If you're doing what you love, you've already won.
I feel a similar way pretty often. I have a couple of visions of software I want to build that are far out of my technical reach. I've been prototyping them, on and off, for about eight years too, depending how you count.
They've all failed. I start with a flash of optimism, and code until I realize I was wrong. I then stop, and rethink things until I think of another guess.
This is exactly how great accomplishments happen. You may be working on an impossible problem, or you may be working on a 20 year problem. Or maybe you're lucky and it's a 10 year problem.
But even if your goal is impossible, it's very likely that if you work on it for 20 years, you will solve a 20 year problem. It might be slightly askew to what you thought you were solving, but it will happen. It's almost inevitable.
Regardless, I wholly support what you're doing. Keep going. And read widely... explore... make sure you're playing in the margins of your field, and exploring odd projects far outside the scope of your work. It's those places that you will make that accidental discovery... that in all these years of trying to "beat the market" you made a fundamental discovery in artificial intelligence, or network theory, or whatever.
And yeah, if you're doing what you love, you've already won.
I feel a similar way pretty often. I have a couple of visions of software I want to build that are far out of my technical reach. I've been prototyping them, on and off, for about eight years too, depending how you count.
They've all failed. I start with a flash of optimism, and code until I realize I was wrong. I then stop, and rethink things until I think of another guess.
This is exactly how great accomplishments happen. You may be working on an impossible problem, or you may be working on a 20 year problem. Or maybe you're lucky and it's a 10 year problem.
But even if your goal is impossible, it's very likely that if you work on it for 20 years, you will solve a 20 year problem. It might be slightly askew to what you thought you were solving, but it will happen. It's almost inevitable.
Regardless, I wholly support what you're doing. Keep going. And read widely... explore... make sure you're playing in the margins of your field, and exploring odd projects far outside the scope of your work. It's those places that you will make that accidental discovery... that in all these years of trying to "beat the market" you made a fundamental discovery in artificial intelligence, or network theory, or whatever.
And yeah, if you're doing what you love, you've already won.