Ask YC: When did you start having interesting ideas?

My interesting ideas in life always came when there were girls around I wanted to impress. As I get older, they come not so often. I read that the most inspired works of Romantic and Classical composers were all written before age 25 with a big exception being Beethoven's and Mozart's final symphonies. It's believed the inspiration behind those symphonies was brought on by the illnesses that killed them.

I was 4-5. I was drawing these grand fountains and water works systems and my grandfather looked at one and saw that water was flowing uphill and explained in basic terms gravity and the Archimedes principle to me.

After that I always wanted to be correct in my drawings so I got interested in children science books. My mom read me kids science stories/tales. I preferred them to fairy tales.

I was 9. I remember imagining how it would be cool if instead of cells my body consisted of tiny robots that intermeshed together and substituted for various bodily functions. Sorta like nano bots I came to learn about 15 years after

I was 10. it was 1988. Soviet Union. I kept drawing a small submarine with all the life support, buoyancy and structural elements I could think of. I wanted to swim from Chukotka/Kamchatka to Alaska

I was about six years old when I remember thinking to myself: I have a lot of great ideas. All I need is an 8 or 10-year old to help me make them cause I'm too young.

I'm sure the ideas weren't that great, but the critical thinking is more important.

Probably around age 4, although at the time, most of them had to do with aliens, robots, and dinosaurs.

When I was 5-7 I would always take apart any broken electronic and try to figure out what it did. Obviously, except for understanding the connection between the parts, LEDs and switch most of the stuff didn't make much sense.

But my goal was to understand electronics enough to modify a cell phone, so I could use it as a telephone jack that I could plug in a laptop (wireless 56k modem). I though it could revolutionized the world.

Obviously this wasn't the best approach for this problem, but I was still pissed when I saw the first wireless internet cards from Telcos.