Dont get me wrong I love my uni, its a great school, very good global recognition and stuff, and lots of cool opportunities and stuff going on. I'm a really passionate guy and I love building, and so I literally on the first day just walked into the CS professors office hours, and was showing him stuff I built. I got offered a research position, joined in on the research meetings for a bit, and then got told that they dont pay right now, so I stopped. I want to make capital, and I dont want to build for someone else to own it just so that I can put it on my resume. It makes me feel like a cuck, and then the prof claims the work. I literally asked him, if students come to you with these ideas why dont they just build it themselves, and struggle a bit and try to become profitable, we have great networks here. And he somewhat agreed, but I apologized for being disrespectful.
As the year went on ive met some new pretty interesting people. And I started to get involved and got accepted to a MIT hackathon, and ended up doing pretty well and founded a startup out of it. my Co founder is a 50 year old industry expert and weve been making good progress, and the engineering team is doing well, its me and one other guy I hired on. We are pitching to the owners of a very well recognized company here in the next couple weeks, and im hopeful that it will go well. Obviously no revenue yet, we are barley in beta testing.
But good lord, I cant focus on school at all. its so hard, this feels like such a drag. 5 course load, and a girlfriend, and then ive also been doing freelance software stuff since highschool, so ive been balencing my existing clients as well. Literally all ive been doing for the last while is just coding, any free moment i get i code. Im at the university from 8am to 7-10pm pretty consistently, my gpa isnt that good because i just coudlnt give a rip honestly, and i know my parents are upset about it because they know im capable, and they think what im building is really cool and its great but they just want me to be safe, but htey dont understand how cooked the market is, this degree is dying, and i feel like to stay ahead especially as a first year i need to be doing stuff like this.
I just cant bring myself to study 2-300 pages of math, and whenever i sit down, i get mutliple messages and emails of feature requests, issues, tagging in github and i cant focus because genuienly i am so passionate about coding and building that anything else feels like noise. And it sucks, im so addicted to it, ive been cutting gym time short to build more, i barley go outside, i barley do any of my hobbies. i genuienly forgot how to cook, and i was a damn good cook. this is consuming everything, and im so addicted, thanks claude. i think studying is great, and i think its important, i dont think its useless, it just feels that way right now. I just want to build and build and build and build.
stressed out of my mind tho. struggle alot with my health. im not fat or anything, i used to be really buff, got into a really bad motorbike accident 2 years ago, year before that broke my arm, but the motorbike accident left me with a TBI, and i was disabled for a while, and then i got back into the gym, hit new PR's on the bench, and then kept getting sick, and hurt, and then 2 months ago i snapped my arm clean in half when i flew off the side of the mountain snowboarding. still managing tho. it makes me really mad im not where i used to be physically. it weighs on me. i feel terrible about myself. i look in the mirror and cringe. im not who i used to be, but mentally and what ive been building, makes me proud. maybe thats what matters, i know i can get back to it. i just need to stop getting hurt.
And why are you burned out? Because you're trying to do uni, and a business, and consulting, and a girlfriend at the same time, and you don't have the time and the brainpower to do it all.
You are finite, friend. You cannot carry this much.
So you have to pick. I do not know, but I suspect that if you're going to do the startup, you need to drop both the uni and the consulting. (Your girlfriend might have a better read on it than me; she's certainly closer to the situation than I am.)