No one can be good at everything, so everyone is mediocre at some things. I imagine a lot of people who end up with 'mediocre lives' probably could have done we

No one can be good at everything, so everyone is mediocre at some things. I imagine a lot of people who end up with 'mediocre lives' probably could have done well in one thing or another, but they either never found it (or never dug deep enough into that area to realize it), or their life circumstances made it difficult for them to properly pursue it / they had some bad luck while pursuing it that scared them away from it (Hi! That's me and board game design. I think I'm pretty good at it, but I've had terrible luck getting publishers to take a chance on me the past six years, despite having multiple games that have won design awards). Also very few people will be remembered for very long after their death, outside of a few people close to them. There's too much input out there for people to dwell on the memories of someone for too long. I hate to admit it, but I don't think about my grandparents (who are all dead now) as much as I probably should, and they were all great people. I mean, how much do most people in a given field know about most of the great thinkers in their field outside of their last name on a few concepts, or maybe they read an article or a book about them once? And even if it wasn't them that came up with it, would possibly another person come up with the same or similar idea a bit further out? Newton and Leibniz separately both came up with the ideas of Calculus (with different approaches) around the same time, for example. I also think it's getting harder to make discoveries or do great (novel) things nowadays. Most of the low-hanging fruit has been pulled in science and computer science, for example, and most of what's available now are big huge hard to solve problems (see Millenium Prize Problems[1]) or unified theory problems, or can't really be discovered without better and more expensive instruments (more powerful telescopes and microscopes, particle accelerators, etc), so it's a lot harder for someone to come up with something really novel nowadays. It's still out there, it just requires a lot more effort and can't easily be done with homemade or budget instruments. So I wouldn't beat yourself up about it too much. Keep trying, sure, but understand you might not succeed, and come to terms with that. [1]: https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems