I have a confession to make, I haven’t shared this openly online in a long time. When I was in my late teens I just gave up on life, I felt like I would never do anything worthwhile. I went completely off the rails, I was taking amounts of substances that would kill a small Irish village. I also stopped working, learning, or doing anything positive, on good days when i wasn’t going on benders I’d site at “home” playing the same 2 games over and over, smoking weed and drinking. —————— When I was 4, I got my first computer and spent 3 hours a day unsupervised on the interwebs, going down “conspiracy theory pipelines” reading about gravity and physics, going onto lemon tube cause some forum posted it. Needless to say I felt more intelligent than my peers, and maybe I was. So I gave up on school and would skip to go to cyber cafes all day. This unfettered access to anything I can think of rotted my brain, but also made me aware that the world is much bigger than a class room. —————— When I met my now wife, I was going through severe withdrawals. I didn’t want to keep doing what I was doing, but everyone I knew was a degenerate. It was hard to quit. She let me move in with her, practically nursed me back to health over 2 years. I had always had an interest in coding, specifically hacking and making computers do things they shouldn’t, but that was never nurtured. —————— I decided now is the time, there will probably never be a chance to win again. So I picked up Mind you I was still addicted to weed, so I decided to Pavlov dog myself into being a programmer. I taped a piece of paper, like the one you see below to an old free desk I found on FB marketplace, I used an 8gb laptop my wife got for free on credit. I used the pomodoro technique to sooth my ADHD mind, studying for 30 mins playing games for 10, every 2 hours of studying I could smoke some weed. Trading my imaginary points for a bong hit, this built a circuit in my brain, and before I knew it I was coding in Ruby and JS. ————— Of course I was useless still, just cause you can write a for loop doesn’t mean you’re useful. So I did this day and night for 2 years. Until I got my first gig. Now I work with world class organizations, have educated at least 500 people. I love my wife. Your life is a video game, play it.