You have to understand - with doing something comes legions of folk like the people in this thread - legions of people who are so troubled by their own comparative mediocrity that instead of picking themselves up and conducting their own quests for excellence, instead - they hold court on the internet, trying to convince themselves and each other that the acts of others always have some balancing negativity that will ultimately ensure they are doing no better than any other human being in life.
You can't change that. You can only not get trapped by the same process.
I'm happy that I lived up to my potential - or as much of my potential as I could have lived up to without risking potentially irreversible damage to my physical or mental health - in a few areas: math, strongman at 170-lb, and reproducing my DNA.
In hindsight, I'm not sure if I would have done it differently. I don't know for certain what genetic cards I hold, and I don't want to take that chance. Others do. Call it being more motivated, or possibly being less intelligent. Everyone has to decide these things for themselves.
In hindsight, I would have probably thrown my hat into welterweight MMA fighting, because as I see it - weight classes help athletes prevent some of the health problems that bigger athletes unfortunately prevent.
I would not have wanted to compete in open class strongman under any circumstance. Screw that - especially assuming we do only live once and are not computer simulations, which - after looking at the latest UFC video game - is looking more and more likely to me that we are just in that sort of experience. That said, such an existential model allows for infinite regression - but I digress.
