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.
Then again he’s maybe the best person to explain the hard work it took to move away from meth and focus his time, money, and energy on something fruitful.