After graduating with a history degree but no job offers, I managed to luck into a full-time gig. From 2003–2006, I had a job where I had basically nothing to do for about half the year. I would get paid just to show up. I spent much of that time drinking during lunch at the T.G.I.Friday’s across the street from the office, emailing my friends, and reading articles on ESPN Page 2 and Maddox.

I think about that period of my life and all the time that I squandered.

I read a ton of books during that time, but I didn’t do anything with the knowledge that I came across. The information stayed in those books. There are so many ideas, lessons, quotes, and anecdotes that I had encountered but let slip through my fingers.

I didn’t even keep a journal.

I did write a half-assed novel and, hilariously, a collection of autobiographical essays even though I was only 24 and hadn’t accomplished anything in life, but those attempts were borne out of boredom and a misdirected desire to do something rather than a specific idea or vision. What if I had taken all of the jokes and funny comments that my friends and I traded over AOL Instant Messenger and put it on my own website?

I finally started my own site a few months ago, but what if I had done it back in ‘03? I now have a family and responsibilities and a job in Corporate America, but back then I could have devoted much more time and energy towards it. Plus, the Internet was a lot more open than it is now. It was far easier to gain an audience and get some traction back then.

I could have been Philly’s version of Perez Hilton.

When we think about the past, we gloss over anything that does not neatly fit into our revisionist narrative. We envision a world in which everything went right.

But how realistic is that?

Maybe it’s for the best that I waited. It took me years of writing for me to find my voice and, truth be told, I’m still finding it. I recently went back and read some Facebook posts from four years ago and cringed, so what would I think about an essay from my early 20's?

And it’s far from a guarantee that my site would have been successful. Scores of people were writing online in the mid-2000s — only one of them went on to become Bill Simmons.

Maybe, in this alternate universe, I’d be writing an essay about how I spent 13 years devoted to a website that no one reads, lamenting the fact that instead of going to business school, I stayed in that same mundane job, pouring all of my spare time and energy into this bottomless void of content that is barely seen.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

Why did I wait so long?

Maybe I wasn’t ready until now.