Apr 19, 2026

hyper-focused athlete lifestyle should be adopted in engineering

Summer is approaching, which means I finally get to spend more time outside playing soccer and cricket, which are by far my favourites past times outside of reading and working. Two weeks ago, I played soccer with a few other individuals (~10 others around the same age), and a new face showed up. He was actually practicing by himself, doing drills, sprints, etc - something you would expect a regular soccer play to do. Obviously, for soccer, the more people you have the better, so naturally, we invited him to play.

Now within the first half-an-hour or so, it was pretty obvious that all his training definitely paid off. He was flying through the other team's defence, always made the right move, could shoot the ball with power, and most importantly, made the game look simple...he moved efficiently. I was lucky enough to be on his team, and he was guiding me on positioning, and how to remain calm when the opposition is pressing me. That advice genuinely made me a better player, and I still follow it today.

At the end of the game, everyone went back to their cars and drove off to their homes, but I stayed back to talk to him a little. I asked him primarily about if he played rep-league soccer or was aiming to play professional. That's when he told me about this goals and what he's currently up to about him trying to go pro. That really excited me because there aren't that many people from where I come from that take sport up professionally (it's typically engineering or medical). And because I've never talked to an individual with such a distinct background, I was naturally curious about his mindset, thought process during the game, and most importantly, about how his days look like.

He told me about his discipline and how his schedule looks like: works in the morning with his coach, then trains with him after his shift. On certain days, he goes on 5k runs, on other days, he's working on drills. And he was telling me about his plans, about how he is a division below professional, which got me really excited for him since I've always wanted to be a professional athlete. I was amazed about how focused he is in actually trying to make it - to me, he was the literal definition of being "locked in." Now I told him that, but he told me that it was nothing special. He told me that I should see European academy players. He was telling me that his friend that tried out for Napoli was telling him that they eat, sleep, live soccer. When they are not training or playing, they are watching soccer. They talk soccer. They don't just train, they live the game.

Now that, again, amazed me. It shed light on what it actually takes to be at the top. Now this isn't a mindset, but a lifestyle. In our domain (engineering), it's the definition of being a workaholic, which isn't always described as something good in society. But I do believe that early-on, one must develop this lifestyle.

In engineering, we throw around words like "passion" or "interest," but what actually matters is exposure. Not just building projects here and there—but consistently thinking about systems, debugging things, breaking things, fixing them, reading about things, talking about things, over a long period of time.

That kind of repetition does something. You start noticing patterns. You stop thinking in isolated components and start thinking in systems. Tradeoffs become more obvious. You get faster at understanding why something won't work before even trying it. You build intuition that not many will have and that's what sets you apart from everyone.

It's not about being a workaholic. It's more about building depth.

The number of strong engineering candidates is increasing a lot. If you're not convinced, consider the dilemma that canadian universities are facing. Universities in Canada are already dealing with way more high-performing applicants than they can accept in their engineering programs. And beyond that, tools have changed.

Now, with AI, it's genuinely possible for someone to build a solid-looking project without fully understanding what's happening underneath. You can get something big working quickly.

So just "building things” isn't enough anymore. What actually differentiates people is:

That's a different layer that is only exposed after countless hours of engineering.

A great example was from a Reddit post I read a few weeks ago (unfortuneately, I lost the post) about why Anthropic's engineers are paid so much despite Claude being present. The response was around the lines of:

they are paid so much because when claude is down, they are the ones that have to figure why it was down, not claude itself.

And this is exactly where engineering intuition comes in.

AI can help you build faster. It can suggest solutions. It can even generate decent architectures. But when something actually breaks like:

you fall back on your understanding and intuition.

You need to reason from first principles. You need to have seen similar failure modes before. You need to be able to narrow things down without guessing. And these things only come from hours and hours of experience of actually trying to think/solve a problem in your domain by yourself.

The point

The Napoli analogy isn't about extremes. It's more about what sustained focus looks like.

For some period of time, going deep matters:

A simple way to think about this is something like Karpathy's "10,000 hour rule -the idea that depth comes from sustained time spent actually doing the work, not just being around it. That's how you move from just executing tasks to actually understanding systems.

Million Dollar Question, When Do You When to Stop Going All in?

I don't think the answer is "never.”

There's definitely a point where just putting in more hours doesn't give the same return. There are many ways one can figure out when to stop, and honestly, it all depends on the individual and what satifies them. But in my opinion, here a few signals that that may help me in terms of understanding if I'm truly getting there:

At that stage, the bottleneck shifts. It's less about raw output and more about clarity, judgment, and communication.

So “pulling back” doesn't mean doing less, it just means shifting focus:

And of course, we cannot forget, you also need breaks. If you're constantly pushing without stepping back, you burn out and everything drops off anyway. Napoli academy players do take time off for themselves too on the daily, otherwise their bodies would not sustain at such a high-level - hence called "recovery." If you are a sports fan, you would know how much athletes prioritize their recovery. Similarly, if you do pursue in trying to be a high-performance engineer and push yourself, you must also prioritize downtime.

I think in today's environment, especially with AI, it's easy to optimize for output, projects, repos, visible work. These are all great and essential, but people believe that this is what gets them to the top. It's a part of it, but it's not all of it. With the rise of vibecoding, what actually stands out now is judgment.

Knowing:

That layer isn't something you get from tools or agents. It's something you build over time by not just building by yourself specifically, but by consuming and being surrounded by individuals, information in your respective field whether it's mechanical to software engineering.