Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?

I didn't enjoy stacking timber at my Dad's timber yard on school holidays. He'd come down at the end of they day and ask how many stacks did I strip out. "...do you want to do this for the rest of your life or go to university?"

Discovering that the number 1 has n nth roots, eg there are three cube roots of 1. Blew my 16 year old mind and pushed me to go to university from a very working class background where people didnt do such things.

Sadly, I then graduated into a horrible recession so the math degree was useless and i became a librarian. However, in the basement they had these mysterious computers they called roadrunners* and I learned UNIX. which led to my entire career.

*They were weird. Looked like tower PCs but ran some variant of SunOS on i386. I never saw them again.

Music geek here.

The Fostex Four track tape recorder was my discovery. My brother and I wore it out. Mom got us a software DAW shortly after.

Fast forward several years, brother ends up at The Village recording studio in LA, works directly with Steven Stills. Not as cool, but I performed for an opener for Head East around the same time. Good times.

For me it was a magazine. As a kid, somewhere I ran across a copy of a National Geographic about the energy crisis (I think it was this one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1157137.National_Geograp...). It might have been in a waiting room or lying on a table at school, I don't remember. But it made an impression on me at an early age that solving energy problems was very very important to the state of the world.

So as a kid, I played at things like 'building' a solar cell out of glue, wire, and can lids, or trying to make a nuclear reactor out of strangely colored rocks. When I was ten, I thought that if you would spin a magnet in space you could make a perpetual motion generator. After all, I knew that things in space would spin forever if nothing touched them, and a generator was basically just a magnet spinning near wires. Eventually I met some engineers who explained to me about things like electrical resistance and inductive back-voltage (Thank you Sam and Ernie). In my early teens, I kept trying to find ways to get around the things that would prevent a perpetual motion machine, and each new idea would teach me a new thing about physics.

By my later teens, I had learned enough physics to give up on perpetual motion, but I was still interested in energy. I got into fusion, and spent a lot of my senior year of high school coming up with bad fusion reactor designs. I learned a lot of new physics that way too. At Georgia Tech I met a kindred spirit (Thank you Nick), and together we started a fusion startup.

I don't know if I never would have been interested in energy if not for seeing that magazine, because energy issues have been everywhere during my lifetime. But I remember that magazine is where it started for me.

In the late 80s, I delivered the Washington Post as a 9 year old — I skimmed the articles daily and one about local BBS sites with phone numbers fascinated me.

I called the numbers and heard weird noises. I was beyond intrigued and had to understand this new world.

8 months saving for a Commodore 64, 6 months saving for a 300 baud modem and I was hooked!

MMOs with markets in them. RuneScape and friends.

It taught me that money isn't really that hard to get, you just have to repeatedly care slightly more than the next person.

Very similar. Reading in the bound paper manual for DOS 2.11:

"BASIC is an interpreted language that allows users to create their own applications."

Twelve year old me: "CREATE. THEIR. OWN. APPLICATIONS."

A friend gave me his Dad's old 386 to use as a word processor. This inspired me to buy a second-hand 486 (a big purchase for the family). I decided to put a CD-ROM in the 486 myself. I was smitten. 25 years later I have advertised fixing computers in the newspaper, photocopy guy, IT Technician, IT Manager, Infrastructure Team Leader, owner of small Saas business, now teach IT to grads.

That I could save files as .html and create webpages. I was 10 years old (1999) and I have no idea why I searched for it (there wasn't google at the time), but I discovered that programming was more fun than gaming (my computer didn't run most of the games anyway so it was the only fun available).

I think it is way harder to be hooked to programming nowadays, the basics are way too boring.

That working harder than other people, attempting to manage risk well, and failing a lot could stop me from being poor or locked up

We had an NES growing up, and the copy of Dragon Warrior III we had erased my game when I was 80% of the way done with the game (I was 4; getting that far on my own was an accomplishment that took weeks and I was very upset).

Cue the start of my obsession with digital preservation.

At 17 years old I walked into a computer lab and saw some people who were using Mosaic. It blew my mind. I knew then the internet was going to change everything and I needed to know as much about it as I could.

CS193P from Stanford that got me interested in app development

My experience was I worked really hard to write an english paper in school. My teacher gave it a C or a B- or something. I asked him why and he was unable to answer and threw a tantrum of sorts about it and proceeded to accuse me of grade grubbing.

After that, I realized education contained highly arbitrary, personality driven decisions and completely lost interest in working hard for school ever again.

The discovery that grading systems, in general, are not "fair" in that they don't seem to actually adhere to logical criteria ended my interest in school. I concluded that what was being graded was actually your likability to teachers. Being unlikable, that was a losing game for me :) So I mentally checked out.