This is a great article, and I was considering starting Fantasy Football this season for the same effect. I will make one finer-grained distinction, however, t

This is a great article, and I was considering starting Fantasy Football this season for the same effect. I will make one finer-grained distinction, however, that the ability to shoot the shit about football is a useful one depending on what you're trying to do with your life. The trade-off is that everything takes time and attention. Lots of different priorities compete for our attention, and while registering in your office's fantasy league might be a small time investment, it might be a disproportionately larger attention investment. You will start noticing games, players, conversations about football, etc., with much more frequency than you previously had. In my personal life, I've sat through many sporting events and conversations with the attention of a dullard with ADD. I generally tune out all sports-related things and devote my extra attention at these events to thinking about other things which are more interesting to me, or ruminating on a problem I am trying to solve. These are potentially useful things I would give up if I am more actively focused on sports-related things as a by-product of simply choosing some big names in a Fantasy draft. At the end of the day, I still find it worth the trade-off, but only because I am optimizing for a certain level of "ubituitous social lubrication" at the expense of, say, skipping the office happy hour and watching a Coursera course on machine learning (a contrived example, but you get my point). You may not want to make this trade-off if you are not trying to be a "general people-person", or if you can obtain this same social lubrication through other avenues (IE, politics). tldr; This article is very important for startup founders, perhaps not so much for systems engineers / data scientists.