When I was in high school I was playing World of Warcraft arena competitively and got top .5% (the highest general rank) in seasons 1-4, later on multiple chara

When I was in high school I was playing World of Warcraft arena competitively and got top .5% (the highest general rank) in seasons 1-4, later on multiple characters in multiple brackets. As I approached college I realized that I had done something that, if I had dedicated myself to almost anything else, would have resulted in me being a masterful expert at it. By the time I was 17 (I played WoW from 13-17, 2004-2008) I had put over 8,000 hours into that game. I spent a quarter of my life playing it for that four year period. It was, of course, an insanely massive waste of time in hindsight. I went from scripting and building custom maps in Neverwinter Nights to playing in Blizzards theme park for a few years where the most coding I managed was hex editing the game models and changing a few labels in addon scripts. I was a directionless dysphoric teenager who had an interest in computers but no real ambition or friends at the time so distraction was tantalizing. It absolutely cost me opportunities to go to more prestigious universities I could have likely qualified for it if I had applied myself to the discipline of getting into elite schools instead of topping ladder ranks. I like to think I came out of that black hole of my life at least knowing the value of dedication. Its only really more recent that I finally came to terms with the total realities of distraction, including writing this post on HN right now. At least this is at the tail end of my 30 minute break from coding this afternoon, so now I'll be getting back to work.