Sounds like a good summary of most successful people before they became successful.
But if you want to get that real sense of accomplishment, I recommend getting a fairly blue collar job either next summer or at night during the school year.
What you need to figure out is whether you're facing bad luck or you're just not as talented / determined as you'd like to think. In most of these examples, it's somebody else's fault: your professors bailed, your friends bailed, the schools rejected you, etc. One of the reasons people work so hard in startups is that those excuses just melt away once it's all up to you.
But if you want to get that real sense of accomplishment, I recommend getting a fairly blue collar job either next summer or at night during the school year.
What you need to figure out is whether you're facing bad luck or you're just not as talented / determined as you'd like to think. In most of these examples, it's somebody else's fault: your professors bailed, your friends bailed, the schools rejected you, etc. One of the reasons people work so hard in startups is that those excuses just melt away once it's all up to you.