I feel like I waited to long to actually start working on something that'll hopefully become a big part of my life.

I know that feel bro. Worse, I'm 7 years into my 4 year degree. One of the things that helped me gain perspective was Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years:

Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:

1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.

2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.

3. Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.

This assumes that some people already have the qualities necessary for being a great designer; the job is to properly coax them along. Alan Perlis put it more succinctly: "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers". Perlis is saying that the greats have some internal quality that transcends their training. But where does the quality come from? Is it innate? Or do they develop it through diligence? As Auguste Gusteau (the fictional chef in Ratatouille) puts it, "anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great." I think of it more as willingness to devote a large portion of one's life to deliberative practice. But maybe fearless is a way to summarize that. Or, as Gusteau's critic, Anton Ego, says: "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

It reminds me of what my teachers always told us, "You can do anything if you put your mind to it." It seems like the self-esteem fluff that's said to make everyone feel special, but I now think it's much more literal than that. It really is just a matter of discipline to learn a skill and a matter of prolonged discipline to master that skill.

Two people embody this, for me at least. The first is Dan McLaughlin of The Dan Plan. He was a 30-year-old photographer before he decided to try and become a professional golfer by following the 10,000 hour idea.

It’s a project in transformation. An experiment in potential and possibilities. Through 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice,” Dan, who currently has minimal golf experience, plans on becoming a professional golfer. But the plan isn’t really about golf: through this process, Dan hopes to prove to himself and others that it’s never too late to start a new pursuit in life. For a detailed description of the project, please read this blog post: http://thedanplan.com/blog/?p=1090

The other is Jimmy Carr, the British comedian. He left a marketing job at Shell to pursue stand-up comedy at 25 and now he's one of Britain's most well-known performers.

Hell, even my wife only just now got her first job in the animation industry (at 24) and she never even went to school for it! She was only able to do this because she made an effort to work on her skills even through shitty retail jobs and surviving off just my student loans for the past seven or eight months.

I struggled for years after high school because some of my best friends just knew what they wanted to do and how they were going to get there. I dropped out of college a few times, worked soul-sucking jobs, and only relatively recently found a passion for programming (I'd been doing it for years, but only out of necessity).

One of the great faults of my 'Career and Personal Planning' courses in high school was their insistence on knowing what you're going to be before the end of grade 12. I remember we had a folder which was supposed to contain the best of the best of our work over our high school career and which the Universities we applied to would look at. That was bullshit; not even I looked at the stuff that was in there. But that mentality haunted me: I was already too late to change gears, I couldn't do anything great with my life. I looked at people like Stephen Wolfram who got a PhD in particle physics at age 20. It was only after dropping out, being human pylon, going to and dropping out of bible college, climbing as far as I could up the corporate ladder without going into management that I shook that mentality and worked on realizing that yes, I could do anything I put my mind to, as long as I learned to kick myself in the ass - because I'm a lazy motherfucker.