Don't try to have things. Money, reputation, academic titles. They don't mean anything. You can have money and still be unhappy. You can have academic titles and still are not good at your trade.
Your actions are important. Not those in the past. And not those in the future. But those in this exact moment.
Don't try to impress someone else. Don't care at all what other people think of you. Only the verdict that you cast on yourself matters. Because if you try to impress others, you will stop acting according to your own convictions, and more accordingly to the convictions that you think the other one has. So if at any point you might have succeeded to impress the other one, you are not impressed by yourself any more. It will be a stale victory.