While I was young, I had trouble making friends. To be more precise, I had trouble understanding people and what companionship meant. Growing up on a small farm in rural south-east Minnesota, the only children I met on a regular basis in my early childhood were my sisters and cousins. Because our friendship was already established by family, I never really got the chance to develop the skills to introduce myself to people. In elementary school, I tried to make true friends, but I was horrible at conversation having never had to try to earn a person's trust and usually ended up saying general things such as 'How is your day?' and then listening to them talk and saying single word phrases if asked for a response. I now realize that because I never opened up to people and explain my dreams and goals, I never really ended up trusting them and instead of having friends, I had acquaintances. By not investing in other people, the relations I built with these people had little value to me.
Until fifth grade, I was a borderline student, I barely read anything beyond requirements and I didn't put a lot of effort into assignments. I don't know what happened, but in fifth grade, I got interested in the Accelerated Reader program at my school. The program gave point values to books based on difficulty, you earned the points for the book by taking a short quiz on a computer to prove you read it. The points could then be reclaimed for prizes at the end of the semester. It had been around since I entered school, but suddenly I wanted to see myself on the list of top readers. This gave me goal, the concept of which had always seemed strange to me before because I had never taken an investment in reading. Within a single semester, I had gone from being unlisted, having never taken an AR test before, to being second in my class of over a hundred. Being rewarded for putting forth an effort was startling idea for me since I usually never expected a reward for my work other then being left unbothered by teachers or my parents.
When I entered high school and gained access to a greater range of books, I began to become interested other academic aspects, such as math and science. I excelled in both and was put in my schools accelerated math class. It was with this that I began to gain a contempt for laziness. Where before idleness hadn't bothered, it now made me think that stopping for a moment would make me lose all the progress I had achieved. I joined 4H and the National Honor Society, I was praised as being an active volunteer and other students saw me as an genius, or at least being very intelligent. This lead to a self-sustaining cycle where the praise of others meant less and less as I watched my own achievements eclipse theirs. I am not sure if this can be considered a docile body, but looking back, it felt like one to me.
My hunger for achievement eventually lead me to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I finished it in three days and its Objectivist ideas had blown my little mind. It had seemed to me that everything I knew and believed had been recorded before me. Its ideas of ones worth being defined by their personal drive and hunger to create spoke to me in the most intimate way possible and validated the meaning of my purpose. This is why I am a physics major seeking to use my mind to unravel the world and use that knowledge to build it better then any god could.
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