After growing up wanting to swim around academia as an astrophysicist, I dropped out of my first attempt at university, bummed around for a bit and eventually got a fairly rubbish tech support job. You reach a point and think "ah well, this is what my life is like, then. I guess I'm not as smart as I thought I was".

But maybe I am. I've gotten progressively less and less rubbish jobs doing more and more sophisticated things, because it turns out I'm good at solving progressively harder and harder problems. I've resumed formal study, and discovered it's easy once you have some sort of work ethic and care about the subject matter. I might be running a decade behind schedule, but it's my goal to solve the biggest problems I can get my hands around. In retrospect, that's many times more exciting than the astrophysics plans I had when I was younger.