Perhaps I can give you some perspective from... the future. I've been doing what you're doing for about 20 years now, and have worked on (mainly with one other

Perhaps I can give you some perspective from... the future. I've been doing what you're doing for about 20 years now, and have worked on (mainly with one other partner) probably 100 things? Some were full blown companies, some were just fun side projects, some were apps that made pretty good money, etc. Perhaps some things I've realized recently will be useful to you: * It took us around 6-8 years before we made any money at all on anything we did. The thing that ended up making money wasn't even a sure thing, it just happened to work out. For a good part of those 6-8 years we thought we sucked because things never quite worked out. It turned out we were learning a bunch of stuff that turned out to be very useful for a whole new thing that came along (phone apps). * Making money wasn't the most important thing for me in these projects, but once we started making money we could quit our jobs and do our own stuff full time. That turned out to be super important, and is the most important part of making money on your projects probably. * Making technology and making a business are two pretty different things, and it's pretty rare that someone is really into both of them. That's probably ok! There are a bunch of businesses that naturally develop out of good technology, so you can probably just work on things that make sense given your strengths. * Jumping around and doing lots of different things is one of my traits as well, and for a while I thought it was a big weakness. It can be. Sometimes an idea needs a few years of consistent effort to see results. Other times though, you were right to give up as it wasn't going anywhere. For me, what helped was to think of what I'm working on as the collection of ALL of the projects that I've done. Then I am making progress no matter which ones fail. Then jumping around doesn't feel as bad. That all being said, there are boring and discouraging times in every project and it can be important that you see things through beyond where you're simply interested intellectually. I'm sure there are a bunch more things that might be helpful that I can't quite think of now, I'll add them as I think of them. Bottom line, what you can do is surprisingly rare (it just doesn't feel that way on HN). It's ok to take some time to develop these skills, one of which is filtering ideas to work on. If you spend enough years working at it then you might even end up an overnight success :)