I have written here many times that the first “Big Boy” book I ever read was a biography of Einstein. I was nine years old and was just tired of the “See Jane Run” type of books I was supposed to be reading in the third grade.  It seemed like almost all the things I was taught in my formative school years (grades 1 through 12), I had already learned on my own.  That made those school years for the most part boring. We lived in a small rural community so there were no “advanced” courses.

Looking back, it could be fate made me read that Einstein book but it ended up that I did learn 90+ percent of what I know today on my own.  It wasn’t until college that things like calculus, was something new to me. But, despite that calculus was none the less boring 😎. Even the things I needed to know during my standard 30-years of my work life were primarily self taught.

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Getting back to the original thoughts for this post, I might have gotten into the “Self-Taught” mode due to that first book about Einstein. He said in that book he had no special special talents. He was only passionately curious.  Maybe I became at least seriously curious because of Einstein? 

Regardless of where it came from, all my life I have been seriously curious about why things are the way they are.  I questioned EVERYTHING. It drove people crazy as most had never thought of it the way I did. They were satisfied with the answer “That’s just the way it is”.

I kinda wonder what my life would have been like if I had not read that book at such an early age?

Curiosity, for Einstein, was a method. He would sit with a question for a very long time. His thought experiments were intense. At 16, he imagined what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam at the same speed. That kind of curiosity only grows in one condition: when you’re honest about what you don’t understand yet and therefore “Question Everything”.