I did the same thing when I was 26. I'm 31 now and I don't really care.
One contributor is that I feel lucky I didn't get "tracked" when I was in my 20s.
I had time to explore the world and take in a lot of experiences and learn a lot of things about being a human, instead of just being "the best" along some metrics that everyone else might have said mattered.
Now maybe I'm just making myself feel better and there's little truth to all that, tho I feel that's unlikely.
I think if you have taken the time to understand things, you will be more effective than people who haven’t.
A reason is because in order to be successful you have to keep making successful choices, a one-off doesn’t cut it. And there’s no way to do that with luck because the probabilities multiply, meaning you’re exponentially less likely to make a string of successful choices if you’re just lucky with patchy understanding, than if you’ve actually cultivated your understanding, and can reproduce it.
So taking the time to observe, learn and reflect, instead of just copying, coding and competing, is actually doing a lot more for your future trackrecord than you might have thought.
One time someone asked Picasso why they should pay him for a sketch it took him 2 seconds to complete. Picasso replied, “You’re not paying for the two seconds, you’re paying for the 40 years I spent to get here.”
You’re worried about time. Don’t be. It’s not important. The important thing is your understanding, not the time you have, or even spend coding. Most of the great products did not launch with something that would take 1000s of hours of coding to create -- mostly, they became successful because their business model, their marketing and their product market fit worked. And all these things came to exist, because of the understanding, and the resulting choices, of the product’s creators.
How did Zuck make FB so successful? Is it because he locked himself in his room and was a coding-Einstein? I don't think so. I think it's because he understood a few things about marketing and people, and could build something, and kept making choices that worked based on that understanding. That made FB what it is.
Did FB grow because it was a far superior technical product encompassing 1000s of hours of work? No. It grew because your friends were on it, so you got on it too. To get people on it, they hand crafted course timetables for each college, and worked to make it useful. They original FB didn't even have photos. Ahahaha. How lacking is that? And yet just over 10 years ago, college kids were signing up to it. So Zuck and his friends knew something from their own experience, and they put that understanding into how they built and sold their work.
So think not on the 100s of hours you wished you’d spend coding. Think instead on the time you invested developing your intuition so you could make choices (about product, marketing and life) that are going to work.
Even PageRank is not a complex algorithm -- the iteration itself is basic. It’s not likely that the biggest contributor to ROI for Larry Page’s time came from hundreds of hours A/B testing and hacking this algorithm. It’s likely that the biggest ROI came from Page and Brin’s deep understanding of the value of citations in establishing credibility and relevance, and that, a little bit tongue in cheek, they decided to make a search engine for the web on the same principle they’d observed operating in academia. And then, the understanding that they had, and kept, cultivating created that they made a string of successful choices around hiring, and around business model.
So before you can create some awesome product, you've got to create yourself and your understanding because, if you're not real, then your subsequent choices, even if the initial product is successful, will not bear out that success in the long term. So whether you become an expert in a relevant part of the world through intensive academics, or hanging around and having fun, the thing that matters is that instead of caring about what everyone else is chasing (being “tracked”) you care about what you care about, and observe and experiment and gain understanding.
And this sounds like what you’ve been doing all along. Instead of focusing on work, you’ve been focusing on yourself, and at the same time keeping one eye firmly on your great ambitions.
So even as you’ve talked like you’ve wasted your time, like time is your enemy, like procrastination is this big evil, I’m feeling like time and how you chose to spend it is actually your asset. You’ve invested that time in learning and observing which has put you ahead of the people who were too busy chasing the “dashboards in their mind” about their career and “achievements”, to really take the time to understand maybe in order to make an original contribution you have to be an original person, first.
And when you get down to building your awesome and great product, it's won’t be about the code, or the algorithms, nor is it, as we can see by looking at Amazon, Google or even, yes, FB, about the UI aesthetics. It’s about the real value you provide people (product market fit/UX), how you share that value (marketing), and how you capture value for yourself from what you create (business model).
Maybe you feel "How do those things apply? They’re business concepts.” I’d say, it works to consider if they’re irrelevant or if they’re actually they’re like thermodynamic fundamentals of how the world works.
The market is just the statistical aggregate of people’s choices on the grand scale, like temperature. A business model is how you make sure you keep doing the stuff you like, like conservation of energy. And marketing is anything that increases the probability that a significant portion of people will choose your product, like a catalyst. And real value is not something you’re likely to search your way to through A/B testing, which partly exists because people have spent so much time becoming experts at work, they’re not experts at where they want their work to have an impact, the world, so instead of being able to have convictions about the world, they choose to A/B test their way across the decision landscape, and such a search only going to leave them more likely atop a molehill than an Everest. Though in the long term, pivoting plus A/B search can be a strategy which works on average, which doesn't mean convictions and the choice to have them are without value. You choose to develop convictions, and when you deploy them in a decision, maybe they get you to Everest faster than if you had only relied on pivoting and A/B search. That's an advantage. Sometime the advantage is so great that while every AB searches over the rolling hills of planet Groupthink, you are already landing pretty close to the highest point on planet Awesome because you chose to develop and deploy your convictions.
So all that time you spent unstructured, untracked, that’s your greatest asset. Anyone can learn to code, anyone can copy your idea, but only you can keep making the choices which it has been your own unique experience’s gift to you to make. So, before you lock yourself in your room again, chasing some metric -- maybe consider that it works for you to keep observing more, and get back to what you’ve been doing so well, but feeling so unnecessarily guilty about, just hanging out and learning, because that's really the foundation of your future success, far more than any coding is. :)