When I went to college, I fully immersed myself into many things, mostly related to Linux and Python. I learned more than I have in my entire life — yet I never went to class more than once a week. Obviously, that isn't sustainable, so I dropped out, moved back home, and sold all of my "distractions" — namely my camera and related things. I was left with the essential: a simple computer. The plan was to go back to my old job at McDonalds and slowly save up money to go back to school and refocus.
This was a pretty dark time in my life. I went through a few different jobs, all terrible. But everything changed when I met some fascinating people in my town at the local coworking center.
These were people that were interested in the things I cared about — software, servers, programming, the internet, and people. They were genuinely interested in my opinion of the things they were building. That changed everything for me. I was valuable to them. The next day, I formally decided that I wasn't going to return to school and was going to focus on my passions instead.
That was the best decision I ever made.
I spent the next six months learning as much as I could about the web, managing servers, running websites, and other technologies. Eventually, I felt that I learned all that I could from them and I moved on to a real job. My career was formally started, and I began to work on open source as much as possible in my spare time. It took years, but eventually people started to really like my work. This changed everything again.
Once I was in a good position with both work and open source, I bought another camera and started taking photos again. A year later, I started getting into music again and bought a synthesizer. I'm in a good balance now. I work on code and community all day for work, and I get to travel the world to speak at different conferences. When I'm traveling, I get to take photos I'd never get to take otherwise. When I'm at home, I spend many of my weekends exploring synthesizers and music. My focus is a bit strained in different directions, but I'm doing what truly makes me happy, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
One important thing to keep in mind is that you can always do things later. If it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, that means you have the opportunity in life to have 8+ careers in totally different fields, all while doing what you love. I don't think selling my camera all those years ago was a good decision, but focusing on software was a great one. One day I might get tired of software, and when I do, I'll try to make a living from photography. That day might never come. We'll see :)
As far as software development is concerned, math is totally irrelevant. So are big systems. I hate large systems. I avoid them whenever possible. That's why I make projects like Requests so simple to use. I can't hold much more in my head. :)
I personally focus on abstraction and simplicity and everything seems to work out really well. I want as little code in my projects as possible. Another thing to keep in mind is that Computer Science and Software Development are two very different things. CS encourages complex system development because that's what it's for. :)
The best advice I can give you is this: Life's not a race, but there's no speed limit either. Attention is the only currency we have in life. Don't waste it. Here's a cheesy inspirational video to the same effect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgp0W9s5wT0
Sorry that this is so long — I almost never write an email that's over two sentences long. :)
Thanks man,
Kenneth Reitz