Ask HN: How to not be jealous of other people despite being a failure
OP I think you need to change your perspective, philosophy, and outlook--<p>Failure is just a step on the path to success.  Failuring to try is trying to fail-- translation: If you&#x27;re not failing, you&#x27;re not trying.  So, pat yourself on the back: You&#x27;re already on the road to success.<p>Look at cases of people like Eric Thomas-- See a brief overview of his life here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;gV1ZK8dgXG0?t=52" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;gV1ZK8dgXG0?t=52</a> or David Gogginns.<p>- Get on Youtube and check out Motivational Speeches and Motivational Music<p>- Pick a project to work on.<p>if you&#x27;re 23 without kids, you don&#x27;t need a job that involves a 2.5 hour commute.  You should consider applying to jobs in other states &amp; cities if you can&#x27;t find local ones within 30 minutes of where you live.<p>For me, I dropped out of grad school, drove across the US to lived in a tent in the SF Bay for a month applying to jobs until I landed one (not a unique story-- the same is true for many people).  Laid off after 4 months.<p>I then lived on a friend&#x27;s rural property and landscaped part time for rent, while teaching myself to build a web app over the course of a few months.  I also realized renting a place in Mexico would only cost about $300&#x2F;month, and since I learned Spanish in HS, I decided to try living in Mexico-- for the purpose of a low cost lifestyle in order to take time to teach myself web app development.<p>What I&#x27;m trying to say is: Success takes lifestyle sacrifice: you might have to move across the country, and&#x2F;or live very frugally, and&#x2F;or.<p>Get creative! Opportunities don&#x27;t come easy-- sometimes you have to make sacrifice and make moves!<p>How badly do you want success? Badly enough to move across the country and live out of a tent for 1-3 months?<p>You could work time and live in a tent in a forest, (or foreign country, or low cost&#x2F;part-time&#x2F;work-trade rural property)-- like I did-- in order to build projects-- visiting cafes&#x2F;libraries every day for wifi access.  Showering at a community center.  Getting food from food banks.  Cooking out of a camping stove.  I&#x27;ve spent cumulative months that way in Alaska, Oregon, California, Texas, while working on becoming a self-taught software engineer.  In cases of tent living, my tent was forests in state parks in Portland, Alaska, &amp; on WWOOF properties (tent&#x2F;cabin) Texas, California.<p>Useless skills? Guess what-- plenty of people are in that boat.  I was-- thats why I am telling you my story.<p>Look: 1. The skills required by an economy change with time.  So all of us have to build new skills once in a while.<p>2. Goods &amp; Services are not uniformly distributed in an economy-- the best jobs in a particular industry might not be where you currently live.  If you really want success, you might have to move (temporarily-- for a few months or years), like I did.<p>Check out the skills are in demand-- via good data sources &amp; visualization such as &quot;BLS: Visualize it: Wages and projected openings by occupation&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;careeroutlook&#x2F;2019&#x2F;article&#x2F;wages-and-openings.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;careeroutlook&#x2F;2019&#x2F;article&#x2F;wages-and-ope...</a><p>Cross reference well paid skills, in high demand, with your interests.  Ideally, a skillset w&#x2F;o a degree requirement (examples: software dev, IT security, sales, digital marketing, etc.).<p>If you were interested in web app dev, I&#x27;d tell ya:<p>- Start building projects.  Check Udemy.com for courses in NodeJS or Python web frameworks for example-- Click &quot;Categories&quot; in the upper left and you&#x27;ll see a ton of in-demand skills you can learn at a low cost (note: only pay the promo price-- about $12.  If its more, just create a new email account &amp; new udemy account, and you&#x27;ll get promo price again).  For a IT SKILLS ROADMAP check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roadmap.sh&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roadmap.sh&#x2F;</a><p>- next, build a website featuring a portfolio, description of your professional &amp; personal interests, and links to your resume<p>- Then build an online presence--  post your resume on multiple resume websites like Indeed.com . Get on LinkedIn.<p>......<p>Success is challenging.  It requires strategic sacrifice, optimism, discipline, and focus.  And you can&#x27;t focus on successful actions if you&#x27;re complaining. So stop complaining, stop focusing on what&#x27;s wrong, and focus on what&#x27;s going right (you have a laptop, Wifi? You&#x27;re young w&#x2F;o obligations? No reason you can&#x27;t self-study a new, in-demand  skillset), and start taking action.<p>TLDR: Did I stop trying to achieve my goal and career dream of earning the career skills of a software engineer, after I was laid off in the SF Bay after just 4 months? No.  I kept at it, lived in a tent &amp; eventually another country to reduce rent, &amp; improve my skills: learned to make, then made app from scratch, then published a web portfolio which featured my app (and another 2-3 smaller, projects).  Landed a remote job within 2 weeks, where I was tasked with learning a new programming language.<p>I had to create the career achievement goal, then promise myself to commit achieving it no matter what-- self teaching, tent, foreign country, then moving to a hub of that particular industry (in this case, IT)... initially I failed. Tried again.  Eventually, with enough work &amp; sacrifice, I broke into the industry.  I applied to Google &amp; Facebook, and interviewed with them-- Currently I&#x27;m not great at data structures &amp; algorithms (hackerrank style) interviews, but I know that with enough practice, if I want to, I can get a role at those or similar, industry leading &amp; well paying IT companies.<p>In fact, I&#x27;ve already had 3 different careers-- just a few years working in a particular occupation (Sales, Marketing, Software Engineering).  I think its likely I&#x27;ll have 2-3 more careers in my lifetime-- I certainly could if I chose to: I&#x27;d just take time to learn new skills.  I&#x27;ve always wanted to learn: Carpentry, Electronics, House construction, Organic Farming &amp; Livestock raising.  I can perhaps take on some of those careers.<p>&quot;“Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.”
— Aldous Huxley