&gt; I hung around with the wrong people, didn&#x27;t put enough thought into what I might like to do for a career<p>You say that like they&#x27;re necessarily causal&#x2F;correlated.<p>When I was in high school I was clinically depressed, smoked weed every day, shoplifted whenever I could just for the thrill of it, failed most of my classes, and in my afternoons, late nights, and sometimes up to 6am, I was contributing to opensource, writing phpBB mods that thousands of people were using in their bulletin boards. My most popular mod had over 10,000 downloads. They even accepted me into the official mod approval team for a while.<p>And despite my obsession with coding and working on my career, I was also an adolescent delinquent.<p>Life is funny that way.