"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest mother-fucker in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way this is liberating. Hiro no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken."
(Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, p.254, Beginning of Chapter 36)
Thing is, he's right; I went through the same process, at around 25. I figured out that, no matter how hard I trained, how hard I worked, there would always be someone out there more dangerous than I was. Having accepted that, I could move on with life.
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