I can’t program but for awhile I wrote for a living.
I was an English major in college and got hooked on Scrabble after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a sportswriter from The Wall Street Journal. I’d always been into gambling and games with a luck factor like poker, backgammon, cribbage, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Always hated chess because the better player (nearly) always wins.
Scrabble’s an interesting game but unless you’re very talented at anagramming and have a good memory, it’s a bit of a slog to learn enough of the “rules” of the game (the words) to make it really fun. At my “peak”, I was studying 20 or so hours a week and wasn’t even making progress anymore, just maintaining the stuff I’d already learned.
It was a way to pass a few years of my life. I traveled around to tournaments, sometimes won enough to break even, met some interesting weirdos, and had a good enough time. But one day I just had enough and put it down and never picked it up again. Just stopped thinking it was fun, I guess.
Biggest thing I took away from it was really seeing how a few minutes (and eventually a few hours) of work a day could help you change how your brain works and how you see the world. I vividly remember one day at work I saw a guy whose name badge said Demetrius. I instantly thought “oh if you add a ‘u’ to his name and rearrange the letters it spells ‘deuteriums.’”
Now, when I think something is too hard or too big to accomplish, I think about that and just start chipping away.