More than three decades after their famous first flight, a journalist asked Orville and Wilbur Wright how they did it. How did two brothers with “no money, no influence, and no other special advantages” do what specialists with all those advantages couldn’t do? “It isn’t true,” Orville corrected, “to say we had no special advantages. We did have unusual advantages in childhood, without which I doubt we could have accomplished much.” What was their unusual advantage? “The greatest thing in our favor,” Orville explained, “was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity. If my father had not been the kind who encouraged his children to pursue intellectual interests without any thought of profit, our early curiosity about flying would have been nipped too early to bear fruit.”
We have to do this too. We have to cultivate their curiosities, whatever they may be. We have to encourage their interests, without any thought of whether or not they might be able to profit from them.
We don’t have to be special, or specialists, to give them this unusual advantage.