"If I lived for the now, I wouldn't be going to college. I wouldn't be planning to study for a PhD in Neuroscience and researching assistive brain/spine implants. I wouldn't study programming languages and designs. I wouldn't be reading The Intelligent Investor. In fact, if you lived for the now, you'd probably be living in a soma-induced haze à la Huxley's Brave New World: it'd be the optimal choice, in fact. Pure neurochemical bliss."

Living for the now doesn't mean being a dopamine junkie.

I went to college knowing that it was basically useless for what I wanted to do with my life. I went because it was time - all the adults around me said that I'd be missing out on an awesome experience if I didn't, and while I was a little skeptical, I figured I'd give it a try. That, and the economy was about to enter the shitter (it was 2001), and the company I was working at was about to lay off 40% of its workforce.

I majored in physics because I liked the feeling of sitting out on my roof with sunshine on my face (yeah, New England, it didn't last very long), textbook in my lap, working on really hard math problems. As it turned out, I didn't like it enough to stick with it. I then majored in computer science because I had found out that I liked it enough to spend my weekends working on compilers and my late nights reading up on programming language design. At the time I did those, I was a physics major, and they were completely irrelevant to anything that might possibly advance my degree or career. But they were fun.

I read The Intelligent Investor because I'd just started working at a financial software startup, had an hour long commute, and figured it might be more fun to figure out what I'd just gotten myself into rather than stare at the silent faces on the train. As it turned out, after reading The Intelligent Investor I didn't much like what I'd gotten myself into at all, which is why I'm not in finance now.

In one of Paul Graham's essays, he says that you can tell an adult from a child because an adult will tend to "lean into" challenges, accepting them as part of who they are instead of shrinking back from them. There's nothing that prevents you from building the habit of leaning into challenges into your daily identity. It doesn't particularly matter what those challenges are, it matters that you attack them. If you build this habit, you'll usually do fairly well even if you don't make a master plan for your life. Heck, you'll probably do better than people who do create a master plan, because life has a way of biting you in the ass and tearing your plans to shreds.