The bit about boredom worked out a little differently for me. I remember being bored at least a few times a week as a little kid, but I'm 22 now and can't remember the last time I was bored. It was definitely before late high school, maybe about ninth grade.<p>About realizing the need to get things done, there's a window that a lot of people don't notice. It opens with said realization and closes when it's too late to act on it (you could say it never closes, but having kids certainly makes things harder). So a lot of people spend much of their 20s and early 30s lamenting their wasted youth without realizing that they've still got time to fix it.
A truly wonderful article. Thanks. I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it as much without feeling a certain degree of pain, though. Perhaps I'm the kind that learns most through failure, but now, the resonance is so much more powerful.<p>While this knowledge would be extremely beneficial for any student of <i>any</i> age, I think the primary difficulty would be in actually feeling the message, as opposed to understanding it. Everybody knows "practice makes ___," but few people act it. The ultimate challenge would be to convey that feeling. Something I'm very interested in :)