I think the "follow your bliss" meme is a decent heuristic. So much of the weird useless stuff I spent lonely hours learning about have actually turned out to

I think the "follow your bliss" meme is a decent heuristic. So much of the weird useless stuff I spent lonely hours learning about have actually turned out to be crucial to my career opportunities and generally made me a better engineer. I think taking some hours to just do cool weird crazy stuff will probably always pay off in one way or another, maybe ten years down the line even.