Manomanman, you and I seem to have a similar past. I went to grad school for 5 years studying Artificial Intelligence and thought that this was the only reasonable path any human could go since this kind of technology has the potential to change everything. It can automate all human labour and free us all (or kill us all, who knows
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Now I have left the academic world and started my own game programming/software company which I find very inspiring.
It sounds to me that you are stuck in the aim, aim, aim... phase now and the best advice I can give you is to simply fire a lot! It is extremely satisfying and I think that at a first glance this might seem like you are wasting your precious time but on the other hand you'll grow much faster and can "prune" a lot of speculative thought patterns and save that computation time for more useful thoughts and actions.
But this you already know
Start firing now!!!!! You know exactly what to do next.