And by should have I mean “should have” because this kind of thing can be subjective.
I’ll start. Senior year of high school I would often skip class to go to the park and smoke weed with my partner (at the time). This park had a lot of birds. The sometimes silly, sometimes strategic, sometimes social and cooperative behavior of the birds blew my 17 year old stoned mind. I remember my partner and I would theorize about what they were doing and thinking. I thought it was super cool. I still think birds are super cool.
Now, many years later, I have a PhD in a behavior adjacent field. I don’t study birds specifically or anything like that, but those experiences and curiosities pushed me in this direction.
Maybe it was all inevitable: these are deep interests that would have been pulled out of me in one way or another. The tinder was inside of me and if it wasn’t getting stoned at the park as a teenager and watching birds that sparked the flame, something else would have. Who knows.
This is a wild one, but I had a meth addiction for about 5 years in my late 20s. During this time I would tweak out on electronics, computers, soldiering, hacking threads and pretty much anything related to that. Skip forward a couple decades and I am a pretty well paid engineer that’s a senior level in his field. I honestly feel that having that time to really focused and tweak out on that stuff helped along my career. (Once I stopped doing that poison)
Probably shouldn’t mention that if you get asked about how you got started at your kid’s school career day.
ADHD?
Isolation and Christian fundamentalism.
I think autism falls onto this category for me. I wasn’t diagnosed until my early 20s. It did hold me back and probably made some things way harder than they should be. But likewise it also fuelled my desire to constantly learn new stuff. Especially when I was younger my interests would constantly switch around. My mind was constantly hyper-focused on the few topics that I was interested in at that moment. Anything else was deemed irrelevant.
This made me struggle with anything that didn’t interest me, but I managed to just about get by in those subjects. But more “logic driven” subjects like math, chemistry, physics, and biology would constantly feed me with new interesting information to dive into. Throughout highschool and especially throughout university (Computer Science) this effectively became a way for me to learn without much effort. Whenever something is interesting to me, the information is just absorbed and I’d spend my free time still thinking about it. Many lectures in uni just led to an overwhelming stream of new ideas and as a result to me playing around with the concepts explained to me
Autism definitely isn’t a “super weapon” like some people seem to claim, but certain parts of it can be very useful traits in the education system and beyond.
Christianity.
