I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is, there is no good news. After all, they say no news is good news. I don’t know who “they” are, but they sure say a lot of things.

They say you can’t be a hero without occasional lawbreaking. They say purple is the new black. They say practicing something one hour per day for an entire year can qualify you as a professional of that activity. Hmm…

First off, whenever someone begins anything with “they say,” you should be wary. Don’t believe everything you hear, just everything I tell you. They say that’s a pretty healthy practice.

But back to the one hour a day thing. I think it has some promise to it, but it only really works with skills, not talents and gifts.

I mean, playing basketball three hours a day for two years won’t make you 6-foot-6-inches tall and dunking from the free throw line any more than singing every time you’re in the shower makes you Adele. You’ll still probably play or sound how Lady Gaga looks.

And now that Modern Warfare 3 came out, there’s a craze of people who are going to log those 365 hours in a handful of days. It would take just over 15 days if they play nonstop.

As if there were ever a doubt, I have a friend who bought the game at midnight on Monday so he could start as soon as possible. Naturally, another friend and I tagged along so we could people-watch all the d00ds and n00bs waiting for the game.

On the way back, my determined friend bought energy drinks at Open Pantry while the other guy and I stayed in the car.

Then we saw it.

The game was sitting on his seat. We grabbed it and ran. It was just a prank, and our ultimate destination was the kid’s apartment anyway.

After about 30 phone calls of skeptical rage, he finally believed us when we said we were at his place. He looked at us as if we were the maniacal ones.

Over the course of the evening I heard him yell expletives I never thought he’d say, though I always knew they were deep inside of this whackjob friend of mine — which reminds me: If you can still choose what kinds of people you surround yourself with, make those decisions based on how your future self would advise you.

The point I was digressing from is that it seems bizarre how vastly important this game was to my friend, when all he would end up doing with it is pass time and become angry.

And all the while, he could be becoming a pro at something else.

So why mash the controller when you could master the guitar, or swing dancing, or ice sculpting?

Playing video games to get better at them is futile anyway, because it’s a categorical mistake of time. I mean, the younger you are, the better gamer you are, and every time you play, you get older.

It’s like clockwork. I remember in high school, an ex-girlfriend of mine had a much younger brother who looked up to me in several ways. Still, I always looked up to him whenever his character was Tebowing on my guy’s corpse after he sniped me from point blank range.

But this isn’t about video games being good or bad – that’s boring. And I love picking up the controller every now and then anyway. I just want to say the way we use time now can either be something we want to look back on, or not.

Procrastination happens. We all know that. And the fact is, we are already professionals at procrastinating because we clearly put our minds to it a long time ago.

But we can procrastinate better by doing something we’ll legitimately enjoy being great at. And we can start now. I bet your future self would like that decision.