past the creative bottleneck.

With stories like those of a Chris Sawyer, there's a combination of obsession with the craft and coherence of purpose. That is, Chris spent a huge part of his life thinking about assembly code and its applications towards games, and then eventually put it towards a project that had few contradictions to it, which became RCT. There are many people, myself included, who put years into their game and then realize they were kidding themselves and had an incoherent approach to the design that ensured it would never feel finished or focused. And when that happens the craft ceases to matter - the project is just a timesink.

Failing in that way, putting in a huge amount of time on a game, really made me despair for a bit, but then right as that happened the cryptocurrency portfolio I had made a few years prior achieved moonshot gains, which is like, "oh, well then, I guess I succeeded anyway?" That moment really clarified how arbitrary succeeding can be; the comparative effort/return of the two endeavors is enormous.

You're only 30, and that's actually fine. Between 30 and 40 often marks a shift in attitudes because you're getting out of the feeling of being a "young striver" trying to get ahead of the crowd in a highly visible space. You can fall into a depressed state if where you are isn't where you saw yourself, but it's also easier to give yourself leeway to pursue things nobody else cares about, which means it can be creatively fertile. It just rests a lot more on continuing to build yourself up beyond your personal issues - health, finances, character development, virtues and all of that. Maybe you don't have the fortitude to make a huge game project or research cutting edge techniques, but you can do more modest things and still find admiration as with my DDR sessions.

I consider myself a person of above-average intelligence, insight, and drive. But working in Silicon Valley, I find myself constantly surrounded by people who are complete outliers. People who I consider close friends who I think are absolutely smarter, more creative, more driven, more knowledgeable than me.

And you know what? You can choose to compare yourself to them (and find yourself lacking) or you can choose to use it as inspiration. Look to those people for the traits you want to find and nurture within yourself. Actively choose to include those people in your life and let yourself become better for having them around. It's never too late to change how you look at things, or to become something different than what you are right now.

I think people in general have periods of intense creativity, followed by long period of learning or living. The more you invest in your “learning periods”, the more often you’ll be able to enjoy these creativity periods.