I've had this thing where I'll think about all the things I'll never do.. At 17, I'd go "I'll never be as good as Gauss". At 19, "Jesus, Lagrange taught at college at age 19". At 20, "Galois died at 20..Damn.."

The only thing that I have going for me is that I have dissociated my emotional/psychological state and my intellectual pursuit to become smarter than I was the day before. I can work on stuff when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when tears are wetting the paper, when it's cold, when it's hot, when I'm anxious, when I'm relaxed. The first thing I did after college is trying to come up with a studying schedule to undo the harm of not making the most out of it.

This is great, right? The downside is that, judging myself even more harshly than when I judge myself compared to others: If I can work in all conditions and everyday, how come I still suck at everything and can't do anything well. I haven't found an answer to that, yet.

Mozart died at 35 ... of strep.

I'm missing your point. Do you mean he was unlucky not to have lived enough, or to have died of strep? (the 'or' is a boolean 'or', not a colloquial one. i.e: not mutually exclusive).

Just continuing the theme of, "When so-and-so famous person was your age, he was dead"

Hmm, the only death example was Galois. Not sure we can make a theme out of that. Also, I'm not sure: are you 35 and are talking about yourself or something made you think I am?

I'm adding a synonym to 'pedant' in my online dictionary: 'jugurtha'

My replies to your comments were questions to elicit further details because I didn't understand what you meant (maybe an inside joke, maybe a gem hidden in there) and I didn't want to go with assumptions and possibly miss meaning. You called me a pedant for that.

<pedantry>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugurtha

</pedantry>

Think at this as an exercise in programming. You don't write a game of Snake to make THE game of Snake. You write it to learn something and hone your skills (same way as someone taking a Math course solves simple and typical exercises).

Getting over this hump in thinking is hard though - I was crippled for years by "CREATION MUST BE PERFECT". It's only recently I've managed to adjust to thinking "all of this is good practice" and dumping almost everything I make out to the public.

Well, as you might already imagine, that is an unrealistic attitude to have. One of the points of these creative endeavors is to have fun and improve yourself, little by little.

The expectation that you must "dunk over Michael Jordan" to do so is a bit absurd.