Nature invented play long before it invented us
&gt;&gt;&gt; A mountain climber, von Helmholtz said, “hits upon traces of a fresh path, which again leads him a little further.”<p>A big example of this in my life was doing my MBA (I was a hardcore developer&#x2F;dev manager at the time.) While many classmates had specific goals like leaving a career behind or breaking into investment banking, my thought was more like &quot;I got the time, my employer will pay tuition, maybe this will be challenging and fun.&quot;<p>Fast forward a few years, I &quot;naturally&quot; ended up in product management. Not because it was my goal, but because the time in b-school taught me how to think about strategy, markets, communicate more clearly, and just be more sociable and have skills to confidently meet high-level clients and not embarrass myself. In other words, &quot;playing at business school&quot; happened to give me skills that enhanced my life in an unexpected (though in retrospect predictable) ways.<p>Smaller examples of this abound. During COVID lockdown I randomly bought a raspberry PI and some basic electronic components. Soon after I ended up buying motor controllers, a tank chassis, sensors (and a soldering iron..) Without intending to, I went from someone who&#x27;s &quot;never done anything with electronics&quot; to someone who &quot;has built an autonomous rover that navigates by sonar.&quot; Completely useless but - for example - it opens up future opportunities to confidently work on a hardware business&#x2F;product should an opportunity arise.<p>A final example - also during COVID lockdown - our living room in-wall AC was barely blowing air and also getting wet. Repair people said that everything is working fine, that&#x27;s just how it is given the airflow in the location of the unit (which didn&#x27;t make sense because my wife remembered it working better a few years ago.) I decided I was going to figure it out - for fun. I didn&#x27;t know anything about ACs and I figured there&#x27;s a good chance that I&#x27;ll fuck things up more, but the &quot;worst&quot; would be buying a new AC (about $2000) which might work better anyway despite what the repairmen said. So basically I had &quot;room to play&quot;<p>Several days later, after several trips to a parts distributor in Queens, after learning about and switching out capacitors, etc. I didn&#x27;t fix the problem. I started to try to measure the current going across the blower fan motor (I learned enough to associate the ice&#x2F;condensation with insufficient air flow) when I short-circuited something and the motor sparked, smoked, and died. FUCK.<p>Here&#x27;s the scene of devastation (at about 3am) when I finally extricated the old burnt motor out of the unit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ibb.co&#x2F;crYxs4R" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ibb.co&#x2F;crYxs4R</a><p>One more bike trip over the bridge to pick up a new motor, then one more because the new motor had a different thickness shaft and I needed bushings, I replaced the motor and noticed right away stronger airflow. Long story short, the old motor was slowly failing (before I made it fail quickly by blowing it up.) So now, we have a perfectly working AC and it cost about $300 (vs living with it or paying $2000 for a new one) and most importantly, I had fun and accidentally learned the skills that will make me a much more confident home owner in the future.<p>There was a funny exchange I had with a colleague when I took a day off to work on the AC. He couldn&#x27;t believe I took time from &quot;the big important job&quot; to do mechanical work, but he was missing the point - the reason I had &quot;the big important job&quot; is that I do shit like this and acquire random skills that help me move forward.