My hope is that the author, 10 years from now, will reflect on _why_ he thought these things, and gain some profound enlightenment from them. I can identify ma

My hope is that the author, 10 years from now, will reflect on _why_ he thought these things, and gain some profound enlightenment from them. I can identify many beliefs about the state of the present (now the past), and the state of the future (now the present), that I held around that same age, and that I'm now embarrassed by. I had no fully-formed idea of what success looked like, save for the meager success I'd enjoyed up to that point. Yet somehow, I felt qualified to hold those beliefs anyway. Case in point: I at 24 (roughly the same age as the author, minus one year) was having a talk with a 37-year-old colleague, where he brought up a statistic he'd read: $27 million was self-sustaining - that, due to diminishing returns, you'd be living the same lifestyle solely off the interest proceeds, if you didn't work another day in your life. My first thought was, "that's not fully out of the realm of possibility - that's maybe even doable!" That was back when I was in the exponential growth phase of my career - I'd just graduated college, and had the word "Junior" dropped from my title shortly thereafter. I now know that's ridiculous, and I look back at 24-year-old me with some contempt for having thought it.