[smueller1234]

That's a beautiful quote, thank you for sharing! It's also how I acquired most of the skills that today define my career. I studied physics and procrastinated with code, and to a lesser extent with studying computer science, extensively. Today I work on Google's technical infrastructure. I suspect that this is not at all an unusual turn of events amongst readers here.

[TeMPOraL]

> I suspect that this is not at all an unusual turn of events amongst readers here.

Definitely not. On large scale, I own most of my career to that disease. On small scale, pretty much every job I got could be attributed to something that I learned through procrastination a year or two earlier.

[mattkevan]

Absolutely the case for me too.

Switched courses to design because my chemistry tutor kept telling me off for doodling on my notes. Got into web development was because I was bored at work and started learning HTML.

Trouble is, it means that whatever I’m doing is what I should be doing some point in the future, not what I actually need to do right now...

[smueller1234]

I have another variant of this: I get code rage (which I can easily self diagnose after the fact as being simply NIH in most cases). So whenever I got stuck debugging a bunch of spaghetti, I'd go look for distractions. But because at this point, that was in a professional setting and no longer just my target for procrastination, I was looking for professionally valid distractions. So I became a team lead/manager that way. One thing leads to another and here I am. Turns out I liked that career, too.