That realization was a gradual one for me. I tell people that I have a limited amount of Life Force and I don't want to waste it.

The upshot of that is (A) that you can't do "everything" just because you can afford it (B) life is too short to "stick it out" if you really don't like what you are doing.

Books are a perfect example of "B": If you read part of a book and you don't like it, stop/quit and read another instead. It makes no sense to read a "bad" book just because you've been conditioned to "finish what you start". There are just too many other great books you could read if you quit reading the bad one and started reading another one.

This is exactly what I did with programming. I could figure it out and produce something after a great deal of effort, but it exhausted me. Meanwhile, I can hammer out 1000 quality, edited words and barely notice it.

You can probably guess where I put my focus.

Tangential to this is that because time is limited your choices will decrease as you approach the end.

While your options are wide open at 20 they are far more limited at 40 or 50 simply because you don't have time to start anew.

And, similar to software, your life requires far more maintenance time as it goes on :)