The desire to honestly face your progress, judge it as wanting and then do something about it is necessary for improvement. The author is correct that wallowing doesn't help, but it's possible that the guilt that prevents you from excusing yourself will also keep you on track.
I find usually people use "i'm behind" as an excuse not to even try because they can never be as good as so and so.
The high performers are usually the people who think it's never too late to learn something new, in my experience.
If you google "celebrity imposter syndrome" you'll see endless pages of articles of varying quality noting that many successful businessmen/leaders/artists have imposter syndrome, and they're evidently high performing.
I agree that high performers must feel that they are capable to make performing feel tractable - I think that's necessary. But also they have to be motivated to do so.
Low performers are often not aware, and would self-evaluate as high performers due to not being aware of their own knowledge gaps, and how far behind they are. There is an excellent graph to illustrate this: https://understandinginnovation.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/...
one is a social comparison, the other is an epistemological observation
Gates didn't drop out of college because he smoked too much pot, or was too lazy. He was getting excellent grades and his teachers were very impressed. It was because he already had a business going, and wanted to concentrate on that.
Plus, as a business owner nobody was going to require him to have a degree, so it didn't really matter so long he had the skills he needed for his business.
Also, his parents were rich and supportive, and no doubt would have supported him if he had failed. He'd have no trouble getting back to Harvard had the business not worked out.
That's a very different kind of "dropout" than most.
A deep sense of the opportunity cost of time—which I how I think of the author's point—can be good and bad at the same time. If it fills you with renewed vigor to make the most of today, great. If it leaves you riddled with remorse and convinced that you have already lost the game and there's no point in trying, not so great.
It can be a delicate balancing act to fix the maladaptive parts of our brains without throwing off the adaptive parts too.
As is so often true, the ideal state is likely somewhere in the middle. A healthy recognition of ones goals and progress against those goals...without self judgement.
To your point, unpleasant does not automatically equal destructive. But unpleasant without perspective on why that unpleasant thing is also beneficial is going to lead to some negative outcomes. Generally, people understand why the speed limit exists, and there is enough info about healthy eating that most people get it.
I'd argue that something like feeling behind in ones life is not so clear cut. That feeling can be beneficial in the long run, depending on where it comes from. It can also be destructive, if perspective is lacking.
At the end of the day this is all rooted in our ego. We want enough ego that pushes us to get better, but at the same time be able to check that same ego when it gets in the way.
I've related many HN items to Jiu-Jitsu and here is another. First, there is always someone better than you. And in some ways it's worse because the person who kicks your ass might be younger, smaller, older or a different gender. It takes an ego to step on to the mat and find out. Then after getting your ass gets kicked it takes checking your ego to learn what happened and go again. Like a lot of life, it's the personal journey that matters.
My undergrad degree was in music. That career lasted 10 years and then I pivoted to marketing. With no relevant degree under my belt and no resources to go back to school, I felt perpetually behind. That feeling motivated me to read and self-study anything and everything I could get my hands on.
I believe I'm a better professional because of it and, combined with some good luck, allowed me to capitalize on opportunities that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
I think "feeling behind" means different things for different people, depending on the experiences in their formative years they have associated with the thought of being behind. The ideal response to the feeling depends on what the feeling is.
a lot of not so high performers also can decouple themselves from the busy world about, from it's projected images, and can search for their own truer, prime/primer/primest selves too. and sometimes they get way behind, and that dissonance is real, and we have to keep living with that distamce between our better selves and us, or we can adapt & be flexible and shift, or just triple down, try to push on, figure out new strategies or reform better fitting goals.