There's no contest going on except in your head. You get hired for a job (and you have been hired for 2 jobs and are going to school at the same time and staying up with your personal life despite significant handicaps so you are not incompetent getting jobs or working hard) and you work that job. What the other people are doing, even in your field is what they are doing. So you are only the backup drummer in the band, on stand-by? If you want to be doing that, that's great!

I'm retired now, went through life not working at very interesting jobs until my last one, which was literally made for me. When we start out, we can't be on top or there'd be no where to go? We can't have the experience or know ourselves well and what we are capable of doing yet because we haven't put in the time. Do you know that, factually, it takes 10 years of work in a field to get good? Writers take 10 years before they are good writers. Bill Gates didn't suddenly become "Bill Gates", he started as a geeky young teen and put in his 10 years.

Yes, it also takes the right equipment at the right time, the right mentors, education, and surroundings to become Bill Gates but if you want to do what you are working on, then the 10 years of hard work can come at any time. I wanted to write a novel for the longest time it seems like but started studying writing and taking classes and putting in the time writing in the mid-90's and, guess what, I wrote a pretty good novel in 2009 http://mysharingspaceonline.com/story.pdf Didn't even edit it or do anything further with it (besides get a free proof copy) but the point was I wanted to write it and I finally was able to, because of the 10 years of work I put in.

That's why looking at what others are doing can make us crazy; they are at different points, want different things, are more/less concentrated on wider/narrower subjects than we are. What we see of them is truly only the tip of the iceberg.

Like I said, I'm retired. Does that mean I've given up, do nothing? No! I'm very active in the fields that interest me, am still learning and working on becoming the best I can "now" for my own purposes. At 61 and me starting only a few years ago, there are scores of people who are better than I am at what I'm doing but they're not Me, they don't have my particular background and experiences and point of view. They can't do what I do as well as I do it because they are not me, doing what I am doing, from my perspective.