You always have to set your own rubrics(self-critique, self-feedback) for success, from the very beginning. Society will always try to impose some on you, for b

You always have to set your own rubrics(self-critique, self-feedback) for success, from the very beginning. Society will always try to impose some on you, for big things(political platforms) and small(bringing the coolest lunchbox to the schoolyard). But to find any peace the externals have to be decoupled from your inner self, and aligned where it is pragmatically convenient for you. The problem with externals is familiar - it's not just the jealousy, it's the imposter syndrome if you start succeeding, the disinterest in the details from friends and family, the stress of the rat race and the fickleness of trends and fashions, with a whole array of concerns summed into a dollar value. Those things get your emotions going in a negative place. If you do your own self-critique well, you can build skills and explore topics that nobody else is, and that's the kind of thing that translates to the optics of surpising outlier success. But when you only subscribe to the same feedback loops as the average, you get predictably average results - on average. There will always be people that grasp a thing a little bit easier, are a little bit more numb to the negatives, have better access to resources. You don't want to assume that is you, because it most likely isn't. And you have to pick and choose what things you will stay average at and what things are going to be your in-depth focus, cause nobody has the time to do it all.