Female Twitch Streamer, ItsHafu, Has “No Work Ethic” & Comes Out on Top
“I also have no work ethic.” This is what female Twitch Streamer, Rumay Wangbetter known as “ItsHafu,” told Dan Gheesling several times during their chat on 30 July 2019. She admitted to dropping out of school twice in her endeavor to rise to the top of the gaming community. Now she’s one of the most successful female streamers out there.
Dan starts off their chat, which was actually streamed live on Twitch, by asking ItsHafu, to discuss her origin story in gaming. Like a lot of us, Hafu began with a Gameboy Color at 14 has been hooked ever since. She moved onto “Triple Triad,” the Final Fantasy VIII card-based minigame on her sister’s Playstation and eventually leading her to World of Warcraft, better known as WoW.
Hafu’s best friend and, then, boyfriend introduced her to Wow that summer but they stopped and she pursued excellence. However, when WoW: The Burning Crusade came out she was self-admittedly really bad and her friend, Skrewd, pulled a Mean Girls and said, “you can’t sit with us” because her character wouldn’t “synergize well.” Well, Hafu took her salty outlook and motivated herself to get better so she could beat them. Finally, after hours of dedicated practice, she beat her arch-nemesis, Skrewd!
The hard work and dedication eventually paid off for Hafu. She was such a good WoW player that she began attending tournaments the summer after her junior year of high school. Hafu knew at that point that going back for her senior year of high school wasn’t worth giving up the dream of flying around the world to compete against the best players in places like Europe and Canada.
Now, if you ask Hafu she has no work ethic anyway when it came to school so she decided to drop out of high school. Hafu explained that in her opinion, “work ethic” is when you need to do something that you don’t want to do. Since gaming fell in line with her wants it was easy to motivate herself to practice and get better. The strong desire for revenge to get better than the friends that told her she was no good helped but she doesn’t consider that work. Since cramming things like history or chemistry seemed like she was doing it for someone else and not her, dropping out wasn’t a hard decision.
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” ― Stephen King
In addition to competing, she would also boost other teams. She was getting paid $30k to $40k to play other peoples not so great character and getting them to a higher level while also gaining more skills herself. Talk about a win-win. Eventually, after about 7 months of competing, she decided to return and finish high school and then head off to college. Hafu majored in finance because she wanted to get rich fast and game the rest of the time. She admitted to joining a sorority and trying to be less antisocial then she was in high school but some nights she just needed to game.
Then Hafu was told about Twitch. She was very hesitant about being on the internet because she had some bad experience so she planned to just avoid it. She thought she would either be put on a pedestal or in the dumpster and neither one sounded appealing. She was eventually convinced that putting out content she was proud should matter more than what people thought. Because she was the only female to win a tournament, she immediately blew up with thousands of viewers on her first stream.
Hafu was partnered right and her Twitch streaming career was taking off with hundreds of viewers turning up to watch her play. She used that same lack of work ethic to master games like Diablo III and eventually changing over to Hearthstone. When another streamer called Amaz came up with the 100 in 10 Challenge, beating it became her new goal and her stream really blew up.
Eventually, Hearthstone stopped feeling gratifying so she began looking for a new game that suited her playstyle. Then she found Autochess but it wasn’t as popular on her stream as Hearthstone but Hafu loved it and her dedication paid off and her viewers came back up in the thousands. After that League of Legends: Teamfight Tactics (TFT) came out and soon Hafu was the number one streamer, winning 80% of her games and recently started averaging 11,000 viewers!
ItsHafu may think that she has no real work ethic but the level of motivation she has continually shown to get better and not settling for anything less than excellent is a true inspiration to everyone. She became one of the best gamers in a male-dominated industry and turn it into a career that she loves. She has set records and won awards and that’s something that can’t be taken from her. While it doesn’t work for everyone, dropping out of school and her self proclaimed a lack of work ethic is something that most people probably envy. If you want to watch her full interview with Dan, the YouTube video is below.
