...in a fourth grade classroom, a teacher named Virginia Rhodes asked a student named Cain Neal, "What do you want to be when you grow up? A farrier, like your father?"
I had spent the previous year in English class trying to win the spelling bee each week to have 20 minutes of time on Mrs. Turner's TRS-80 playing a space invaders game. I got so good at spelling that year that she had to make computer time a reward for other things so other kids could enjoy it as well. At first, I loved the conquest of getting to play the game. Then I started learning how it worked by keenly observing it. Back then resolution was really sad and it was easy to see the pixels on the screen. Very quickly I figured out how many pixels the enemies moved, how often they fired, how many pixels wide they were, and all the parameters of the gameplay. I often wondered how changing those parameters about the game would change the resulting gameplay.
I replied to Mrs. Rhodes that day, "I want to make video games on computers!" She tossed her head to the side, knitted her brow, and in a disbelieving tone said, "You want to do WHAT?" Everybody else got saccharine sweet praise for their choices and what a great farmer, firefighter, or nurse they would be. All I got was an expression like she bit into something sour, a hmmmmn, and then she skipped feedback altogether. The fact that Mrs. Rhodes seemed to disapprove of this as a profession was a sudden unexpected motivator. That week I picked up and started reading Microsoft Basic that came with our Kaypro II computer. In a few weeks, I was writing "10 REM *** STAR TREK -- THE ADVENTURE GAME" with about a thousand PRINT and INPUT statements following it.
Sometimes I find motivation in really strange places.