Your initial planning is the key. The number of hours you can spend, getting your identity package done, setting up your office, making the contacts, making your calls, and setting your goals (both short term and long term). In effect, getting your ducks in order, being sure all your P&Q's are taken care of, and then just getting started.
So if you see yourself in the above, realize what you are doing, and either move forward and do something or stop wasting everyone's time, including your own, and resign yourself to the life you have. Remember, it's no one fault but your own that you have the problems you do, especially if you do nothing to change them.
For those of us who have participated in the investment arena for more than just the past couple of years, 2000 will likely go down as "not unprecedented and long overdue." For the investors who have come to the party more recently, it was a brutal, eye-opening, and sobering experience. Buying every dip didn't work. Dot-com IPOs didn't work. This year was truly a coming-of-age experience for millions of "adolescent" investors.