In the lead up to my gaming career I honestly didn’t see it coming. I had just finished highschool in 2017 and wanted to get into medicine, my ATAR was good but wasn’t good enough to get into a uni close to my home in Sydney. Also to get into medicine you have to do UMAT which is now called something else but it’s basically “the doctor test”, I did terrible in the UMAT so I decided I was going to take a gap year to study for the UMAT and consider if I should move to another state for uni or make a long transit to somewhere like newcastle. During this gap year I decided to play a game called league of legends (League) basically everyday because I didn’t have much to do.

When I was about 12 I started playing League with my highschool friends who introduced me to the game and quickly became hooked to it as I was really competitive in all things I did (I played a lot of soccer and also played call of duty competitions when I was 11 - which I don’t think was allowed but yeah) after a few months of playing the game I became a lot better than my friends at the game and I honestly became a piece of work every time I played with them. I would always critique them, rage at them and still to this day my friends quote the things I used to yell at them. For me playing games wasn’t just for fun it was to be the best and every time I played with my friends I could not understand how they sat there and enjoyed the game if we were losing or doing funny things in the game all I saw was the optimal ways to win the game. So about the time I was 13/14 I decided I would stop playing with my friends after school because some of them had told me they didn’t like playing with me due to the fact that I got too angry/annoying to enjoy the game. This led me to play the game in “ranked” mode which basically gives you a ranking and every single match you play results in you winning points or losing points which represent your ranking in your region (my region being OCE - Australia, NZ etc).

After playing on my own for about a year and a bit I climbed to the top rank in the game when I was 15 which is called Challenger and represents approximately the top 200 players in the region out of more than 100,000 people who played ranked. A few months after reaching Challenger I quit gaming completely to go onto the next “challenge” which for me was year 11 and year 12 because I wanted to get into med school. Fast forward back to my gap year I started playing League again and within 2 months I reached Challenger again. Due to my rapidly increasing ranking it caught the eye of some team scouts and I joined my first ever team called “The Dire Wolves” when I was 18. This resulted in me joining different teams over the past few years and at times coaching the game to ultimately find many ways to make money and entertain in the gaming space. 

I felt immense pressure to go to uni honestly by myself for the most part. For the past two years I did basically nothing but study because going into year 10 I was doing very poorly in school and wanted to prove I could get a great ATAR. So not going to uni felt like I wasted all my hard effort but also it gave me security to go back to uni if my gaming career didn’t work out. 

When it comes to my job I have two favourite things:

1. When I was playing League professionally, I really loved being a leader amongst my teammates and the competition of facing other teams.

2. In my streaming job I really enjoy that I am my own boss, I work on my own schedule and follow my own desires. Working in e-sports at times was tiring since you are working in a new and emerging space which has some issues. At times people I worked with people who were really difficult, but honestly you’ll get this in any parts of life, so being my own boss gives me more autonomy around who I choose to work with. 

For people who are unsure about pursuing a career that doesn’t involve going to uni I say do it. When I started my journey, I was stressed a lot but I would look in the mirror and ask myself would i be kicking myself 10 years down the track for not taking the chance? Everytime I asked myself that question I knew I had to give pro-gaming everything I could because I knew I’d be proud of myself in the long term - regardless if i succeed or fail, i’m just happy I did it. I know people who have been kicked out of home, live on friends' couches, move cities to live in basements to make e-sports their career and now they have a completely successful career but holy sh*t those early years were tough. And those people I’m sure are proud of themselves for persevering. 

When it comes to stress levels in my career i’d say that’s the biggest issue. Being in a job where there are no rules, some dude can make a digital image of a monkey and becomes a millionaire. That's sometimes how being in youtuber/streaming and gaming works. The ways I deal with this stress is by a lot of personal questions. I ask myself - am I creating something I enjoy? Am I being authentic? Am I being the person I want to be?

If the answers to those questions are yes then I keep going and I’m personally validated by that regardless of whether a stream gets lots of viewers or not. If the answer to those questions is no then I have to re-evaluate what I’m doing and make changes. Besides a lot of thinking I eat healthy and work out. Every single highly successful person in this industry I know has experienced burnout so I do everything I can to try and alleviate the pressure and stresses on my body physically so I can put more effort into myself mentally. After I have a great stream or I finish competing in a match it’s similar to that of a physical athlete, you’ve got two options you can go out and celebrate with friends and loved ones or you go to sleep because you’re so damn exhausted . That's how you look after yourself.

Hopefully people enjoy this little story about the beginning of my gaming/content journey and I hope everyone was able to put up with my awful writing 😂