Senescence is an inevitability. All we can do is try to strike the balance between graceful acceptance and raging against the dying light.

Being sleep-derived not only hurts you at work, it hurts your health. You need to value yourself enough to have good sleep hygiene.

When you're going to school primarily for career purposes, it's more important to focus on which program is best for you. In addition, your success at college depends far more on what you do at the college than at which college you do it: Choosing the right program, then the right advisor, the right courses, the right term papers, the right co-curricular activities, the right fieldwork, the right internships. You can make those choices at any college.

The lack of crispness comes significantly from a societal change in what's valued: a replacement of bold individual initiative with collaboration, consensus, teamwork etc. All that team-involved decision-making often leads to tepid solutions and a slow-moving organization.

You might want to keep trying to rise, using a path that builds on your natural strengths: sales, analysis, managing people, whatever, and keep asking for honest feedback. When you reach the point at which it feels clear you've topped out, revise your job description or take a step back. Up is not the only way.

Some parents let kids "learn on their own skin" and many of those kids end up, as adults, languishing on their parents' sofas.

Many psychotherapists believe laziness is usually just the symptom. That the real problem is fear of failure, fear of success, or fear of authority.