As a counterexample, I attribute much of my success to being a compulsive World of Warcraft player in my 20s. True, founding and being the Guild Master of a ha

As a counterexample, I attribute much of my success to being a compulsive World of Warcraft player in my 20s. True, founding and being the Guild Master of a hardcore raiding guild wasn't great for my ability to focus on my real job. Main Tanking and leading 40 players through endgame content 3-4 nights a week didn't do any favors for my social life. But the skills I developed ended up transferring pretty well over to founding and running a remote web dev agency. In fact it turned out that managing paid employees over the Internet is easier than managing volunteers in many regards. When you screw up, your employees tend to go easy on you, because they like their paychecks and changing jobs is a lot harder than changing Warcraft guilds. I was young and kind of a loser at the time and there was little chance anyone was going to give me anything important to manage. WoW gave me an opportunity to develop a valuable skill set at an early age.