I actually learned this lesson playing World of Warcraft, a Massively Multiplayer Online game. You see in WoW there is a huge timesink of effort required to beat the game. We're talking thousands of hours of gameplay. It's a social game, and the more skilled the people that you are with, the quicker that comes. It's also an RPG, meaning that you need to do x to do x+1.
The playerbase therefore learns the most optimal way to do everything the fastest possible way, and they call that the meta. The meta is almost always monotonous and boring. It's a terrible way to play the game, but if it gets you to be playing with a cool group of people, people will bore themselves to death.
Another aspect of the meta is that being an RPG, you are just about forced to stick to one character. When a patch is added to the game and your character goes from the storngest to the weakest, your social status drops considerably. But no problem, because in a few months another patch might launch that switches the balance. The group of people that you deal with therefore need to treat you well when you are weak so that you will stay with them when you are strong.
The neat thing with WoW is it's 15 years old, there have been many many cycles, and all of the people driven to play this way have long since burned themselves out. We see numbers for what they are. We see the social status games.
The balance is to ignore the numbers and find the people. The people going to Stanford might just be on average better people than going to your local State University, but if you can find people to fill out your social circle within your State university that meet your criteria, do that. If you can sacrifice a little bit of effort to move yourself somewhere slightly better to get around better people, maybe that's worth it. But don't sacrifice everything for Moloch.
And the lesson you learn once you give up the numbers, that we all intuitively know anyway, is that you very quickly get BIGGER numbers than those chasing it. Capability comes from the feedback of learning and doing. When you do stuff for fun and feel pain when you mess up, you become motivated to learn, which gives you more opportunity to play. So there was actually no balance after-all, the dominant choice was always to play.
So here's to play. Here's to WoW. A gigantic waste of time that has taught me many of lives most important lessons.