Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
If you need some perspective shift on habit formation I greatly suggest giving this video a watch.
I’ve tried to stop or cut back on my drinking for years, I’d always slip up and then feel bad about it, then slip even further in the trap.
That video itself changed the way I was viewing my situation and has literally changed my life organically in some short order.
No guilt, frustration, shame, anger, just acceptance.
Be kind to yourself
From what I’m getting, you see the end point of major goals other people had, and you wonder how you could ever do anything like that.
What you need to do is turn that into a main quest line. In a video game (most of the time) you don’t start with “kill the big boss and save the realm” but every little thing progresses you to that point. The first thing you get as a goal is something stupid simple and abstract like Equip your sword and block some arrows. Eventually all the little side tangents culminate in “Kill the Boss, Save the realm”.
So try to use that principle in your life. Ask yourself a question, what do I need to do right now to do “XYZ”, come up with two things that would help you accomplish it. Now ask yourself, of those two things, is there anything I can do within the next 5 minutes to make that happen. If your answer is no (let’s be honest it most likely is), split each of those tasks into two things that will help you accomplish that minigoal.
Eventually you will have broken the tasks in two enough times you can find your “Equip your sword, Dodge some arrows” and start crawling your way up that quest tree.
Or you mistimed the Balmer Peak managed to do an ungodly amount of progress, forgot to comment in any meaningful way, and the next day try to go through all the changes you did and figure out what the Fuck your were on about, and how this thing works when it seems it really shouldn’t.
I suppose it depends on your outlook. I’d rather have had the passive income over time paid in stock options that multiply in value that I can get interest free loans against to file tax losses than the one time payout you have to pay gains on.
Hindsight is 20/20
Edit to add: there’s also a non zero chance that Meta swooped in like Disney did to Central Florida, set up a secret shell company to buy the property under value so no one knows what big business is behind the acquisition.
You just know someone bought that domain hoping to turn it into a gangbusters online clothes retailer and the best they could manage to do is camp on it and sell it.
Could’ve been Bezos, instead was a bozo.
I think this was a rebuttal with hindsight as evidence for the “BoTh SiDeS aRe JuSt As BaD” folks from 2016.