Achievements

Reading the book "Against the Gods" (thanks Baba!), it details the history of risk, and how society moved from thinking of the future as pure uncertainty to one where it can be (sometimes) quantified.

The book describes the many people that contributed to risk assessment, from philosophers who thought about probabilities in life to mathematicians that provided the theorems on calculating the utility and expectancy of events.

What was more remarkable was the amount of achievements that these people had acquired by such young ages. Fibonacci wrote his book Liber Abaci when he was 27. Edmond Halley was a member of the English Royal Society by the time he was 22. Daniel Bernoulli was Professor for Mathematics by the time he was 24.

I don't know if it's because the life span of people in those days were shorter, but people seemed to be awesome early. Of course, history would have a bias to people of note, so we only read about famous people who would have been the top 1% of their society.

We are definitely getting to an age where I can see some of my friends really powering ahead in their pursuits / professions, and it's fantastic to see that. It just makes me think that I need to do more with my life. What's my contribution? What can I do that will make an impact?

I could be approaching this the wrong way. Perhaps the better question should be "what strengths do I have so that whatever I do has the greatest impact?"

Of course, as I write this, having come off a massive night in town, perhaps the focus is in the wrong place at the moment!